# The Book in a Few Sentences The book "[[O que é minimalismo digital|Digital minimalism]]: for a deep life in a shallow world" written by Cal Newport presents a vision of how to find a healthy balance between our digital and real lives. The author highlights several problems that can occur with the increasing use of applications and websites, such as: [[Vício]] on social networks, the distraction caused by incessant notifications, the pressure to always be available and connected. In addition to warnings about the online world, the author also presents several practical solutions adopted by many of his students to overcome specific problems. Some of these strategies are simple, such as uninstalling social network applications from your cell phone, others are more difficult to implement, such as buying a cell phone that only makes calls. It is important to highlight that the author makes it very clear that to be a "digital minimalist" it is not necessary to completely disconnect and stop using any online service. The most important thing is to always ask yourself: what benefit do I want to get from this online service and how can I get the most out of this benefit without it getting in the way of other important (if not more important) activities in my life? Therefore, "[[O que é minimalismo digital|Digital Minimalism]]" is a practical and inspiring guide for those who want to regain control over their digital life and find balance in a connected age. # How This Book Changed Me I read this book right after I finished reading the book [[Essentialism|Essentialism - The Disciplined Pursuit of Less]] and it is interesting to see how the two complement each other. While the book [[Essentialism|Essentialism]] focuses more on our daily activities and especially in the professional world, this book focuses more on our digital life. In any case, both books have the same objective: to present a series of strategies to identify what is important in each person's life (whether in the digital or real world) and also strategies to use the time we have available in the most efficient way possible. # Notes ## Main Notes about the Book You should start by understanding [[O que é minimalismo digital|O que é minimalismo digital]]. In short, [[O que é minimalismo digital|digital minimalism]] is an approach that aims to simplify and optimize the use of digital technologies in our lives. It is a response to the [[Vício]] that we often develop in relation to electronic devices, which keep us constantly connected and distracted. Digital technologies have profoundly influenced our way of life, both positively and negatively. Thus, it is interesting to note that there are [[2 impactos das tecnologias digitais]] and that [[O mundo digital está vindo para a sua alma]]. Therefore, [[O que é minimalismo digital|digital minimalism]] has [[3 princípios para o minimalismo digital|3 principles for its effectiveness]]. A common mistake when evaluating a technology [[Não confunda conveniência com criticidade|is to confuse what is convenient with what is critical]]. So, when thinking about the technologies you use, it's interesting to ask yourself the [[3 perguntas para questionar tecnologias]] and remember that [[Tecnologias são superestimadas]]. It's important to remember that [[Curtidas não são informativas]]. In addition, it's important to [[Cultive lazer de alta qualidade]] that provides us with true pleasure and enrichment. To do this, it's interesting to know the [[3 lições para lazer de qualidade]] and to make a [[Plano de lazer semanal e sazonal]]. Finally, [[Se prepara para uma batalha contra as Big Techs]]. Know that a [[Computador geral]] can do many things but shouldn't do them simultaneously and try to [[Make your cell phone dumb]]. [[O que é minimalismo digital]] is an invitation to reflect on our technological habits and seek a healthier and more conscious relationship with digital tools. It's a way to prioritize what really matters, value our time and preserve our mental health in an increasingly digitalized world. ## List of Notes - [[O que é minimalismo digital|O que é minimalismo digital?]] - [[Vício]] - [[2 impactos das tecnologias digitais]] - [[O mundo digital está vindo para a sua alma]] - [[3 princípios para o minimalismo digital]] - [[Nosso tempo é precioso]] - [[Lei do rendimento decrescente]] - [[Pessoas não otimizam o seu uso de tecnologia]] - [[Não confunda conveniência com criticidade]] - [[3 perguntas para questionar tecnologias]] - [[Solidão é algo que ocorre no cérebro]] - [[Privação de solidão]] - [[Tecnologias são superestimadas]] - [[Paradoxo das redes sociais]] - [[Atividades de curto e longo prazo]] - [[Connection is not conversation]] - [[Curtidas não são informativas]] - [[Cultive lazer de alta qualidade]] - [[3 lições para lazer de qualidade]] - [[Plano de lazer semanal e sazonal]] - [[Se prepara para uma batalha contra as Big Techs]] - [[Computador geral]] - [[Consumo lento de notícias]] - [[Make your cell phone dumb]] # My 3 Favorite Highlights - People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable. - To allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must: Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it. - (…) Put another way, in 90 percent of your daily life, the presence of a cell phone either doesn’t matter or makes things only slightly more convenient. (…) the urgency we feel to always have a phone with us is exaggerated. # Highlights (248) A common term I heard in these conversations about modern digital life was exhaustion. It’s not that any one app or website was particularly bad when considered in isolation. As many people clarified, the issue was the overall impact of having so many different shiny baubles pulling so insistently at their attention and manipulating their mood. — Page: 68 ^ref-60031 --- As I discovered in my subsequent research, and will argue in the next chapter, some of these addictive properties are accidental (few predicted the extent to which text messaging could command your attention), while many are quite purposeful (compulsive use is the foundation for many social media business plans). — Page: 73 ^ref-6510 --- The techno-philosopher Jaron Lanier convincingly argues that the primacy of anger and outrage online is, in some sense, an unavoidable feature of the medium: In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts. — Page: 85 ^ref-63650 --- Few serious commentators think we’d be better off retreating to an earlier technological age. But at the same time, people are tired of feeling like they’ve become a slave to their devices. — Page: 99 ^ref-31365 --- 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. — Page: 106 ^ref-7028 --- 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. — Page: 109 ^ref-29880 --- I call it digital minimalism, and it applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools. — Page: 115 ^ref-63428 --- Because digital minimalists spend so much less time connected than their peers, it’s easy to think of their lifestyle as extreme, but the minimalists would argue that this perception is backward: what’s extreme is how much time everyone else spends staring at their screens. — Page: 121 ^ref-6002 --- This process requires you to step away from optional online activities for thirty days. During this period, you’ll wean yourself from the cycles of addiction that many