Choosing a focused life in a noisy world

Introduction

Few want to spend so much time online, but these tools have a way of cultivating behavioral addictions. The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.

They joined Facebook to stay in touch with friends across the country, and then ended up unable to maintain an uninterrupted conversation with the friend sitting across the table.

The key to thriving in our high-tech world is to spend much less time using technology.

Aggressive action is needed to fundamentally transform your relationship with technology.

“They honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices.” - Henry David Thoreau

Part 1: Foundations

Chapter 1: A Lopsided Arms Race

Drunk Tank Pink by Adam Alter

The title, for example, refers to a study that showed aggressively drunk inmates at a Seattle naval prison were notably calmed after spending just fifteen minutes in a cell painted a particular shade of Pepto-Bismol pink, as were Canadian schoolchildren when taught in a classroom of the same color. The book also reveals that wearing a red shirt on a dating profile will lead to significantly more interest than any other color, and that the easier your name is to pronounce, the faster you'll advance in the legal profession.

If I force you to quit Facebook, you're not likely to suffer serious withdrawal symptoms or sneak out in the night to an internet café to get a fix. On the other hand, these addictions can still be quite harmful to your well-being. You might not sneak out to access Facebook, but if the app is only one tap away on the phone in your pocket, a moderate behavioral addiction will make it really hard to resist checking your account again and again throughout the day.

How tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

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.

We’re social beings who can’t ever completely ignore what other people think of us.

Compulsive use is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan.

We didn't sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.

Chapter 2: Digital Minimalism

Digital minimalism is 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.

If a new technology offers little more than a minor diversion or trivial convenience, the minimalist will ignore it.

Even when a new technology promises to support something the minimalist values, it must still pass a stricter test: Is this the best way to use technology to support this value? If the answer is no, the minimalist will set to work trying to optimize the tech, or search out a better option.

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 principles of digital minimalism

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'Is this going to be helpful or is it going to be detrimental? Is it going to bolster our life together, as a community, or is it going to somehow tear it down?'

The Amish prioritize the benefits generated by acting intentionally about technology over the benefits lost from the technologies they decide not to use.

'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.' - Henry David Thoreau

'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.'

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?

Part of what makes this philosophy so effective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satis-faction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to avoid.

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.

Chapter 3: The Digital Declutter

The digital declutter process

Put aside a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life.

Technologies include apps, websites, and related digital tools that are delivered through a computer screen or a mobile phone and are meant to either entertain, inform, or connect you.

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

You should probably also include video games and streaming video in this category.

In some cases, you'll abstain from using the optional technology altogether, while in other cases you might specify a set of operating procedures that dictate exactly when and how you use the technology during the process.

During this thirty-day break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful.

You will probably find the first week or two of your digital declutter to be difficult, and fight urges to check technologies you're not allowed to check. These feelings, however, will pass, and this resulting sense of detox will prove useful when it comes time to make clear decisions at the end of the declutter.

At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank slate. For each technology you reintroduce, determine what value it serves in your life and how specifically you will use it so as to maximize this value.

Does this technology directly support something that I deeply value? This is the only condition on which you should let one of these tools into your life.

Is this technology the best way to support this value?

How am I going to use this technology going forward to maximize its value and minimize its harms?

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.

Part 2: Practices

Chapter 4: Spend Time Alone

Lead Yourself First by Kethledge and Erwin #book

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.

You can enjoy solitude anywhere so long as your mind is left to grapple only with its own thoughts.

Solitude can be banished in even the quietest setting if you allow input from other minds to intrude.

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.

You can experience insights and emotional balance from unhurried self reflection.

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.' - Blaise Pascal

Solitude: A Return to the Self by Anthony Store #book

“Conversation enriches understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.” - Edward Gibbon

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.

Solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.

The ability to be alone is anything but a rejection of close bonds and can instead affirm them.

Calmly experiencing separation builds your appreciation for interpersonal connection when they do occur.

“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.' - Henry David Thoreau

The iPod was pushing us toward a newly alienated phase in our relationship with our own minds.

The smartphone provided a new technique to banish these remaining slivers of solitude: the quick glance. At the slightest hint of boredom, you can now surreptitiously glance at any number of apps or mobile-adapted websites that have been optimized to provide you an immediate and satisfying dose of input from other minds.

Solitude Deprivation: A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

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.

Henry David Thoreau wanted to find wildness in a suburban setting.

'I've always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now what that X represents I don't really know ... but it's a substantial ratio.' - Glenn Gould

Practice: leave your phone at home

Practice: take long walks

“Only thoughts reached by walking have value.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

“The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Practice: write letters to yourself

Writing 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.

Chapter 5: Don’t Click “Like”

When given downtime our brain defaults to thinking about our social life.

Replacing real world relationships with social media use is detrimental to your well-being

Anything textual or noninteractive-basically, all social media, email, text, and instant messaging-doesn't count as conversation and should instead be categorized as mere connection.

The socializing that counts is real conversation, and text is no longer a sufficient alternative.

If you adopt this philosophy, you'll almost certainly reduce the number of people with whom you have an active relationship. 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. Once you no longer count the latter activities as meaningful interaction, your social circle will seem at first to contract.

Practice: don’t click “like”

Don’t click the “like” button ever and never leave comments. Remain silent.

Practice: consolidate texting

Always be on do not disturb mode.

Once you no longer treat text interactions as an ongoing conversation that you must continually tend, it's much easier to concentrate fully on the activity before you.

Simply tell people close to you that you check texts several times a day, so if they send you something, you'll see it shortly, and that if they need you urgently, they can always call you.

Practice: hold conversation office hours

Chapter 6: Reclaim Leisure

A life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.

Embrace pursuits that provide you a source of inward joy.

If you begin declutterring 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.

The mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change-not rest, except in sleep.

Expending more energy in your leisure can end up energizing you more.

The value you receive from a pursuit is often proportional to the energy invested.

Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

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.

Practice: fix or build something every week

Practice: schedule your low-quality leisure

Practice: join something

Join first and work out the other issues later.

Practice: follow leisure plans

Describe specific goals you hope to accomplish, with accompanying strategies for how you will accomplish them.

Doing nothing is overrated.

Investing energy into something hard but worthwhile almost always returns much richer rewards.

Chapter 7: Join the Attention Resistance

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.

Practice: delete social media from your phone

Practice: turn your devices into single-purpose computers

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.

Practice: use social media like a professional

Practice: embrace slow media

Focus only on the highest-quality sources.

Breaking news 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.

Consider limiting your attention to the best of the best when it comes to selecting individual writers you follow.

Practice: dumb down your smartphone

Your time = their money

Conclusion

Shared from Twos ✌️

Use code “baller”