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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cal Newport
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January 20 - August 15, 2020
A common term I heard in these conversations about modern digital life was exhaustion.
the issue was the overall impact of having so many different shiny baubles pulling so insistently at their attention and manipulating their mood.
For heavy internet users, repeated interaction with this darkness can become a source of draining negativity—a steep price that many don’t even realize they’re paying to support their compulsive connectivity.
our culture’s relationship with these tools is complicated by the fact that they mix harm with benefits.
vague resolutions are not sufficient by themselves to tame the ability of new technologies to invade your cognitive landscape—the addictiveness of their design and the strength of the cultural pressures supporting them are too strong for an ad hoc approach to succeed.
what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.
digital minimalism, and it applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools.
Laurence Scott does so quite effectively when he describes the modern hyper-connected existence as one in which “a moment can feel strangely flat if it exists solely in itself.”
It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy.
tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.
the attention economy drives companies like Google into a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.”
Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences.
new technologies are particularly well suited to foster behavioral addictions. As Alter admits, the behavioral addictions connected to technology tend to be “moderate” as compared to the strong chemical dependencies created by drugs and cigarettes. If I force you to quit Facebook, you’re not likely to suffer serious withdrawal symptoms or sneak out in the night to an internet café to get a fix.
intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval. Our brains are highly susceptible to these forces.
the notification symbol for Facebook was originally blue, to match the palette of the rest of the site, “but no one used it.” So they changed the color to red—an alarm color—and clicking skyrocketed.
a lack of positive feedback creates a sense of distress. This is serious business for the Paleolithic brain, and therefore it can develop an urgent need to continually monitor this “vital” information.
We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead.
Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.
minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.
working backward from your deeply held values when deciding how to live your life.
stripping away superfluous features of new technologies to allow them to access functions that matter while avoiding unnecessary distraction.
Principle #1: Clutter is costly.
Principle #2: Optimization is important.
Principle #3: Intentionality is satisfying.
provides a powerful justification for our first principle of minimalism: that more can be less.
hiring out his labor only one day per week would be sufficient.
“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.”
Who could justify trading a lifetime of stress and backbreaking labor for better blinds?
It therefore makes sense to clutter your digital life with as many of these small sources of value as you can find, much as it made sense for the Concord farmer to cultivate as many acres of land as he could afford to mortgage.
If you value new connections and exposure to interesting ideas, he might argue, why not adopt a habit of attending an interesting talk or event every month, and forcing yourself to chat with at least three people while there? This would produce similar types of value but consume only a few hours of your life per month, leaving you with an extra thirty-seven hours to dedicate to other meaningful pursuits.
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.
better selection of tools or the adoption of smarter strategies for using the tools.
current events. New technologies can certainly help you support this goal. Perhaps, at first, the process you deploy is just keeping an eye on the links that pop up in your social media feeds. This process produces some value, as it keeps you more informed than if you weren’t using the internet at all for this purpose, but it leaves a lot of room for improvement. With this in mind, assume you invest some energy to identify a more carefully curated set of online news sites to follow, and to find an app, like Instapaper, that allows you to clip articles from these sites and read them all
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Gabriella adopted an optimization to this process: she’s not allowed to watch Netflix alone.*
By removing the apps from their phones, however, they eliminated their ability to browse their accounts as a knee-jerk response to boredom.
They want you, therefore, to think of their offerings as a sort of fun ecosystem where you mess around and interesting things happen.
The reason most Amish are prohibited from owning cars, for example, but are allowed to drive in motor vehicles driven by other people, has to do with the impact of owning an automobile on the social fabric of the community.
This type of thinking also explains why an Amish farmer can own a solar panel or run power tools on a generator but cannot connect to the power grid. The problem is not electricity; it’s the fact that the grid connects them too strongly to the world outside of their local community, violating the Amish commitment to the biblical tenet to “be in the world, but not of it.”
The Amish prioritize the benefits generated by acting intentionally about technology over the benefits lost from the technologies they decide not to use. Their gamble is that intention trumps convenience—and
you must first ask: Does this technology directly support something that I deeply value? This is the only condition on which you should let one of these tools into your life. The fact that it offers some value is irrelevant—the digital minimalist deploys technology to serve the things they find most important in their life, and is happy missing out on everything else.
Be the best way to use technology to serve this value
These services have a way of entering your life through cultural pressure and vague value propositions, so they tend not to hold up well when subjected to the rigor of the screen described above.
solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds. You can enjoy solitude in a crowded coffee shop, on a subway car, or, as President Lincoln discovered at his cottage, while sharing your lawn with two companies of Union soldiers, so long as your mind is left to grapple only with its own thoughts.
solitude can be banished in even the quietest setting if you allow input from other minds to intrude.
To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.
“the ability to be alone . . . is anything but a rejection of close bonds,” and can instead affirm them. Calmly experiencing separation, he argues, builds your appreciation for interpersonal connections when they do occur.
