Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology

by Cal Newport

Your monthlong break from optional technologies resets your digital life. You can now rebuild it from scratch in a much more intentional and minimalist manner. To do so, apply a three-step technology screen to each optional technology you’re thinking about reintroducing. This process will help you cultivate a digital life in which new technologies serve your deeply held values as opposed to subverting them without your permission. It is in this careful reintroduction that you make the intentional decisions that will define you as a digital minimalist.

We can therefore say, with only mild hyperbole, that in a certain sense, solitude helped save the nation.

“Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.”

regular doses of solitude, mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish as a human being.

Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

If you suffer from chronic solitude deprivation, therefore, the quality of your life degrades.

everyone secretly fears being bored.

Nietzsche, of course, is not the only historical figure to use walking to support a contemplative life.

And I am reminded of the events and companions of my life—for my walks, after so long, are cultural events.

I would be lost without my walks because they’ve become one of my best sources of solitude.

On a regular basis, go for long walks, preferably somewhere scenic. Take these walks alone, which means not just by yourself, but also, if possible, without your phone.

If you’re wearing headphones, or monitoring a text message chain, or, God forbid, narrating the stroll on Instagram—you’re not really walking, and therefore you’re not going to experience this practice’s greatest benefits. If you cannot abandon your phone for logistical reasons, then put it at the bottom of a backpack so you can use it in an emergency but cannot easily extract it at the first hint of boredom.

You can walk on cold days, or when it’s snowing, or even during light rain (during my MIT commutes I learned the value of good rain pants).

These efforts are hard, but the rewards are big. I’m quite simply happier and more productive—

I wrote an entry titled “The Plan,” underneath which I put a list of my values in life, falling under the categories of “relationships,” “virtues,” and “qualities.”

These notebooks play a different role: they provide me a way to write a letter to myself when encountering a complicated decision, or a hard emotion, or a surge of inspiration.

gained clarity.

This behavior necessarily shifts you into a state of productive solitude—wrenching you away from the appealing digital baubles and addictive content waiting to distract you, and providing you with a structured way to make sense of whatever important things are happening in your life at the moment.

brains evolved to crave rich social interaction, and then explore the serious issues caused when we displace this interaction with highly appealing, but much less substantial, electronic pings.

humans have a particular affinity for interaction and communication

contrasting conclusions,

“Where we want to be cautious … is when the sound of a voice or a cup of coffee with a friend is replaced with ‘likes’ on a post.”

simulacrum

Our analog brain cannot easily distinguish between the importance of the person in the room with us and the person who just sent us a new text.

addictive allure.

her online interactions all have an exhausting element of performance that have led her to the point where the line between real and performed is blurring.

If you subscribe to conversation-centric communication, you might still maintain some social media accounts for the purposes of logistical expediency, but gone will be the habit of regularly browsing these services throughout your day, sprinkling “likes” and short comments, or posting your own updates and desperately checking for the feedback they accrue.

When my sister was living in Japan, we would regularly converse over FaceTime, deciding to place a call based on the same spur-of-the-moment inspiration with which you might casually drop in on a relative living down the street. At any other period of human history, this capability would be considered miraculous. In short, this philosophy has nothing against technology—so long as the tools are put to use to improve your real-world social life as opposed to diminishing it.

pondering,

The “Like” button was introduced as a simpler way to indicate your general approval of a post, which would both save time and allow the comments to be reserved for more interesting notes.

Correct, like button is synonym for validation of public.

If you eliminate these trivial interactions cold turkey, you send your mind a clear message: conversation is what counts—don’t be distracted from this reality by the shiny stuff on your screen.

callous omission.

perfunctory scroll

This point is crucial because many people fear that their relationships will suffer if they downgrade this form of lightweight connection. I want to reassure you that it will instead strengthen the relationships you care most about. You can be the one person in their life who actually talks to them on a regular basis, forming a deeper, more nuanced relationship than any number of exclamation points and bitmapped emojis can provide.

Call me at 5:30 any day you want.”

conversation office hours strategy.

“The best and most pleasant life is the life of the intellect.”1 He concludes, “This life will also be the happiest.”

life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.

Exactly what nishkaam karm means.

This leaves a void that would be near unbearable if confronted, but that can be ignored with the help of digital noise. It’s now easy to fill the gaps between work and caring for your family and sleep by pulling out a smartphone or tablet, and numbing yourself with mindless swiping and tapping. Erecting barriers against the existential is not new—before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions—

A useful place to start investigating high-quality leisure is within the so-called FI community.

FI stands for financial independence, which refers to the pecuniary state in which your assets produce enough income to cover your living expenses.

Where he does spend most of his time is working on projects.

seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.

bias toward action over more traditional ideas of relaxation might strike some as needlessly exhausting, but to Pete and Liz it makes perfect sense.

My core argument is that craft is a good source of high-quality leisure.

“Many people experience the world largely through a screen now,”

Another common property of high-quality leisure is its ability to support rich social interactions.

Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.

storm these remaining redoubts of unmolested focus and start ransacking—generating massive new fortunes in the process.

concrete advice,