Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology

by Cal Newport

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.

“is this the best way to use technology to support this value?”

“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.”

clutter is costly.

A temporary detox is a much weaker resolution than trying to permanently change your life, and therefore much easier for your mind to subvert when the going gets tough.

give your brain the regular doses of quiet it requires to support a monumental life.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal famously wrote in the late seventeenth century.

Calmly experiencing separation, he argues, builds your appreciation for interpersonal connections when they do occur.

Wendell Berry summarized this point more succinctly when he wrote: “We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.”

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.

we need solitude to thrive as human beings, and in recent years, without even realizing it, we’ve been systematically reducing this crucial ingredient from our lives. Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.

there’s nothing wrong with connectivity, but if you don’t balance it with regular doses of solitude, its benefits will diminish.

the more you use social media, the less time you tend to devote to offline interaction, and therefore the worse this value deficit becomes—leaving the heaviest social media users much more likely to be lonely and miserable.

Humans are naturally biased toward activities that require less energy in the short term, even if it’s more harmful in the long term—so we end up texting our sibling instead of calling them on the phone, or liking a picture of a friend’s new baby instead of stopping by to visit.

conversation is the good stuff; it’s what we crave as humans and what provides us with the sense of community and belonging necessary to thrive. Connection, on the other hand, though appealing in the moment, provides very little of what we need.

Once you no longer treat text interactions as an ongoing conversation that you must continually tend, it’s much easier to concentrate fully on the activity before you.

When the void is filled, you no longer need distractions to help you avoid it.

It’s a general rule of slow movements that a small amount of high-quality offerings is usually superior to a larger amount of low-quality fare.