Digital Minimalism (book)

Connect

🔼Topic:: Wellbeing (MOC) 🔼Topic:: Minimalism

✒️ Note-Making

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas

1. Technologies are after our attention and agency - technologies have evolved beyond their initial proposal of improving our life, to the point that these technologies are lead by a desire to use our attention, our time and money against our preferences, and to take away our agency.
2. Use technology as a last resort and as supportive tool only - as default, use technologies only to support your physical social life, and not as a replacement. regain your agency and act with intentionality. reduce use of technology to make time for high quality leisure.
3. There's no alternative to face to face interactions - no matter how easy it is to connect through technology, the quality is not remotely the same. Don't give up on face to face interactions with those you care about.
4. Replace technology with high quality leisure - Create opportunities for pure solitude to detox and enable deep thinking, or spend time in quality leisure like a craft or a sport.

🗒️Relate

⛓by following this method, what will happen? technology is a tool, it can be used for good or for bad/harmful purposes. and we should be attentive to the way we use it and do it in a conscience way.

🔍Critique

✅ relevant research, metaphors or examples that helps to convey the argument

any recommendation to board games is appreciated

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are... there is a thin line for those who either use their phone for work purposes or otherwise incapable of detaching themselves from technology, for them the solution is more difficult to implement, and will require higher effort from them.

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style...

🖼️Outline

📒 Notes

Intro

our current digital life is taking control of our time, emotions, thoughts and Agency. small steps/ tips and tactics cant be the solution. a whole philosophical standpoint is required to reshape our relationship with digital life and social media in particular.

Introduction

• the issue was the overall impact of having so many different shiny baubles pulling so insistently at their attention and manipulating their mood.
• this irresistible attraction to screens is leading people to feel as though they’re ceding more and more of their autonomy when it comes to deciding how they direct their attention.
• 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.
• digital minimalism, and it applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools.

Part 1 - what is Digital Minimalism and why it is Essential

A Lopsided Arms Race

we didn't sign up to lose our control to social media. they began as innocent products, which quickly became a source of addiction. its not that were lazy or stupid, were just "hooked". they make us addicted by using:

1. intermittent gratification - dopamine hits in random internals (you're never going to know when you're going to get a like or a new notification) Gamification
2. social acceptance - we crave for the acceptance and approval of others, to maintain our social status and check on others Peer Pressure

in light of these strong forces, tips and tricks aren't enough, we need a complete change in the way we look, consume and use technology, a new philosophy of technology, which is digital minimalism. those who practice it go against the FOMO of not being online or using social media, and their default is to only use the tool if the benefits outweigh the costs. Pareto Principle

A Lopsided Arms Race

• 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.
• These apps and slick sites were not, as Bill Maher put it, gifts from “nerd gods building a better world.” They were, instead, designed to put slot machines in our pockets.
• 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.
• how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.
• there’s nothing fundamental about the unpredictable feedback that dominates most social media services. If you took these features away, you probably wouldn’t diminish the value most people derive from them.

Digital Minimalism

digital minimalism principles:

1. clutter is costly (too many tools reduce value of each one) the flip side of Emergence and less is more
2. optimization is important
3. intentionality is satisfying

Deep dive:

1. Clutter - think economically about your life, how you spend your minutes. Would you really want to "pay" 2 hours a day for the gains you get from social media? Are there better alternatives? Be like Henry David Thoreau that calculated what is the minimal amount of money he needed for his basic needs, and rested all the rest, that way he worked only one day a week. Alternative cost
2. optimization - We need to spend more focus on Optimization .currently small improvements to the way we use technology can lead to a drastic change in our wellbeing, because we spend too little on finding the optimal point, instead being sucked in too deep where every minute is more harmful to us than good. i.e we stick to the Defaults, and lack Critical Thinking
3. use technology with awareness - like noticing what you eat and be mindful about it. Keep your autonomy by actively choosing which technologies you use and why, and not succumbing to the Attention Economy

Digital Minimalism

• it’s hard to permanently reform your digital life through the use of tips and tricks alone.
• 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.
• “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.”
• 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.
• more often than not, the cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises.
• The Amish prioritize the benefits generated by acting intentionally about technology over the benefits lost from the technologies they decide not to use.
• 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.

