Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology

by Cal Newport

But as is becoming increasingly clear to those who have attempted these types of minor corrections, willpower, tips, and 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.

I’ve become convinced that 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.

Bill Maher ends every episode of his HBO show Real Time with a monologue. The topics are usually political. This was not the case, however, on May 12, 2017, when Maher looked into the camera and said: 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 it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.

“This thing is a slot machine,” Harris says early in the interview while holding up his smartphone.6 “How is that a slot machine?” Cooper asks. “Well, 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?” Cooper asks. “They are programming people,” Harris says. “There’s always this narrative that technology’s neutral. And it’s up to us to choose how we use it. This is just not true—” “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.”

“Philip Morris just wanted your lungs,” Maher concludes. “The App Store wants your soul.”

how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

how much it cost to support his life at Walden Pond—a lifestyle that, as he argues at length in this first chapter, satisfies all the basic human needs: food, shelter, warmth, and so on. Thoreau then contrasts these costs with the hourly wages he could earn with his labor to arrive at the final value he cared most about: How much of his time must be sacrificed to support his minimalist lifestyle? After plugging in the numbers gathered during his experiment, he determined that hiring out his labor only one day per week would be sufficient. This magician’s trick of shifting the units of measure from money to time is the core novelty of what the philosopher Frédéric Gros calls Thoreau’s “new economics,” a theory that builds on the following axiom, which Thoreau establishes early in Walden: “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.”6,7

When analyzed through Thoreau’s new economics, this exchange can come across as ill conceived. Who could justify trading a lifetime of stress and backbreaking labor for better blinds? Is a nicer-looking window treatment really worth so much of your life? Similarly, why would you add hours of extra labor in the fields to obtain a wagon?

the sense of meaning that comes from acting with intention.

Perhaps predictably, this clash of old neural systems with modern innovations has caused problems. Much in the same way that the “innovation” of highly processed foods in the mid-twentieth century led to a global health crisis, the unintended side effects of digital communication tools—a sort of social fast food—are proving to be similarly worrisome.

The low-bandwidth chatter supported by many digital communication tools might offer a simulacrum of this connection, but it leaves most of our high-performance social processing networks underused—reducing these tools’ ability to satisfy our intense sociality. This is why the value generated by a Facebook comment or Instagram like—although real—is minor compared to the value generated by an analog conversation or shared real-world activity.

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

the way that digital communication tools can subvert the offline communication that remains in your life. Because our primal instinct to connect is so strong, it’s difficult to resist

as detailed in the first part of this book, many of these tools are engineered to hijack our social instincts to create an addictive allure. When you spend multiple hours a day compulsively clicking and swiping, there’s much less free time left for slower interactions.

And because this compulsive use emits a patina of socialness, it can delude you into thinking that you’re already serving your relationships well, making further action unnecessary.

Critics have also highlighted the ability for social media to make us feel ostracized or inadequate, as well as to stoke exhausting outrage, inflame our worst tribal instincts, and perhaps even degrade the democratic process itself. For

zero-sum relationship between online and offline interaction.

In her 2015 book, Reclaiming Conversation, Turkle draws a distinction between connection, her word for the low-bandwidth interactions that define our

online social lives, and conversation, the much richer, high-bandwidth communication that defines real-world encounters between humans.

Face-to-face conversation is the most human—and humanizing—thing we do.24 Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood.

The philosophy of conversation-centric communication takes a harder stance. It argues that conversation is the only form of interaction that in some sense counts toward maintaining a relationship. This conversation can take the form of a face-to-face meeting, or it can be a video chat or a phone call—so long as it matches Sherry Turkle’s criteria of involving nuanced analog cues, such as the tone of your voice or facial expressions. Anything textual or non-interactive—basically,

all social media, email, text, and instant messaging—doesn’t count as conversation and should instead be categorized as mere connection.

Notice, in true minimalist fashion, conversation-centric communication doesn’t ask that you abandon the wonders of digital communication tools. On the contrary, this philosophy recognizes that these tools can enable significant improvements to your social life. Among other advantages, these new technologies greatly simplify the process of arranging conversation.

Harris felt uncomfortable, in other words, not because he was craving a particular digital habit, but because he didn’t know what to do with himself once his general access to the world of connected screens was removed.

It’s important to know that the “attention economy” describes the business sector that makes money gathering consumers’ attention and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers.

This idea is not new. Columbia Law professor and technology scholar Tim Wu (who wrote a book on this topic titled The Attention Merchants) traces the beginning of this economic model to 1830, when the newspaper publisher Benjamin Day launched the New

York Sun, the first penny pres...

To do so, he lowered the price of the Sun to a penny and pushed more mass interest stories. “He was the first person to really appreciate the idea—you gather a crowd, and you’re not interested in that crowd for its money,” Wu explained in a speech, “but because you can resell them to someone else who wants their attention.”7