Very inspiring. I’m going to start using my dumb phone after reading this book.
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 that you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.
Some excerpts:
- Bill Maher – “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. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking. Philip Morris just wanted your lungs. The App store wants your soul.
- The attention economy drives companies like Google into a “race to the bottom of the brain stem”
- Apps and websites sprinkle intermittent variable rewards all over their products because it is good for business.
- How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or post or whatever. As Sean Parker said “It’s a social-validation feedback loop“
- We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a s select group of technology investors.
- Keiran Setiya : “If your life consists only of actions whose worth depends on the existence of problems, difficulties, needs, which these activities aim to solve, you’re vulnerable to the existential despair that blooms in response to the inevitable question, “is there all there is to life?” One solution to this despair ts to follow Aristotle’s lead and embrace pursuits that provide you with a source of “inward joy”.
- Low-quality digital distractions play a more important role in people’s lives than they imagine…More and more people are failing to cultivate the high-quality leisure lives that Aristotle identifies as crucial for human happiness. This leaves a void that would be near unbearable if confronted, but that can be ignored with the help of digital noise…. Cultivate high-quality leisure before culling the worst of the digital habits.
- Can you build a billion-dollar empire like Facebook if you’re wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook?
- Tim Wu in Attention Merchants “You gather a crowd, and you’re not interested in that crowd for its money but because you can resell them to someone else who wants their attention.”
- Smartphone are ubiquitous billboards! They are the Trojan horses of the attention economy.
Embrace strenuous leisure – to avoid depressive boredom!
Optimization ideas I am going to try:
- Do not watch Netflix alone.
- Do not listen to podcasts alone.
- Get a “dumb phone”.
- If you want to keep your smartphone:
- Turn off all notifications. Keep phone in Do Not Disturb mode by default – except on call 🙁
- Delete all social media apps. Check social media on laptop for 20 minutes once a week. You don’t have to quit these services, you just have to quit accessing them on the go. Be part of the ATTENTION RESISTANCE.
- Don’t use social media for entertainment or out of boredom. Use it only to keep in touch with friends and family.
- Batch texts.
- Use Freedom.
- Listen to 5 minute news summary on audio instead of reading news.
- Read news on Allsides.com. This prevents “echo chamber” effect of right vs. left that we face on preferred news sites or on Twitter.
- Use “Digital Wellbeing” App on Android to reduce mobile screen time to less than 30 minutes per day.
- Take long walks (already do!). When you take long walks, leave your smartphone at home – don’t suffer from solitude deprivation.
- Check out Frugalwoods website.
- Go to the “Snakes and Lattes” cafe in Toronto.
- Schedule in advance time that you plan to spend on “low-quality leisure”.