digital tools can instill, and begin to rediscover the analog activities that provide you deeper satisfaction. — Page: 131 ^ref-10778 --- Our current relationship with the technologies of our hyper-connected world is unsustainable and is leading us closer to the quiet desperation that Thoreau observed so many years ago. But as Thoreau reminds us, “the sun rose clear” and we still have the ability to change this state of affairs. — Page: 155 ^ref-35693 --- a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization — Page: 161 ^ref-42810 --- The point of the above observations, however, is to emphasize what many also forget, which is that these changes, in addition to being massive and transformational, were also unexpected and unplanned. — Page: 203 ^ref-36351 --- We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life. We didn’t, in other words, sign up for the digital world in which we’re currently entrenched; we seem to have stumbled backward into it. — Page: 210 ^ref-49666 --- Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable. — Page: 223 ^ref-65188 --- What’s making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control—a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child’s bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience. — Page: 224 ^ref-44294 --- People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable. — Page: 232 ^ref-12665 --- The primary source of friction, of course, is almost certainly more simple: Minimizing distraction and respecting users’ attention would reduce revenue. — Page: 271 ^ref-33348 --- Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences. — Page: 308 ^ref-1051 --- When the American Psychiatric Association published its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in 2013, it included, for the first time, behavioral addiction as a diagnosable problem. — Page: 316 ^ref-64957 --- After reviewing the relevant psychology literature and interviewing relevant people in the technology world, two things became clear to him. — Page: 318 ^ref-64289 --- First, our new technologies are particularly well suited to foster behavioral addictions. — Page: 319 ^ref-27122 --- The second thing that became clear to Alter during his research is even more disturbing. Just as Tristan Harris warned, in many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features. — Page: 324 ^ref-62147 --- Irresistible, — Page: 327 ^ref-43586 Look up this book --- intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval. — Page: 330 ^ref-9481 --- unpredictability releases more dopamine—a key neurotransmitter for regulating our sense of craving. — Page: 336 ^ref-38647 --- Alter goes on to describe users as “gambling” every time they post something on a social media platform: Will you get likes (or hearts or retweets), or will it languish with no feedback? The former creates what one Facebook engineer calls “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure,” while the latter feels bad. — Page: 341 ^ref-15309 --- Every appealing headline clicked or intriguing link tabbed is another metaphorical pull of the slot machine handle. — Page: 349 ^ref-31499 --- The whole social media dynamic of posting content, and then watching feedback trickle back unpredictably, seems fundamental to these services, but as Tristan Harris points out, it’s actually just one arbitrary option among many for how they could operate. — Page: 361 ^ref-33737 --- Let’s now consider the second force that encourages behavioral addiction: the drive for social approval. — Page: 371 ^ref-34469 --- If lots of people click the little heart icon under your latest Instagram post, it feels like the tribe is showing you approval—which we’re adapted to strongly crave. — Page: 376 ^ref-47875 --- Our Paleolithic brain categorizes ignoring a newly arrived text the same as snubbing the tribe member trying to attract your attention by the communal fire: a potentially dangerous social faux pas. — Page: 388 ^ref-23562 --- 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. — Page: 396 ^ref-18466 --- When Bill Maher joked that the App Store was coming for our souls, he was actually onto something. As Socrates explained to Phaedrus in Plato’s famous chariot metaphor, our soul can be understood as a chariot driver struggling to rein two horses, one representing our better nature and the other our baser impulses. When we increasingly cede autonomy to the digital, we energize the latter horse and make the chariot driver’s struggle to steer increasingly difficult—a diminishing of our soul’s authority. — Page: 418 ^ref-17903 --- The underlying behaviors we hope to fix are ingrained in our culture, and, as I argued in the previous chapter, they’re backed by powerful psychological forces that empower our base instincts. — Page: 435 ^ref-19927 --- What he needs—what all of us who struggle with these issues need—is a philosophy of technology use, something that covers from the ground up which digital tools we allow into our life, for what reasons, and under what constraints. — Page: 439 ^ref-42396 --- 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. — Page: 443 ^ref-62441 --- Notice, this minimalist philosophy contrasts starkly with the maximalist philosophy that most people deploy by default—a mind-set in which any potential for benefit is enough to start using a technology that catches your attention. — Page: 452 ^ref-25422 --- minimalists 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. — Page: 460 ^ref-5700 --- His decision to leave these services, however, was about more than a tweak to his digital habits; it was a symbolic gesture that reinforced his new commitment to the minimalist philosophy of working backward from your deeply held values when deciding how to live your life. — Page: 475 ^ref-53560 --- Digital minimalists are also adept at stripping away superfluous features of new technologies to allow them to access functions that matter while avoiding unnecessary distraction. — Page: 496 ^ref-43135 --- So far in this chapter, I’ve argued that the best way to fight the tyranny of the digital in your life is to embrace a philosophy of technology use based in your deeply held values. — Page: 520 ^ref-44428 --- My argument for this philosophy’s effectiveness rests on the following three core principles: — Page: 523 ^ref-19048 --- Principle #1: Clutter is costly. Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation. — Page: 524 ^ref-31302 --- Principle #2: Optimization is important. Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology. — Page: 527 ^ref-33469 --- Principle #3: Intentionality is satisfying. Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. This source of satisfaction is independent of the specific decisions they make and is one of the biggest reasons that minimalism tends to be immensely meaningful to its practitioners. — Page: 530 ^ref-17196 --- Thoreau’s purpose in these tables is to capture precisely (not poetically or philosophically) 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. — Page: 567 ^ref-29403 --- After plugging in the numbers gathered during his experiment, he determined that hiring out his labor only one day per week would be sufficient. — Page: 570 ^ref-33383 Essa é um boa pergunta a ser feita. Mesmo! --- “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.” — Page: 573 ^ref-56098 --- Thoreau’s new economics considers such math woefully incomplete, as it leaves out the cost in life required to achieve that extra $59 in monetary profit. — Page: 577 ^ref-31014 Money can cost your life! --- What these farmers are actually gaining from all the life they sacrifice is slightly nicer stuff: venetian blinds, a better quality copper pot, perhaps a fancy wagon for traveling back and forth to town more efficiently. — Page: 584 ^ref-16485 --- It’s true that it takes more time to walk to town than to ride in a wagon, Thoreau notes, but these walks still likely require less time than the extra work hours needed to afford the wagon. — Page: 588 ^ref-45305 --- How much of your time and attention, he would ask, must be sacrificed to earn the small profit of occasional connections and new ideas that is earned by cultivating a significant presence on Twitter? — Page: 598 ^ref-48495 Essa é um visão interessante. Quanto tempo é sacrificado para se ganhar algo? --- This is why clutter is dangerous. It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life. — Page: 609 ^ref-55890 --- He asks us to treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance—arguably the most valuable substance we possess—and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade for the various activities we allow to claim our time. — Page: 616 ^ref-53251 --- The law of diminishing returns is familiar to anyone who studies economics. It applies to the improvement of production processes and says, at a high level, that investing more resources into a process cannot indefinitely improve its output—eventually you’ll approach a natural limit and start experiencing less and less extra benefit from continued investment. — Page: 621 ^ref-36529 --- If you increase the amount of energy you invest into this optimization, you’ll increase the amount of value the process returns. At first, these increases will be large. As the law of diminishing returns tells us, however, eventually these increases will diminish as you approach a natural limit. — Page: 640 ^ref-20149 --- The reason the second principle of minimalism is so important is that most people invest very little energy into these types of optimizations. — Page: 654 ^ref-51923 --- It’s this reality that leads digital minimalists to embrace the second principle, and focus not just on what technologies they adopt, but also on how they use them. — Page: 657 ^ref-24387 --- There are two major reasons why so few people have bothered to adopt the bias toward optimization — Page: 670 ^ref-29799 --- The first is that most of these technologies are still relatively new. Because of this reality, their role in your life can still seem novel and fun, obscuring more serious questions about the specific value they’re providing. — Page: 672 ^ref-23495 --- The second reason so few think about optimizing their technology use is more cynical: The large attention economy conglomerates that introduced many of these new technologies don’t want us thinking about optimization. — Page: 676 ^ref-31472 --- Finding useful new technologies is just the first step to improving your life. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use them. — Page: 687 ^ref-61609 --- The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values. — Page: 713 ^ref-13565 --- the third principle of minimalism, which claims that approaching decisions with intention can be more important than the impact of the actual decisions themselves. — Page: 734 ^ref-20033 --- At the core of the Amish philosophy regarding technology is the following trade-off: The Amish prioritize the benefits generated by acting intentionally about technology over the benefits lost from the technologies they decide not to use. — Page: 736 ^ref-5219 --- 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. — Page: 771 ^ref-59493 --- Pulling together these pieces, we arrive at a strong justification for the third principle of minimalism. 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. — Page: 774 ^ref-48743 --- it’s the commitment to minimalism itself that yields the bulk of their satisfaction. — Page: 778 ^ref-26965 --- This connection, of course, is specious. Outsourcing your autonomy to an attention economy conglomerate—as you do when you mindlessly sign up for whatever new hot service emerges from the Silicon Valley venture capitalist class—is the opposite of freedom, and will likely degrade your individuality. — Page: 787 ^ref-58978 --- I recommend instead a rapid transformation—something that occurs in a short period of time and is executed with enough conviction that the results are likely to stick. I call the particular rapid process I have in mind the digital declutter. — Page: 798 ^ref-11563 --- Much like decluttering your house, this lifestyle experiment provides a reset for your digital life by clearing away distracting tools and compulsive habits that may have accumulated haphazardly over time and replacing them with a much more intentional set of behaviors, optimized, in proper minimalist fashion, to support your values instead of subverting them. — Page: 805 ^ref-5232 --- A temporary detox is a much weaker resolution than trying to permanently change your life, and therefore much easier for your mind to subvert when the going gets tough. — Page: 829 ^ref-40086 --- During the thirty days of your digital declutter, you’re supposed to take a break from “optional technologies” in your life. The first step of the declutter process, therefore, is to define which technologies fall into this “optional” category. — Page: 835 ^ref-20254 --- Don’t, however, confuse “convenient” with “critical.” It’s inconvenient to lose access to a Facebook group that announces campus events, but in a thirty-day period, this lack of information won’t cause any critical damage to your social life, and it might expose you to interesting alternative uses for your time. — Page: 862 ^ref-5246 --- Generally, too many operating procedures might make the declutter experiment unwieldy, but most people required at least a few of these more nuanced constraints. — Page: 891 ^ref-42915 --- Now that you have defined your technology rules, the next step of the digital declutter is to follow these rules for thirty days.* You’ll likely find life without optional technologies challenging at first. — Page: 902 ^ref-7595 --- A major reason that I recommend taking an extended break before trying to transform your digital life is that without the clarity provided by detox, the addictive pull of the technologies will bias your decisions. — Page: 918 ^ref-15200 --- With this in mind, you have duties during the declutter beyond following your technology rules. For this process to succeed, you must also spend this period trying to rediscover what’s important to you and what you enjoy outside the world of the always-on, shiny digital. — Page: 924 ^ref-22220 --- As stated, the goal of the reintroduction is to put technology to work on behalf of specific things you value. This means to an end approach to technology requires clarity on what these ends actually are. — Page: 931 ^ref-64591 --- After your thirty-day break comes the final step of the digital declutter: reintroducing optional technologies back into your life. This reintroduction is more demanding than you might imagine. — Page: 970 ^ref-43412 --- It’s the care you take here that will determine whether this