Digital Minimalism

2024-12-31

Our current relationship with technologies of hyper-connected world is unsustainable and leading us to quite desperation. But we still have the ability to change this state of affairs. To do so, we must not allow the tools the tools, entertainment, distractions of internet age to dictate how we spend our time, how we behave or how we feel. We should not lose control to technologies. Instead, we must take steps to extract the good from these technologies while sidestepping the bad.

A smartphone is a slot machine. Every time I check my phone, I'm playing slot machine to see What did I get?. Silicon Valley is programming people as they want you to use it in a particular ways and for long periods of time, because that's how they make their money.

Tech companies encourage behavioral addiction by intermmittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

Users are gambling every time they post something on social media: Will you get likes or will it languish with no feedback? The former creates bright dings of pseudo-pleasure while the latter feels bad.

In the Paleolithic times, it was important that you manage your social standing with other members of the tribe as your survival depended on it. The social media feedback buttons gives the feeling of tribe giving approval to us - which we're adapted to strongly crave.

Digital Minimalism is a philosophy in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out everything else. When a new technology offers only a trivial convenience, the minimalist will ignore it. Even when the technology promises to support something the minimalist values, it must pass a stricter test: Is this the best way to use technology to support value? If no, optimize the usage of tech or search for a better option.

Principles of digital minimalism:

1. Clutter is costly - too many devices, apps and services create an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits each individual item provides in isolation.
2. Optimization is important - To truly extract a benefit from a technology, its necessary to think carefully about how to use it (the more you use it, the lesser the returns - the law of diminishing returns.)
3. Intentionality is satisfying - Minimalist derive satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies.

How to rapidly become a minimalist?

1. Put aside a 30 day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life.
2. During this 30 day period, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful.
3. At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank state. For each technology you reintroduce, it should serve something that you deeply value, be the best way to use technology to serve this value and determine specifically how you will use it so as to maximize the value it supports.

What kind of applications to avoid uninstalling? If your stop checking your work email, it will harm your career - so you can't take a break from it. Keep the ones which are necessary, remove the rest. The necessary ones are usually technologies that play a key logistical role.

The head of mental health services at an university says that there was a raise in anxiety and anxiety-related disorders and this raise coincided with the first incoming classes of students that were raised on smartphones and social media.

Moment is an app which tracks how often and how long you look at your screen each day. An average Moment user spends around three hours a day looking at their smartphone screen with only 12 percent spending less than an house and an average user picks up their phone thirty-nine times a day. The numbers probably skew low as the people who downloaded an app like Moment are people who are already careful about their phone use.

New technologies help create a culture that undermines time alone with your thoughts. For the first time in history, solitude is beginning to fade away, making it possible to completely banish solitude from your life. Smartphones enable solitude deprivation even the tiny moments of solitude, like standing in the queue by allowing us to take quick glances. Part of the problem that complicates the discussion of waning solitude is that it's easy to underestimate the severity of the phenomenon.

Why is solitude needed? During the years of civil war, President Abraham Lincoln resided at Armed Forces Retirement Home in solitude, commuting back and forth to the White House on horseback. Here, there was the lack of people to demand his attention. The solitude gave him time to reflect, away from the bustle of White House.

Everyone benefits from regular dose of solitude. Solitude gives insights, an understanding of the self and closeness to others and emotional balance which comes from unhurried self-reflection. It helps us to thrive as humans.

Solitude even helps us to be close to others. By calmly experiencing separation, it builds your appreciation for interpersonal connections when they do occur.

You need not hike to a remote cabin miles from another human being to practice solitude. You can enjoy solitude in a crowded coffee shop, on a subway car so long as your mind is left to grapple only with its own thoughts without any other external input. This external input can be anything, like reading a book, listening to a podcast, watching TV etc.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room - Blaise Pascal.

Some practices for increasing regular time with your thoughts alone:

• Leave your phone at home. The urgency we feel to always have a phone with us is exaggerated.
• Take long walks. The hardest part of this is making the time. Schedule the time in advance.
• Write letters to yourself. By composing thoughts in the structured form demanded by written prose, I've often gained clarity.

Our brain is a sophisticated social computer. In moments of cognitive down time, when we are not engaged in any activity, our brain defaults to thinking about our social life. The loss of social connection turns out to trigger the same system as physical pains - explaining why the death of a family member, breakup or even a social snub can cause such distress. A simple conversation with a store clerk requires massive amounts of neuronal computational power to take in and process a high-bandwidth stream of clues about what's going on in the clerk's mind.

Digital communication tools encourages interactions through short, text-based messages and approval clicks that are orders of magnitude less information laden that what we have evolved to expect. In a comparison of studies on use of social media, studies that found positive results focused on specific behaviors while the studies focused on overall use found negative results. Using social media tends to take people away from the real world socializing that's massively more valuable and also leaving out most of our high-performance social processing networks underused. The small boosts you receive from liking your friend's photo can't come close to spending real-world time with that same friend.

