Afford Anything - Digital Minimalism - with Dr. Cal Newport

Episode Date: February 4, 2019

#176: Cal Newport created a philosophy called digital minimalism, which is idea of reducing your digital life down to only the most important core essentials. Remove the apps from your phone, then slowly re-introduce only the ones that are the most useful and beneficial. Take control of your smartphone, rather than letting it control you.   Digital minimalism is a philosophy of technology use. This philosophy pulls from the concepts of minimalism, essentialism, the slow movement, and the 80/20 principle, applying these ideas towards your digital life. Cal discusses the digital minimalist philosophy on today’s episode. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode176  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every decision that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. It applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention. It applies to anything in your life that is a resource that you need to manage. So how do you wisely manage these resources? Today's podcast episode is going to deep dive into what might be your very most important asset, your attention. How do you manage your attention, particularly in this era of digital distraction? Dr. Cal Newport is on today's episode to talk about that.

My name is Paula Pant. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast. Welcome to the show. I am very excited to have Cowanuport back on the show. I've been a big fan of his for many years. I started reading him before I even started a blog, back when he was writing about study hacks and about the nuanced ideas around the idea of Follow Your Passion. He has a great body of work out there.

Today he joins us on the show to talk about a specific philosophy that he calls digital minimalism. Digital minimalism takes the concept of minimalism, the concept of focusing on what matters and ignoring the rest, and applies it to your digital life. It is a philosophy of technology use. And in many ways, it echoes the core philosophy of the fire movement, the financial independence retire early movement. which is also at its heart a philosophy of focusing only on what matters and ignoring the rest, both in terms of your expenses and later in terms of the work that you choose to do. So we're going to dive into the nuances of the minimalist philosophy and the slow movement and essentialism and the 80-20 principle,

and we're going to talk specifically about how to apply this to the way that you interact with technology on a day-to-day basis. Here's Cal Newport. Hi, Cal. Hi, Paula. Good to hear from you. good. It's been a couple of years since we last chatted. Yeah, it has been. Well, I'm continuing to be out here and roughly people's feathers about technology, so I guess I can't complain. Well, in terms of the feathers that you're ruffling, you have a philosophy of technology, specifically a philosophy of technology use. And that is what digital minimalism is. What is that philosophy? Digital minimalism says you should essentially wipe the slate clean in terms of the technologies you use in your personal life.

Wipe the slate clean, get rid of all the clutter, all of the sort of apps and services that you may be sort of haphazardly signed up for when you're in college or because, you know, you saw something at your friend's house and said, I'll try this. You wipe it clean. Then very carefully start adding technologies back, doing so only if you could make a very strong, case that this particular tool is going to have a very positive impact on something that I really value. So you're going from this sort of haphazard and cluttered digital life to one that is very selective and very intentional with just a small number of tools that give you really big returns. So in terms of what you just said, if your goal is to decrease digital clutter, and let's talk a little bit more in a minute about whether or not that should be a person's goal and if so,

why. But if your goal is to decrease digital clutter, it seems like there are two approaches. One is the additive approach that you just mentioned, where you wipe the slate clean, start from zero, and then begin adding things back in. The other would be a subtractive approach where you start with the status quo and then gradually decrease removing one app at a time piece by piece. Why do you advocate the additive approach rather than the subtractive one? Well, we have a lot of history to look at, try to figure out what will work better because the basic principles of minimalism, which is that less can be more, is something that goes back a really long way and comes up again and again throughout history. We have it in antiquity. We have Thoreau, make it a really strong case for it.

We see it show up multiple times in the 20th century, in the 21st century. We get the online minimalism movement. And of course, even the fire movement that you're a part of has a lot of elements of minimalism in it. And one of the common themes throughout this history is that it usually works better to start from scratch and rebuild intentionally. The main issue being, if you have an edifice like your digital life where the elements have been added haphazardly, you have no reason to believe that any of them are, you know, in particular the right things to be there.

And right, so the more efficient way to build an intentional structure is to start from scratch. So it's true you can start removing, let's say, some apps you use and some services you use and maybe feel like a little bit less clutter. But often the goal of minimalism is not just getting rid of things, but focusing down on things that give you lots of value. And that requires a positive step at some point. So you can't just get there probably from subtracting. Let's talk about why a person should get rid of digital clutter.

