Problem: technology has so many benefits but has also mixed so many negatives about it as well, leading to technology’s control over our lievs
Moderate approaches are fair, but we need to develop a deeper philosophy on how we use technology
Digital minimalism: spend less time online to make full use of a our high tech world. Prioritizes long term meaning over short term satisfaction
Part 1: Foundations
A Lopsided Arms Race
Many of the technology changes that we have seen so far are mainly accidental. No one predicted that it would blow up like it did
Most of us, if told back that this would be our digital lives, would not have wanted it this way
Problem is not with the utility of social media/technology, but rather how it was extended beyond the minor roles that we originally envisioned. We are effectively losing control
Silicon Valley wants you to use your technology in particular ways for longer periods of time, because that’s how they make money. Using psychological tricks
Technology addiction is moderate compared to chemical addictions, but it still means that we can obsessively check our social media statuses/updates
Tech companies encourage this addiction by creating intermittent positive reinformcement and the drive for social approval
Intermittent positive reinformcement: posting updates may or may not get likes, creating dings of pseudo-pleasure, going down a rabbit hole because you may come across something interesting, attention-seeking features
Drive for social approval: feedback buttons are way to measure your social standing, maintaining Snapchat streaks, immedietely respond to texts, tagging fiends
Provides no utility to the user, only serves to keep people glued to the screen
Digital Minimalism
Its hard to reform your digital life through the use of tips and tricks alone
Definition of digitial minimalism: focus online time on small number of carefully selected activities that strongly support your values and miss out on everything else
Always about implicit cost benefit analysis: ignore trivial distractions and even if i there is a new technology that supports values, it must be the best technology
By basing technology off values, we regain control over technology
Maximalist philosophy: any potential for benefit is a reason to use the technology
Not only do you have to quit social media, but you can also optimize it: use email newsletters instead of social media, bookmarking Facebook pages that are important
Principles behind why this works:
Clutter is costly: cluttering attention can lead to a greater harm than the individual good of all the apps that you download
Thoreau’s new economics is a good supporting argument: we cannot only look at the benefits from a social media website, but also its costs. How much of your time and attention must be sacrificed by the occasional profit/connections you make on social media websites
Must be thorough in our calculations of time spent.
Optimization is important: not only should you select technology that supports your values, but think carefully about how you will use it
Think of the law of diminishing returns. Small changes can lead to massive improvements, but they certainly diminish over time
Many people are still stuck to the early part of the diminishing return curve and have not tried to optimize
Examples: make Netflix streaming a social activity, removing app from phone
Experiment with how you can best use technology
Intentionality is satisfying: one big reason why minimalism is meaningful to practitioners
Purposefully controlling what role technology plays in life. Can disregard at any moment (eg. Mennonite, Amish)
Digital Declutter
Recommend a rapid transformation, occurs in a short period of time and likely to stick
Process:
Put aside thirty-day period during which you take a break from optional technologies in life
Explore and rediscover activities and behaviours that are satisfying and meaningful
Reintroduce optional technologies at the end, but need to determine what its value is and how you will use it to maixmize value
Like a reset, but not a detox. This isnt simply a break, it is a lifestyle change
Step 1: Define technology rules
Identify all technologies delivered through your computer screen that you can deem optional. General heuristic for optional: consider something optional unless temporary removal would significantly disrupt life
Dont confuse convenient technologies to critical technologies
If there is a technology that is largely optional but with a few critical use cases, then define operating procedures that dictate how and when to use it rather than giving unrestricted access
Step 2: Take a Thirty Day Break
A thirty day break is needed so that the bias from social media does not affect you at the end of the month
Figure out what is important to you and what you enjoy outside of the digital world. This will guide you when you are trying to reintroduce technology back into your life
Step 3: Reintroduce Technology
For each optional technology, ask: does it directly support something that I deeply value? Then, ask: is this technology the best way to support this value (or replace with something better)? Finally, ask: “How am I going to use this technology going forward to maximize its value and minimize its harms?
