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by
Cal Newport
Started reading
July 1, 2025
enslavement to modern devices
being in command of their own life’
always-on, digitally-caffeinated culture’
If you’re looking for a blueprint to guide you as you liberate yourself from the shackles of email, social networks, smartphones, and screens, let this book be your guide’ Adam
everyone who owns a mobile phone and has been wondering where their time goes gets a chance to absorb the ideas in this book.
Put more energy into what makes you happy, and ruthlessly strip away the things that don’t’
cultivating intense focus, and
Andrew Sullivan wrote a 7,000-word essay for New York magazine titled “I Used to Be a Human Being.”
my phone plays a relatively minor role in my life—
intrusive role
social media’s ability to manipulate their mood.
In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts.
personal lives was worth deeper exploration.
people are tired of feeling like they’ve become a slave to their devices.
This reality creates a jumbled emotional landscape where you can simultaneously cherish your ability to discover inspiring photos on Instagram while fretting about this app’s ability to invade the evening hours you used to spend talking with friends or reading.
digital Sabbath, or keep your phone away from your bed at night,
minor corrections, willpower, tips, and vague resolutions are not sufficient by themselves to tame the ability of new technologies to invade your cognitive landscape
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.
“simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,”
The goal of this book is to make the case for digital minimalism, including a more detailed exploration of what it asks and why it works, and then to teach you how to adopt this philosophy if you decide it’s right for you. To do so, I divided the book into
the analog activities that provide you deeper satisfaction.
take walks, talk to friends in person, engage your community, read books, and stare at the clouds. Most importantly, the declutter gives you the space to refine your understanding of the things you value most.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
A philosophy, in other words, like digital minimalism.
What’s making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control
lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience.
People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable.
were pushed into it by the high-end device companies and attention economy conglomerates who discovered there are vast fortunes to be made in a culture dominated by gadgets and apps.
The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children.5 Because, let’s face
checking your “likes” is the new smoking.
every time I check my phone, I’m playing the slot machine to see ‘What did I get?’” Harris answers. “There’s a whole playbook of techniques that get used [by technology companies] to get you using the product for as long as possible.”
“Is Silicon Valley programming apps or are they programming people?”
“Technology is not neutral?” Cooper interrupts. “It’s not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that’s how they make their money.”
nonprofit called Time Well Spent with the mission of demanding technology that “serves us, not advertising,” and went public with his warnings about how far technology companies are going to try to “hijack” our minds.8
red shirt on a dating profile will lead to significantly more interest than any other color,
“What’s the single biggest factor shaping our lives today?” His experience of compulsive game playing on his six-hour flight suddenly snapped the answer into sharp focus: our screens.
if the app is only one tap away on the phone in your pocket, a moderate behavioral addiction will make it really hard to resist checking your account again and again throughout the day.
these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features.
intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.
“How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”17 And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.
The whole social media dynamic of posting content, and then watching feedback trickle back unpredictably, seems fundamental to these services,
Dopmine loop pleasure
second force that encourages behavioral addiction: the drive for social approval.
“We’re social beings who can’t ever completely ignore what other people think of us.”
If lots of people click the little heart icon under your latest Instagram post, it feels like the tribe is showing you approval—which we’re adapted to strongly crave.
Social media, in particular, is now carefully tuned to offer you a rich stream of information about how much (or how little) your friends are thinking about you at the moment.
This single click requires almost no effort on your part, but to the user being tagged, the resulting notification creates a socially satisfying sense that you were thinking about them.
our soul can be understood as a chariot driver struggling to rein two horses, one representing our better nature and the other our baser impulses.
“How I Kicked the Smartphone Addiction—and You Can Too.”
To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation.