First of all, for the sake of people listening, what exactly do you mean by digital clutter? Well, I mean it in the same way you would think about clutter in your house, right? That you just, you have more stuff that you need and the weight of having all these. things around is starting to create negative consequences. So in the digital realm, what that means is that you have quite a few different apps and services and tools that are all pulling out your time and attention. And the overall combined impact of this is negative, that you feel sort of constantly distracted, you feel like you're spending more time on your devices than you know is either healthy or useful, that you're beginning to feel maybe manipulated in terms of how you feel or what you believe

on a day-to-day basis. And so this is clutter. It's too many thags. They're not returning enough value, and the negative cost is starting to have a consequence in your life. Let's take an app like Facebook, for example, where there are certainly negative costs. You look through the news feed, somebody says something politically incendiary, you get angry. Those are the elements of Facebook that are time-consuming and often negative emotion-provoking. Or you compare your life to somebody else and say this person is constantly on vacation in Bora Bora and I'm not, therefore my life must be terrible. Those are certainly some of the more negative elements, but Facebook also has positive elements. So in terms of an app that, a single app that has both positive and negative features,

would that app be clutter or would specific components of its use be clutter, but the app itself be neutral like a tool? Well, the key to minimalism is not to go thig by thag, right? say, how does the maybe the positives outweigh the negatives? It's a stand to start with, okay, here's what I know for a fact is important to me. Here are my values. Here's where I want to spend my time. Here are the five things I think are key to crafting a life worth living. And then if you're a minimalist, you go back and say, what's the best way, if any, to use technology to support each of these things? And you think about it. You see if there's any really high

ROI tools you can deploy that's going to help those things. And then you let those answers be the technologies you use in your personal life. So what you want to try to avoid with this philosophy is just looking at individual things in isolation and say, well, here's some things that could be nice and here's some things I don't like. Because again, that's the same recipe that leads people to having a cluttered house. They say, well, I don't know if I always need like a melon baller, but you know what I have some parties. Sometimes it's nice to do melancholy.

So I guess I'll keep the melon baller, right? If you do that type of analysis on everything in an overcrowded house, you're going to end up with an overcrowded house. But if you instead, let's say take everything out of your house, you know, pack it in a box and then say, okay, I'm only going to take things back out as I need it that's really important to my life. You're probably going to end up with a house that's much less cluttered and where everything in it is really useful. It has real meaning or value for you. So that's the mindset that I'm more advocating is start from what's important in your life. What does your life what to be like? And then work backwards and say, oh, are there some big wins here where there's particular technology I can deploy this really good to have.

help this one thing. What I hear within that answer are elements of the 80-20 principle or the concept of essentialism. Yeah, the 80-20 principle, mathematically speaking, is quite useful and is underpinning a lot of the theory behind minimalism. Part of what you get out of the math underneath the 80-20 principle is that if you look at, let's say, an array of different activities, and some activities have a really high return. So as you invest energy into them, you get a very high return in your life, and some have a small return, your best strategy for maximizing the positive return is to put as much energy as possible into the small number of things that give you really big returns. So this is essentially another way of looking at, a flip-side way of looking at opportunity cost,

that when you're spending time on something lower value, not negative value, but maybe something that just returns a little bit of value, you also have to factor in that, you know, that time could have been spent on something that was giving a higher return. And so the math there behind opportunity class or the 80-20 principle, which is similar, is that investing in a small number of things that you know for sure are very valuable for you is almost certainly going to help your life more than try to avoid missing out on small value things. So then what do you do with certain apps, like we'll use Facebook again as an example, in which for extremely specific goals, such as keeping in touch with family members who live, in a different country. Facebook is the best tool for that, but it also comes with all of these other components that are either neutral or negative. How would a person handle that within the digital minimalist framework? Yeah, it's a great question because something you see a lot of

digital minimalists do, they never think about the tools that they use purely in the binary sets of do I use this or do I not use this. Instead, they almost always, approach these tools with also the questions of how and when do I use this. So like, let's use your example. Let's say one of the things you really value is connection to your family and that there's a tool like Facebook that for whatever reason is actually a really effective tool for keeping in touch with your family, it gives you a lot of value. What a minimalist would do is they would say, well, I'm not just going to say, okay, I use Facebook now. You know, I click on their phone 50 minutes a day on Facebook products like the average American user. They would say, okay, how and when am I going to

use Facebook. And there they might say, well, of course, I'm not going to have it on my phone. It's just going to be on my computer. I'm going to use the news feed eradicator plug-in. So I'm not going to see any of these algorithmically selected articles that the app is trying to use to distract me. And I check in in the evening every other day for about 15 minutes to see what's going on with my family. That's classic minimalism. So when you think about the how and the wind and not just the what, you're able to take the cost-of-benefit ratio of these tools and push them decidedly in your advantage. It's like a real hack for getting a lot more out of the tools than the tools are getting out of you. Oh, I like that. Get more out of the tools than the