process sparks lasting change in your life. — Page: 974 ^ref-54089 --- Once a technology passes this first screening question, it must then face a more difficult standard: Is this technology the best way to support this value? — Page: 981 ^ref-34765 --- If a technology makes it through both of these screening questions, there’s one last question you must ask yourself before it’s allowed back into your life: How am I going to use this technology going forward to maximize its value and minimize its harms? — Page: 987 ^ref-7089 --- To allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must: Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it. — Page: 998 ^ref-3617 --- the lack of people demanding his attention: even when he wasn’t technically alone, Lincoln was able to be alone with his thoughts. — Page: 102 ^ref-40013 --- Everyone benefits from regular doses of solitude, and, equally important, anyone who avoids this state for an extended period of time will, like Lincoln during his early months in the White House, suffer. — Page: 134 ^ref-26494 --- This flawed definition introduces a standard of isolation that can be impractical for most to satisfy on any sort of a regular basis. — Page: 152 ^ref-6230 --- As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude 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. — Page: 153 ^ref-46764 --- Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be. — Page: 159 ^ref-54437 --- Storr’s conclusion is that we’re wrong to consider intimate interaction as the sine qua non of human thriving. Solitude can be just as important for both happiness and productivity. — Page: 190 ^ref-30038 --- To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence. — Page: 195 ^ref-54383 --- Calmly experiencing separation, he argues, builds your appreciation for interpersonal connections when they do occur. — Page: 205 ^ref-51099 --- regular doses of solitude, mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish as a human being. — Page: 214 ^ref-63285 --- “we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” — Page: 220 ^ref-20902 --- To put this in context, previous technologies that threatened solitude, from Thoreau’s telegraph to Storr’s car phone, introduced new ways to occasionally interrupt time alone with your thoughts, whereas the iPod provided for the first time the ability to be continuously distracted from your own mind. — Page: 231 ^ref-48469 --- The smartphone provided a new technique to banish these remaining slivers of solitude: the quick glance. — Page: 239 ^ref-36599 --- It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life. Thoreau and Storr worried about people enjoying less solitude. We must now wonder if people might forget this state of being altogether. — Page: 242 ^ref-65466 --- Irresistible. — Page: 248 ^ref-44100 Another book to look up --- Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds. — Page: 261 ^ref-51622 --- For one thing, when you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you: the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, and to strengthen relationships. — Page: 271 ^ref-50839 --- The sudden rise in anxiety-related problems coincided with the first incoming classes of students that were raised on smartphones and social media. — Page: 288 ^ref-63290 --- The defining trait of iGen, she explains, is that they grew up with iPhones and social media, and don’t remember a time before constant access to the internet. They’re paying a price for this distinction with their mental health. “Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones,” Twenge concludes. — Page: 303 ^ref-35077 --- college student he interviewed at a residential anxiety treatment center put it well: “Social media is a tool, but it’s become this thing that we can’t live without that’s making us crazy.” — Page: 311 ^ref-12801 --- As I’ve learned by interacting with my readers, many have come to accept a background hum of low-grade anxiety that permeates their daily lives. — Page: 327 ^ref-1174 --- But as Maynard explains, this complicated mixture of solitude and companionship is not a secret Thoreau was trying to hide. It was, in some sense, the whole point. “Thoreau’s intention was not to inhabit a wilderness,” he writes, “but to find wildness in a suburban setting.” — Page: 345 ^ref-7949 --- What Thoreau sought in his experiment at Walden was the ability to move back and forth between a state of solitude and a state of connection. — Page: 349 ^ref-36562 --- It’s exactly this alternation between regular time alone with your thoughts and regular connection that I propose as the key to avoiding solitude deprivation in a culture that also demands connection. — Page: 357 ^ref-56883 --- The failed fight against cell phones in movie theaters is a specific consequence of a more general shift that’s occurred over the past decade: the transformation of the cell phone from an occasionally useful tool to something we can never be apart from. — Page: 374 ^ref-31995 --- And everyone secretly fears being bored. — Page: 379 ^ref-55306 --- I don’t mean to create a false sense of nostalgia for these pre–cell phone times. All of the above scenarios are somewhat improved by better communication tools. But what I do want to emphasize is that most of this improvement is minor. Put another way, in 90 percent of your daily life, the presence of a cell phone either doesn’t matter or makes things only slightly more convenient. — Page: 385 ^ref-7658 --- The purpose of these observations is to underscore the following point: the urgency we feel to always have a phone with us is exaggerated. — Page: 401 ^ref-46934 --- To emphasize what I hope is clear, this practice is not about getting rid of your phone—most of the time, you’ll have your phone with you and enjoy all of its conveniences. It does aim, however, to convince you that it’s completely reasonable to live a life in which you sometimes have a phone with you, and sometimes do not. — Page: 414 ^ref-6764 --- Nietzsche emphasized this point when he contrasted the originality of his walk-stimulated ideas with those produced by the bookish scholar locked in a library reacting only to other people’s work. “We do not belong,” he wrote, “to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books.” — Page: 450 ^ref-46274 --- In such instances, I try to defer to my cognitive inclinations, and remind myself how hard it would be to pick up these signals amid the noise that dominates in the absence of solitude. — Page: 467 ^ref-3477 --- Most of us will never meet Thoreau’s ambitious commitment to ambulation. But if we remain inspired by his vision, and try to spend as much time as is reasonable on foot and engaging in the “noble art” of walking, we too will experience success in preserving our health and spirits. — Page: 486 ^ref-8250 --- These notebooks play a different role: they provide me a way to write a letter to myself when encountering a complicated decision, or a hard emotion, or a surge of inspiration. By the time I’m done composing my thoughts in the structured form demanded by written prose, I’ve often gained clarity. — Page: 520 ^ref-53036 --- The key is the act of writing itself. This behavior necessarily shifts you into a state of productive solitude—wrenching you away from the appealing digital baubles and addictive content waiting to distract you, and providing