Because our primal instinct is so strong, its difficult to resist checking a device in the middle of a conversation with a friend, reducing the quality of the richer interaction in front of us. Fully present to one another in a face-to-face conversation, we learn to listen, develop the capacity of empathy, experience the joy of being heard, of being understood.

Adopt conversation-centric communication. Practices:

• Don't click like and stop leaving comments on social media posts. Why? Because they teach your mind that connection is a reasonable alternative to conversation. Clicking Like is a low-value interaction and by eliminating it, you send your mind a clear message that conversation is what counts.
• Consolidate texting. Keep your phone in Do Not Disturb mode by default, adjusting the settings so calls from a selected list (your spouse, your kid's school) do come through. This allows you to be more present when you're not texting, allowing your to fully focus on the activity before you and paradoxically, it also upgrades the nature of your relationships.
• Hold conversation office hours. Put aside times on set days during which you're available for conversation.

People are caught in a fraught sense of obligations that being a friend means being ready to be attentive, online. When you refuse to use social media icons and comments to interact, it means that some people will inevitable fall out of your social orbit - in particular, those whose relationship with you exists only over social media. Let them go. The idea that its valuable to maintain vast numbers of weak-tie social connections is largely an invention of the past decade or so.

People who take a break from technology experience distress, like withdrawal symptoms experiences by an addict. This distress is due to not knowing what to do in the absence of technology. Fill the gap with high-quality leisure.

As the boundary between work and life blends, jobs become more demanding and community traditions degrade, more and more people are failing to cultivate the high-quality leisure crucial for human happiness. It leaves a void that would be unbearable if confronted but that can be ignored with the help of digital noise. Fill the void with high-quality leisure activities.

We might tell our self that after a long day of work, the best reward is an evening devoid of plans and commitments. In such evenings, we find ourselves several hours of watching and screen tapping, ending up more fatigued than when we began. But if such an evening is spent in an activity doing something - even if it's hard - you will end the night feeling better.

Crafts are a good source of high-quality leisure. People have a need to put their hands on tools and to make things. Long ago, we learned to think by using hands and manipulating the world around us. But many people experience the world largely through a screen now, using hands only to poke at screens.

When you do a craft, you can say to the world that this is what I have built/fixed etc. When screens replace craft, people lose the outlet for self-worth established through unambiguous demonstration of skill. Here, social media offers a substitute source of aggrandizement - you can point to a photo of your latest visit to a restaurant, hoping for likes.

Is something like coding on an integrated editor or video gaming count as craft? No, because activities mediated by a screen exhibit a fundamentally different character than those embodied in the real world.

A cafe in Toronto has no Wi-Fi, forgettable food, uncomfortable chairs but people queue up to three hours in the cold to visit it. Why? It's a board game cafe. The popularity is due in large part to the social experience of playing these games. Playing a board game is in a rich multimedia 3D interaction requiring a much higher use of brain, identifying the social cues of your opponent in a rich A good leisure activity requires real-world, structured social interactions.

Practices for adopting high-quality leisure:

• Fix or build something every week, like changing your own car oil, installing a new ceiling-mounted light fixture, starting a garden plot.
• Schedule in advance the time you spend on low-quality leisure.
• Join something - a local volunteer group, a committee at your temple etc
• Follow leisure plans - have an objective and habits along with the strategies for achieving them. The objective should have specificity in it - a vague goal is less likely to succeed.

The battle with social media companies is lopsided as they have put in huge amount of financial resources to gain our attention. Google's market cap is over $800 billion, Facebook is over $500 billion, while in contrast Exxon-Mobil is $370 billion. Extracting eyeball minutes has become more lucrative than extracting oil.

At the core of the attention economy is the smartphone's ability to deliver advertisements to users at all points during the day, as well as to help services gather data from these users to target those ads with unprecedented precision. Companies like Facebook innovated the field of attention engineering, figuring out how to exploit psychological vulnerabilities to trick users into spending far more time on these services than they actually intended. The average user now spends 50 minutes per day on Facebook products alone. To sustain this compulsive use, you cannot have people think critically about how they use their phone. Facebook in recent years has presented itself as a foundational technology, like electricity or mobile telephone, so that people don't critically about how they use its services.

Practices for extracting value from these services and to avoid exploitation:

• Delete social media from your phone. When you need to access it, you can access via web-browser and by this, you also reduce the ability of the service to distract you.
• Turn your device into single purpose computers. When you allow yourself access to all that your general-purpose computers offers at all time, it will also give access to apps and websites engineered to hijack your attention. Use tools like Freedom to aggressively control access to any website or app. Have them blocked by default.
• Use social media like a professional: Pros use social media to extract large amount of value for their professional and personal lives, while avoiding much of the low-value distractions these services provide. Have a careful plan on how you use each of the social media services, maximizing good information and cutting out the waste.
• Embrace slow media - a small amount of high-quality offerings is usually superior to a larger amount of low-quality fare (a few detailed reports are more informative than large number of breaking news).
• Dumb down your smartphone.