Declutter

Decluttering is made of three parts: a. make a list of all the technologies you are not going to use for the next 30 days (mainly entertainment and social media technologies, not your microwave) b. have a detox for 30 days, with replacing the technologies with other activities (family, friends, nature walks...) - more on that in part 2 c. reinsert the technologies back only if:

• it support one of your Core Values.
• it is the best way to support this value
• you have defined clear rules and Boundaries of using this technology

The Digital Declutter

• 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.
• consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life.
• 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.

Part 2: Methods to Maintain a Digital Minimalist Life

Spend Time Alone

have more moments of Solitude - solitude is when we are able to have uninterrupted thoughts without the influence/disturbance from others. this doesn't mean you have to have a cabin in the woods, but can also happen in a café. solitude is a great chance to process our thoughts and emotions, have deep introspection with ourselves, spark creative thoughts, and evaluate our connection with others. Downtime brain. in this generation, these moments are rarer than ever, since having constant Distractions (either by boredom or from other people) denies us these moments, which causes anxiety. for example, a Nature walk is a good chance to get some solitude, as long as you're without your phone, no headphones...

Spend Time Alone

• give your brain the regular doses of quiet it requires to support a monumental life.
• 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.
• solitude is a prerequisite for original and creative thought,
• 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.
• in 90 percent of your daily life, the presence of a cell phone either doesn’t matter or makes things only slightly more convenient.

Don't Click "Like"

we are social animals by default Human is a social being, when uninterrupted, our brain "fires" regions that are related to social issues. this social need doesn't get fulfilled from social media, we need deep long conversation, that involve facial expressions, not the mere shallowness of text. Platos Cave thus, social media should be a supporter of real life social events, and not the replacement of communication. so: set up events using Facebook = good have a chat/hit "like" or "comment" instead of calling/meeting = bad

Don’t Click “Like”

• our 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.
• the value generated by a Facebook comment or Instagram like—although real—is minor compared to the value generated by an analog conversation or shared real-world activity.
• 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.
• 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.
• despite your good intentions, the role of low-value interactions will inevitably expand until it begins to push out the high-value socializing that actually matters.

Reclaim Leisure

the transition (i.e decluttering your life) wont be successful unless you fill the time you previously spend doing digital things with other activities. the book recommends on doing high leisure activities, which are:

1. something active (do, instead of watch)
2. something physical (such as a craft or a hobby)
3. something social (such as sports or board games)

Reclaim Leisure

• If you begin decluttering the low-value digital distractions from your life before you’ve convincingly filled in the void they were helping you ignore, the experience will be unnecessarily unpleasant at best and a massive failure at worse. 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.
• Leisure Lesson: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.
• 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.
• Leisure Lesson: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.
• there’s a sensory and social richness to real-world encounters that’s largely lost in virtual connections,
• Leisure Lesson: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.
• It’s too easy to be good intentioned about adding some quality activity into your evening, and then, several hours of rabbit hole clicking and binge-watching later, realize that the opportunity has once again dissipated.
• First, knowing that you will soon review your performance makes you more likely in the moment to stick with your habits. Second, this reflection allows you to identify issues that might need resolving.

Join the Attention Resistance

have concentrated "text" time, where you read/respond to text messages, otherwise its on "do not disturbed" mode. similarly, have "office hours" for conversation, where everyone is invited to call you at that time. Time Blocking

to make the transition easier, it is suggested to:

1. schedule in advance your low quality leisure (digital)
2. use site blocking services, have blocked as default
3. dump down your phone
4. separate between leisure devices and productivity devices

Join the Attention Resistance

• At the core of this shift was the smartphone’s ability to deliver advertisements to users at all points during their day, as well as to help services gather data from these users to target those advertisements with unprecedented precision.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.