Excerpts from the book: Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology

Excerpts from the book: Is my series where I share some highlights and notes I made while reading some book that I think is good, thought provoking and worth sharing.

Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology

The urge to pick up our phones every few minutes has become a nervous twitch that shatters our time into shards too small to be present. In this timely book, professor Cal Newport shows us how to pair back digital distractions and live better with less technology. Introducing us to digital minimalists -- the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones or obsessively document everything they eat -- Newport reveals how to live more intentionally in our tech-saturated world. Take back control from your devices and become a digital minimalist.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.”
• Their gamble is that intention trumps convenience—and this is a bet that seems to be paying off.
• 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.
• 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.
• Wendell Berry summarized this point more succinctly when he wrote: “We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.”
• The urgency we feel to always have a phone with us is exaggerated. To live permanently without these devices would be needlessly annoying, but to regularly spend a few hours away from them should give you no pause. It’s important that I convince you of this reality, as spending more time away from your phone is exactly what I’m going to ask you to do.
• I never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can’t stand tourist attractions, don’t sit on the beach unless there’s a really big sand castle that needs to be made, [and I] don’t care about what the celebrities and politicians are doing. Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.
• Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.
• My core argument is that craft is a good source of high-quality leisure.
• Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.
• Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.