Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy.

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

This is why clutter is dangerous. It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life.

We eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling, but soon realized that in doing so we were accidently degrading our humanity.