you with a structured way to make sense of whatever important things are happening in your life at the moment. — Page: 535 ^ref-50749 --- endowment shared by every human being on earth: the ability to perform complicated social thinking. — Page: 573 ^ref-60435 --- A natural conclusion of this reality is that we should treat with great care any new technology that threatens to disrupt the ways in which we connect and communicate with others. When you mess with something so central to the success of our species, it’s easy to create problems. — Page: 576 ^ref-54944 --- On further self-reflection, Lieberman realized that this background hum of activity tends to focus on a small number of targets: thoughts about “other people, yourself, or both.” The default network, in other words, seems to be connected to social cognition. — Page: 606 ^ref-20397 --- Sure enough, once scientists knew what to look for, they discovered that the regions of the brain that defined the default network are “virtually identical” to the networks that light up during social cognition experiments. When given downtime, in other words, our brain defaults to thinking about our social life. — Page: 608 ^ref-59194 --- As Lieberman summarizes: “The brain did not evolve over millions of years to spend its free time practicing something irrelevant to our lives.” — Page: 624 ^ref-56020 --- These experiments represent only some key highlights among many from a vast social cognitive neuroscience literature that all point to the same conclusion: humans are wired to be social. — Page: 636 ^ref-764 --- In other words, depending on whom you ask, social media is either making us lonely or bringing us joy. — Page: 660 ^ref-57386 --- subject’s perceived social isolation (PSI)—a loneliness metric. — Page: 681 ^ref-51743 --- These dueling studies seem to present a paradox—social media makes you feel both connected and lonely, happy and sad. — Page: 694 ^ref-724 --- The studies that found positive results focused on specific behaviors of social media users, while the studies that found negative results focused on overall use of these services. — Page: 695 ^ref-48073 --- “What we know at this point,” Shakya told NPR, “is that we have evidence that replacing your real-world relationships with social media use is detrimental to your well-being.” — Page: 703 ^ref-49989 --- The problem, then, is not that using social media directly makes us unhappy. Indeed, as the positive studies cited above found, certain social media activities, when isolated in an experiment, modestly boost well-being. The key issue is that using social media tends to take people away from the real-world socializing that’s massively more valuable. — Page: 707 ^ref-52187 --- As Shakya summarizes: “Where we want to be cautious . . . is when the sound of a voice or a cup of coffee with a friend is replaced with ‘likes’ on a post.” — Page: 713 ^ref-45324 --- 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 — Page: 719 ^ref-11489 --- 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 we end up texting our sibling instead of calling them on the phone, or liking a picture of a friend’s new baby instead of stopping by to visit. — Page: 724 ^ref-62020 --- Our analog brain cannot easily distinguish between the importance of the person in the room with us and the person who just sent us a new text. — Page: 729 ^ref-39647 --- 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. Turkle agrees with our premise that conversation is crucial: — Page: 742 ^ref-55071 --- she remains optimistic that once we recognize the issues in replacing conversation with connection, we can rethink our practices. — Page: 762 ^ref-34493 --- It can’t simply be digital business as usual augmented with more time for authentic conversation—the shift in behavior will need to be more fundamental. — Page: 768 ^ref-49712 --- conversation-centric communication. — Page: 772 ^ref-23810 --- 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. — Page: 779 ^ref-29759 --- In this philosophy, connection is downgraded to a logistical role. This form of interaction now has two goals: to help set up and arrange conversation, or to efficiently transfer practical information (e.g., a meeting location or time for an upcoming event). Connection is no longer an alternative to conversation; it’s instead its supporter. — Page: 783 ^ref-52518 --- Similarly, if you adopt conversation-centric communication, you’ll still likely rely on text-messaging services to simplify information gathering, or to coordinate social events, or to ask quick questions, but you’ll no longer participate in open-ended, ongoing text-based conversations throughout your day. — Page: 790 ^ref-19603 --- 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. — Page: 793 ^ref-24208 --- In short, this philosophy has nothing against technology—so long as the tools are put to use to improve your real-world social life as opposed to diminishing it. — Page: 801 ^ref-49843 --- Real conversation takes time, and the total number of people for which you can uphold this standard will be significantly less than the total number of people you can follow, retweet, “like,” and occasionally leave a comment for on social media, or ping with the occasional text. — Page: 804 ^ref-63668 --- In her book, Sherry Turkle summarizes research that found just five days at a camp with no phones or internet was enough to induce major increases in the campers’ well-being and sense of connection. — Page: 812 ^ref-13255 --- You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. — Page: 819 ^ref-9503 --- To click “Like,” within the precise definitions of information theory, is literally the least informative type of nontrivial communication, providing only a minimal one bit of information about the state of the sender (the person clicking the icon on a post) to the receiver (the person who published the post). — Page: 845 ^ref-29249 --- The reason I’m suggesting such a hard stance against these seemingly innocuous interactions is that they teach your mind that connection is a reasonable alternative to conversation. — Page: 855 ^ref-55068 --- If you eliminate these trivial interactions cold turkey, you send your mind a clear message: conversation is what counts—don’t be distracted from this reality by the shiny stuff on your screen. — Page: 858 ^ref-51351 --- Here’s my tough love reassurance: let them go. The idea that it’s valuable to maintain vast numbers of weak-tie social connections is largely an invention of the past decade or so—the detritus of overexuberant network scientists spilling inappropriately into the social sphere. — Page: 870 ^ref-33259 --- Nothing about your life will notably diminish when you return to this steady state. As an academic who studies and teaches social media explained to me: “I don’t think we’re meant to keep in touch with so many people.” — Page: 873 ^ref-2956 --- Put simply, don’t click and don’t comment. This basic stricture will radically change for the better how you maintain your social life. — Page: 877 ^ref-59206 --- The more you text, however, the less necessary you’ll deem real conversation, and, perversely, when you do interact face-to-face, your compulsion to keep checking on other interactions on your phone will diminish the value you experience. — Page: 891 ^ref-40980 --- consolidate texting. — Page: 894 ^ref-48877 --- This practice suggests that you keep your phone in Do Not Disturb mode by default. On both iPhones and Android devices, for example, this mode turns off notifications when text messages arrive. — Page: 896 ^ref-6556 --- When you’re in this mode, text messages become like emails: if you want to see if anyone has sent you something, you must turn on your phone and open the app. — Page: 899 ^ref-61716 --- When your friends and family are able to instigate meandering pseudo-conversations with you over text at any time, it’s easy for them to become complacent about your relationship. — Page: 908 ^ref-21699 --- Being less available over text, in other words, has a way of paradoxically strengthening your relationship even while making you (slightly) less available to those you care about. — Page: 914 ^ref-11148 --- To conclude, let’s agree on the obvious claim that text messaging is a wonderful innovation that makes many parts of life significantly more convenient. — Page: 923 ^ref-4232 --- He hacked his schedule in such a way that eliminated most of the overhead related to conversation and therefore allowed him to easily serve his human need for rich interaction. Perhaps not surprisingly, I want to propose here that you follow his lead. — Page: 949 ^ref-38607 --- When any student writes me to ask a question, or request advice, or share their experience with one of my books, I can point them to my regular office hours and say, “Stop by or call anytime.” — Page: 972 ^ref-35284 --- Nicomachean Ethics, — Page: 982 ^ref-21321 Look up this book --- As Aristotle elaborates, a life filled with deep thinking is happy because contemplation is an “activity that is appreciated for its own sake . . . nothing is gained from it except the act of contemplation.” — Page: 986 ^ref-27766 --- In this chapter, I call these joyful activities high-quality leisure. The reason that I’m reminding you here of their importance to a well-crafted life—an idea that dates back over two thousand years—is that I’ve become convinced that to successfully tame the problems of our modern digital world, you must both understand and deploy the core insights of this ancient wisdom. — Page: 995 ^ref-47788 --- It’s not that Harris had a specific online activity that he really missed (like a smoker without his cigarettes), it’s instead that he was uncomfortable about not having access in general. — Page: 012 ^ref-9074 --- If you want to succeed with digital minimalism, you cannot ignore this reality. — Page: 023 ^ref-63612 --- The most successful digital minimalists, therefore, tend to start their conversion by renovating what they do with their free time—cultivating high-quality leisure before culling the worst of their digital habits. — Page: 026 ^ref-52290 --- When the void is filled, you no longer need distractions to help you avoid it. — Page: 029 ^ref-7284 --- Pete and Liz emphasize a perhaps surprising observation: when individuals in the FI community are provided large amounts of leisure time, they often voluntarily fill these hours with strenuous activity. — Page: 075 ^ref-58555 --- Pete, for his part, offers three justifications for his strenuous life: it doesn’t cost much money, it provides physical exercise, and it’s good for his mental health (“For me, inactivity leads to a depressive boredom,” he explains). — Page: 077 ^ref-30671 --- How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. — Page: 092 ^ref-64780 --- He’s reworking the old entrepreneurial adage “You have to spend money to make money” into the language of personal vitality. — Page: 111 ^ref-12885 --- As Bennett would tell you—and Pete, Liz, and Teddy would confirm—if you instead rouse the motivation to spend that same time actually doing something—even if it’s hard—you’ll likely end the night feeling better. — Page: 117 ^ref-25450 --- Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption. — Page: 120 ^ref-59200 --- In this context, “craft” describes any activity where you apply skill to create something valuable. — Page: 123 ^ref-65146 --- When you use craft to leave the virtual world of the screen and instead begin to work in more complex ways with the physical world around you, you’re living truer to your primal potential. — Page: 142 ^ref-22152 --- Craft makes us human, and in doing so, it can provide deep satisfactions that are hard to replicate in other (dare I say) less hands-on activities. — Page: 144 ^ref-45022 --- But as Crawford implies, these digital cries for attention are often a poor substitute for the recognition generated by handicraft, as they’re not backed by the hard-won skill required to tame the “infallible judgment” of physical reality, and come across instead as “the boasts of a boy.” Craft allows an escape from this shallowness and provides instead a deeper source of pride. — Page: 158 ^ref-55979 --- Because this chapter is about leisure—that is, efforts you voluntarily undertake in your free time—I’m going to propose that we stick to the stricter definition of craft promoted by the above arguments. — Page: 173 ^ref-5321 --- Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world. — Page: 177 ^ref-14865 --- Playing games also provides permission for what we can call supercharged socializing—interactions with higher intensity levels than are common in polite society. — Page: 202 ^ref-62766 --- The secret to CrossFit’s success is probably best captured by one of the most notable differences between a CrossFit box and a standard gym: no one is wearing earphones. — Page: 244 ^ref-50204 --- This support helps push people past their natural limits, which is important; a core belief of CrossFit is that extreme intensity in a short period of time is superior to a large volume of exercise over a long period. — Page: 251 ^ref-61006 Isso é real? --- they are leisure activities that enable the types of energized and complex sociality that are otherwise rare in normal life. — Page: 260 ^ref-52837 --- The most successful social leisure activities share two traits. First, they require you to spend time with other people in person. — Page: 263 ^ref-48098 --- The second trait is that the activity provides some sort of structure for the social interaction, including rules you have to follow, insider terminology or rituals, and often a shared goal. — Page: 265 ^ref-18650 --- Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions. — Page: 270 ^ref-55616 --- It’s a physical object that demands (cognitive) struggle before it begins to return value—but when it does, the value is more substantial and lasting than the sugar high of a lightweight digital distraction. — Page: 281 ^ref-64225 --- The Mouse Book Club delivers a high-quality analog experience, but it couldn’t exist without many technological innovations of the past decade. — Page: 292 ^ref-56389 --- era. On the contrary, the internet is fueling a leisure renaissance of sorts by providing the average person more leisure options than ever before in human history. — Page: 294 ^ref-37917 --- We’ve now arrived at an apparent circularity. This chapter argues that to escape the drain of low-value digital habits, it’s important to first put in place high-quality leisure activities. These quality activities fill the void your screens were previously tasked to help you ignore. But I just argued that you should use digital tools to help cultivate this leisure. It seems, then, that