The perceived utility of these tools is not the ground on which our growing wariness builds.
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Scientists have known since Michael Zeiler’s famous pecking pigeon experiments from the 1970s that rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern. Something about unpredictability releases more dopamine—a key neurotransmitter for regulating our sense of craving
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This single click requires almost no effort on your part, but to the user being tagged, the resulting notification creates a socially satisfying sense that you were thinking about them.
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“It’s a social-validation feedback loop . . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
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Digital Minimalism: A philosophy of technology use 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 on everything else.
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[M]inimalists 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.
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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?
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[K]eep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose?
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“I’m controlling the role technology is allowed to play in my life.” After a moment of hesitation, she adds: “It makes me feel a little smug at times.” What Laura describes modestly as smugness is almost certainly something more fundamental to human flourishing: the sense of meaning that comes from acting with intention.
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Part of what makes this philosophy so effective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to avoid.
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The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.
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Even old ideas require new investigation to underscore their continued relevance.
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[G]radually changing your habits one at a time doesn’t work well—the engineered attraction of the attention economy, combined with the friction of convenience, will diminish your inertia until you backslide toward where you started.
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[S]olitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.
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Calmly experiencing separation, he argues, builds your appreciation for interpersonal connections when they do occur.
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Even though iPods became ubiquitous, there were still moments in which it was either too much trouble to slip in the earbuds (think: waiting to be called into a meeting), or it might be socially awkward to do so (think: sitting bored during a slow hymn at a church service). The smartphone provided a new technique to banish these remaining slivers of solitude: the quick glance.
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[E]veryone secretly fears being bored.
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When given downtime, in other words, our brain defaults to thinking about our social life.
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[O]ur brains adapted to automatically practice social thinking during any moments of cognitive downtime, and it’s this practice that helps us become really interested in our social world.
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[A] life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.
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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.
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Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.
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Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.
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Craft allows an escape from this shallowness and provides instead a deeper source of pride.
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Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.
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Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.
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This status of cultural ubiquity is ideal for Facebook because it pressures people to remain users without having to sell them on concrete benefits.
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[T]he power of a general-purpose computer is in the total number of things it enables the user to do, not the total number of things it enables the user to do simultaneously.
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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
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[I]f you’re interested in commentary on political and cultural issues, this experience is almost always enhanced by also seeking out the best arguments against your preferred position.
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[E]ngaging with arguments provides a deep source of satisfaction independent of the actual content of the debate.
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Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves. They don’t accept the idea that offering some small benefit is justification for allowing an attention-gobbling service into their lives, and are instead interested in applying new technology in highly selective and intentional ways that yield big wins. Just as important: they’re comfortable missing out on everything else.