Use your standard operating procedures to dictate how you want to use the technology
Part 2: Practice
Spend Time Alone
Lincoln often spent time away from the White House and pursued solitude to give him space to think. His solitude provided crucial time and space to chart out US history
Solitude is about making sure that your brain is not distracted and free from input from other minds
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone” - Blaise Pascal
What is important to note is that solitude can actually affirm interpersonal relationships as we realize how much these individuals mean to us while we seek isolation
Modern day technologies are providing new ways to provide distraction. iPod music, iPhone apps and more. Have led to a statet of solitude deprivation: a state in which you spend close to zero time alone with own thoughts and free from input from other minds
By avoiding solitutde, we miss out on the ability to clarify hard problems, regulate emotions, building moral courage, strengthening relationship. In other words, it significantly degrades our lifestyle
We should aim for a lifestyle where we can switch between solitude and connection
Leave your phone at home: the things that seem are necessary with a phone can surely be done without it. The phone is not vital
Urgency that we feel without a phone is often exaggerated. They are the primary source of solitude deprivation
Take long walks: should aim for deep-in-the-woods productive aloneness
You need to schedule these in, because we rarely have enough free time to go on walks
Write letters to yourself: structuring your thoughts in teh form of letters can help provide some clarity
Don’t Click “Like”
Our brain is like a massive social computer, so we should ensure that no technology interferes with that
Brain is automatically thinking about social status during cognitive downtime and are quite advanced
Social media is positively correlated with lonelliness, most likely because people are using social media to replace their offline relationships
Conversation-centric communication: conversation, not connection, is the only form of interaction that counts towards maintining a relationship:
Conversations can take the form of face-to-face meeting, video chat, phone call. Textual or non-interactive stuff does not count as conversation and more of connection
Connection is downgraded to a logistical role: set up a conversation or transfer practical info
Social media role is simply to foster off-line communication
Requires sacrifice: reduces the number of people with whom you have an active relationship
Don’t click ‘like’: liking is the least informative type of nontrivial communication.
Instead, remain silent. Liking and commenting teaches your mind that connections is better than conversation
May need to sacrifice friends who care only about likes on social media
Consolidate texting: set up Do Not Disturb mode on phone and schedule certain times to check texts
Prevents you from thinking that texting is a substitue for conversation, because it disrupts online communication
Motivates both of you to find an offline substitute to texting. Strengthens rather than weakens relationships
Hold conversation office hours: set up a certain time for conversations
Makes for a much richer conversation. If someone is trying to contact you, just tell them to call you at a particular time
You can use your commute as a office hours or a certain time at a coffee shop
Reclaim Leisure
Life requires activities that serves no other purpose than the the satisfaction that the activity generates itself
Many people are uncomfortable with the concept of digital minimalism because they dont know what to do when there is no digital media
You need to renovate what you do in your free time. A lot of people swear by active/strenuous life
Bennet principle: spend more energy in your lesiure activity makes your actual working hours a lot more tolerable. Prioritize demanding acities over passive consumptions
Craft activities, where you apply skill to create something of value. Humans are intrinsically built for this activity
Social media has tried to replace this with digital cries for attention that poorly replaces the recognition of a handicraft
Try to do something in the physical world
Some leisure activities, like working out or playing board games, provides a conducive environment for supercharged social interactions.
Most successful social leisure activities share two traits: spend time person to person and has structure
You can use technology to the cultivate these leisures, paradoxically enough. Technology will be relagated to a support role, helping you set up the activity but not acting as the activity itself
Build or fix something every week: good way of learning new skills. Start with easy projects that you can follow step by step, that gradually move toward more complicated endeavors
Schedule low quality leisure: work out specific time periods where you go on web surfing, social media checking and streaming. Oustide of those periods, stay offline
Join something: be part of structured groups
Follow leisure plans: strategize your leisure into seasonal and weekly plans:
Seasonal plan: objectives (specific goals you hope to accomplish) and strategiesi (how you accomplish them). Be highly specific in goals and strategies. Can put habits as well
Weekly plan: review your seasonal plan every week and schedule in leisure time during the week. Don’t think of leisure as optional. Reflect on them as well
Join the Attention Resistance
The attention economic model is based on packing and distributing products that grab onto your mind as much as possible so a third party can benefit from it. Eg. Facebook and advertisers
The attention model recieved more fuel when the iPhone was released, allowing companies to target ads to users on a constant basis. Required attention engineering, as it needed users to spend extraodinary amount of time on their smartphones
We can try our best to critically think about services and try to tailor our approach, but attention engineers can find ways to distract us such that we are back to our wandering ways
You need to both prepared and committed ruthlessly to use social media on your terms and avoid exploitation
Delete social media from you phone: not quitting the service entirely, but quitting the easy accessibility
Turn your devices into single-purpose computers: rapid switching between tasks on a computer is one reason why we have lost our edge. Try to limit the things you do simulataneously by shutting down parts of the computer that are distracting
Transform devices into single purpose machines at any moment
Use tools like Freedom to aggressively control which parts of the computer you want to run
Think of these services as being blocked by default
Use social media like a professional: have a very careful plan of how you approach social media
Embrace slow media: focus on the highest quality sources of information and only check them on set times during the week (eg. read newspapers every morning, read a select few online publications in the weekends)
Dumb down your phone: declaring freedom from smartphone is embracing the attention resistance, because it is the preferred Trojan horse in distracting our time