I’m asking you to embrace new technology to help you avoid new technology. — Page: 300 ^ref-54834 --- The state I’m helping you escape is one in which passive interaction with your screens is your primary leisure. — Page: 303 ^ref-6730 --- satisfying afternoon of tinkering. A foundational theme in digital minimalism is that new technology, when used with care and intention, creates a better life than either Luddism or mindless adoption. We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that this general idea applies here to our specific discussion of cultivating leisure. — Page: 309 ^ref-42235 --- Handiness is rarer today for the simple reason that, for most people, it’s no longer essential for either their professional or home lives to function smoothly. — Page: 341 ^ref-62840 --- But maximizing personal and financial efficiency isn’t the only relevant goal. As I argued earlier in this chapter, learning and applying new skills is an important source of high-quality leisure. — Page: 346 ^ref-2459 --- Though there is some pride to be gained in learning a new computer program, or figuring out a complicated new gadget, most of us already spend enough time moving symbols around on screens. The leisure we’re tackling here is meant to tap into our strong instinct for manipulating objects in the physical world. — Page: 359 ^ref-20466 --- My suggestion is that you try to learn and apply one new skill every week, over a period of six weeks. Start with easy projects like those suggested above, but as soon as you feel the challenge wane, ramp up the complication of the skills and steps involved. — Page: 365 ^ref-32630 --- The premise of this chapter is that by cultivating a high-quality leisure life first, it will become easier to minimize low-quality digital diversions later. — Page: 391 ^ref-21162 --- Here’s my suggestion: schedule in advance the time you spend on low-quality leisure. That is, work out the specific time periods during which you’ll indulge in web surfing, social media checking, and entertainment streaming. — Page: 396 ^ref-62296 --- When first implementing this strategy, don’t worry about how much time you put aside for low-quality leisure. It’s fine, for example, if you start with major portions of your evenings and weekends dedicated to such pursuits. The aggressiveness of your restrictions will naturally increase as they allow you to integrate more and more higher-quality pursuits into your life. — Page: 409 ^ref-9119 --- I conjecture that the vast majority of regular social media users can receive the vast majority of the value these services provide their life in as little as twenty to forty minutes of use per week. — Page: 413 ^ref-51670 --- This is why, when defending their products, they prefer to focus on the question of why you use them, not how you use them. Once people start thinking seriously about the latter question, they tend to recognize that they’re spending way too much time online. (I’ll dive deeper into this issue in the next chapter.) — Page: 416 ^ref-48066 --- These reasons help explain the surprising effectiveness of this simple strategy. Once you start constraining your low-quality distractions (with no feeling of lost value), and filling the newly freed time with high-quality alternatives (which generate significantly higher levels of satisfaction), you’ll soon begin to wonder how you ever tolerated spending so many of your leisure hours staring passively at glowing screens. — Page: 419 ^ref-29937 --- Few can mimic the energy Franklin invested into his social leisure, but we can all extract an important lesson from his approach to cultivating a fulfilling leisure life: join things. — Page: 445 ^ref-53490 --- These obstacles provide a convenient excuse to avoid leaving the comfort of family and close friends, but Franklin teaches us that it’s worth pushing past these concerns. — Page: 452 ^ref-25653 --- Here I want to suggest that you apply this same approach to your leisure life. I want you, in other words, to strategize your free time. — Page: 460 ^ref-42441 --- With this in mind, I suggest you strategize this part of your life with a two-level approach consisting of both a seasonal and weekly leisure plan. I explain each below. — Page: 465 ^ref-8198 --- good seasonal plan contains two different types of items: objectives and habits that you intend to honor in the upcoming season. The objectives describe specific goals you hope to accomplish, with accompanying strategies for how you will accomplish them. The habits describe behavior rules you hope to stick with throughout the season. In a seasonal leisure plan, these objectives and habits will both be connected to cultivating a high-quality leisure life. — Page: 471 ^ref-51132 --- A good seasonal plan will have a small number of interesting and motivating objectives, coupled with a small number of tractable habits designed to ensure a regular patina of quality. — Page: 500 ^ref-38110 --- At the beginning of each week, put aside time to review your current seasonal leisure plan. After processing this information, come up with a plan for how your leisure activities will fit into your schedule for the upcoming week. — Page: 503 ^ref-2535 --- Finally, in justifying this planning approach, I want to underscore the foundational argument delivered throughout this chapter: doing nothing is overrated. — Page: 529 ^ref-36910 --- For the many different reasons argued in the preceding pages, investing energy into something hard but worthwhile almost always returns much richer rewards. — Page: 533 ^ref-49163 --- 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. — Page: 558 ^ref-4585 --- His goal became to sell as many minutes of his readers’ attention as possible to the advertisers. 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.” — Page: 563 ^ref-24306 --- Extracting eyeball minutes, the key resource for companies like Google and Facebook, has become significantly more lucrative than extracting oil. — Page: 576 ^ref-11140 --- The iPhone, and the imitators that soon followed, enabled the attention economy to shift from its historical position as a profitable but somewhat niche sector to one of the most powerful forces in our economy. — Page: 578 ^ref-10814 --- This type of compulsive use is not an accident, it’s instead a fundamental play in the digital attention economy playbook. — Page: 589 ^ref-40195 --- The big companies want “use” to be a simple binary condition—either you engage with their foundational technology, or you’re a weirdo. By contrast, the type of “use” these companies perhaps most fear is the Ginsberg and Burke definition, which sees these products as offering a variety of different free services that you can carefully sift through and use in a manner that optimizes the value you receive. — Page: 614 ^ref-6196 --- If your personal brand of digital minimalism requires engagement with services like social media, or breaking news sites, it’s important to approach these activities with a sense of zero-sum antagonism. You want something valuable from their networks, and they want to undermine your autonomy—to come out on the winning side of this battle requires both preparation and a ruthless commitment to avoiding exploitation. — Page: 633 ^ref-47169 --- There’s also, however, a more ominous feedback loop at play. As more people began to access social media services on their smartphones, the attention engineers at these companies invested more resources into making their mobile apps stickier. — Page: 648 ^ref-57517 --- Pulling together these pieces of evidence points to a clear conclusion: if you’re going to use social media, stay far away from the mobile versions of these services, as these pose a significantly bigger risk to your time and attention. This practice, in other words, suggests that you remove all social media apps from your phone. You don’t have to quit these services; you just have to quit accessing them on the go. — Page: 651 ^ref-4600 --- This strategy is classic digital minimalism. By removing your ability to access social media at any moment, you reduce its ability to become a crutch deployed to distract you from bigger voids in your life. — Page: 655 ^ref-29781 --- But the one thing they definitely don’t want you to notice is that the only really good reason to be accessing these services on your phone is to ensure companies like Facebook continue to enjoy steady quarterly growth. — Page: 670 ^ref-35181 --- Part of what made computers so revolutionary was that they were general purpose—the same machine could be programmed to perform many different tasks. — Page: 696 ^ref-5352 --- It’s this mind-set, that “general purpose” equals “productivity,” that leads people to cast a skeptical eye on tools like Freedom that remove options from your computing experience. — Page: 701 ^ref-49696 --- As many have discovered, the rapid switching between different applications tends to make the human’s interaction with the computer less productive in terms of the quality and quantity of what is produced. — Page: 709 ^ref-11939 --- It’s instead quite natural once you recognize that the 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. — Page: 712 ^ref-45841 --- If you want to join the attention resistance, one of the most important things you can therefore do is follow Fred Stutzman’s lead and transform your devices—laptops, tablets, phones—into computers that are general purpose in the long run, but are effectively single purpose in any given moment. — Page: 716 ^ref-56643 --- This practice of default blocking might at first seem overly aggressive, but what it’s actually doing is bringing you back closer to the ideal of single-purpose computing that’s much more compatible with our human attention systems. — Page: 726 ^ref-35402 --- This feature was introduced to increase the amount of content users generate, and therefore the amount of time they spend consuming this content. — Page: 756 ^ref-49769 About the stories and reels feed --- In their academic account, for example, Jennifer follows a curated list of journalists, technologists, academics, and policy makers. — Page: 778 ^ref-27625 Is it possible to separate people in different interests? --- approach social media as if you’re the director of emerging media for your own life. — Page: 794 ^ref-34931 --- Whereas the Europeans suggest transforming the consumption of media into a high-quality experience (much like the Slow Food movement approach to eating), Americans tend to embrace the “low information diet”: a concept first popularized by Tim Ferriss, in which you aggressively eliminate sources of news and information to help reclaim more time for other pursuits. — Page: 812 ^ref-45301 Essas sao duas visoes distintas mas interesantes --- Crucial to this news consumption habit is the ritualistic nature of the sequence. You don’t make a conscious decision about each of the sites and feeds you end up visiting; instead, once the sequence is activated, it unfolds on autopilot. — Page: 825 ^ref-49018 --- To embrace news media from a mind-set of slowness requires first and foremost that you focus only on the highest-quality sources. Breaking news, for example, is almost always much lower quality than the reporting that’s possible once an event has occurred and journalists have had time to process it. — Page: 833 ^ref-4921 --- Unless you’re a breaking news reporter, it’s usually counterproductive to expose yourself to the fire hose of incomplete, redundant, and often contradictory information that spews through the internet in response to noteworthy events. — Page: 837 ^ref-5798 --- The internet is a democratizing platform in the sense that anyone can share their thoughts. This is laudable. But when it comes to reporting and commentary, you should constrain your attention to the small number of people who have proved to be world class on the topics you care about. — Page: 840 ^ref-38624 --- Another tenet of slow news consumption: if 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. — Page: 848 ^ref-27838 --- As we’ve known since the time of Socrates, engaging with arguments provides a deep source of satisfaction independent of the actual content of the debate. — Page: 855 ^ref-3521 --- I recommend instead isolating your news consumption to set times during the week. To foster the state of “full concentration” promoted by the Slow Media Manifesto, I further recommend that you ritualize this consumption by choosing a location that will support you in giving your full attention to the reading. I also recommend that you care about the particular format in which you do this reading. — Page: 858 ^ref-56193 --- If you follow the above approach to news consumption (or something with a similar focus on slowness and quality), you will remain informed about current events and up to speed on big ideas in the spaces you care most about. But you will also accomplish this without sacrificing your time and emotional health to the frantic cycle of clicking that defines so many people’s experience of the news. — Page: 867 ^ref-35287 --- His main argument is that tablets and laptops have become so lightweight and portable that there is no longer a need to try to cram productivity functionalities into increasingly powerful (and therefore increasingly distracting) smartphones—phones can be used for calls and messages, and other portable devices can be used for everything else. — Page: 892 ^ref-39679 Why not have a dumb phone instead of a new one? --- This follows because smartphones are the preferred Trojan horse of the digital attention economy. — Page: 915 ^ref-24551 --- Dumbing down your phone, of course, is a big decision. Our attraction to these devices goes well beyond their ability to provide distraction. For many, they provide a safety net for modern life—protection against being lost, feeling alone, or missing out on something better. — Page: 919 ^ref-36409 --- The result is a society left reeling by unintended consequences. We eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling, but soon realized that in doing so we were accidently degrading our humanity. — Page: 968 ^ref-22617 --- Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves. — Page: 975 ^ref-12172 --- At the same time, I want to emphasize that transitioning to this lifestyle can be demanding—many of the minimalists I interviewed balanced their tales of triumph with examples where they let a tool get the best of them. — Page: 979 ^ref-26246 --- In my experience, the key to sustained success with this philosophy is accepting that it’s not really about technology, but is instead more about the quality of your life. — Page: 982 ^ref-48711 --- Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools. — Page: 986 ^ref-17652 ---