tools get out of you. Yeah. Just as an aside, I talked about in the book that there's this group that I loosely call the attention resistance because they actually think about what they're doing when they're trying to hack these tools. They get value out of it without being taken advantage of by the attention economy companies. They see it almost like they're in a resistance movement. And so they have all these high-tech tools and plugins they use to really eliminate the attention economy company's ability to stag their attention. So it's almost like surgical strikes. All right, we got to get in the Facebook and we got to get this message off to our friend who's, you know, living in Belgium. And we got to get out of there before they notice us and capture us in the newsfeed. And like high-tech

commandos, they deploy all these different tools and stuff to make that possible. One of the things that I have noticed within my practice of doing this, and I've done this for years, is that I have missed a lot of various opportunities that have arisen when people use messaging on Facebook in a real-time way. So I will check my Facebook messages once a week. And during that once-a-week check, I see all of these messages from people saying, hey, we're getting together in an hour for dinner. Want to join us? And yeah, I get that seven days later.

I personally have just accepted that I need to paraphrase. Chris, I need to let small bad things happen in order to free up space for good things. But there are certainly some people who would be resistant to that. Have you heard of that happening? And is my attitude towards it something that you would endorse? You do have the right attitude. And I think Tim put it well in that sort of classic article of his. What are the principles of minimalism? So what are the principles for why this less is more approach actually ends up putting you in a better place the alternatives is that intentionality trumps inconvenience. And so this is one of the reasons why you shouldn't worry too much about, well, some bad

things or inconveniences will happen. There will be events I don't know about. There'll be maybe something I miss out on. I mean, there's, you know, whatever, a party I don't hear about or whatever it is, I mean, at almost any of these minimalist activities, you're probably putting on the table, when you take something off your plate, you're putting on the table a potential inconvenience or missed opportunity. But an important principle is that living intentionally, saying I'm being in control of what matters in my life and how I'm best going to support it, in most context, this is going to return way more value in your life than what is lost to the inconveniences.

We tend, especially in our culture, to weigh overvalue inconvenience, worry about it too much. We're also way too concerned about missed opportunities and missed value. And we're really worried about that. But what we're missing is we've known this through sort of millennia of looking at various wisdom traditions is that the positive return of being very intentional is itself something that you shouldn't discount. So in your case, for example, if friends in a social life, I'm assuming it are very important to you, I mean, the minimalist approach would say, I want to make sure I'm supporting that. Maybe there's a particular tool that I used in a particular way that helps me support my social life. But also there's probably a lot of things you'd want to put into place unrelated to technology to make sure that that value, is fulfilled. And as long as you're doing that, then you don't have to worry about, well,

are there any opportunities on miss eat or maybe a dinner or this or that? And so really, this notion that intentionality trumps inconvenience is pretty important. It's okay for some bad things to happen so long as you're really consistently putting your energy on the things you know for sure are good. Absolutely. You gave an example in your book about how social media managers use social media in a non-distracting way. I remember one of the examples that you gave was about, a person who uses, I believe it was a tool called TweetDeck in order to filter through tweets in order to see only the ones that were relevant to the work of social media management for clients. Yeah, it's interesting when you talk to social media professionals. What you notice

is the way that professionals use these tools is so much different than how the normal consumer uses them, which is, by the way, the way that the social media companies want you to use them, which is this sort of unstructured, unbounded kind of ad hoc exploration where you just, you see this and click on this and look at this. And they just want you in the ecosystem and that they want you to loosely play around it there as long as possible because that's their business model. But people who run, say, social media brands for companies, for example, they don't do this at all.

I mean, first of all, they would never use social media on their phone. I mean, the only reason you would ever use social media on your phone is mainly as distraction, right? Which, of course, is a big part of the business model, but has very little to do with the utility of it. So they'll almost always be used it on a desktop. They rarely interact directly with the interfaces that the social media companies provide. So they'll use tools like TweetDec.

There's also much more sophisticated tools that essentially plug in into these sort of more complex enterprise systems that the companies use in their marketing and publicity departments that are even more complicated than TweetDeck they learned about. But they'll have really complicated filter set up. Like I want to find, has there been any mention of this that was done by someone, who has at least this many followers and got this many retweets. And so they have these very complex filters so they can see exactly where's the signal and the noise.

When it comes to posting, well, that's really scheduled and really structured. And I go into that details to make the point that how you use these things matter. And if you're just idly on these tools using them, don't let, like maybe you have some professional use or some specific use for these tools, don't let that be an excuse to fall into the trap that the companies want you to fall into, which is like just keep it on your phone. pull it out whatever, just let us take the driver's seat of your attention. It's better, you know, it'll be fun. Don't worry about it.

And if someone asks, you could just have some reason, like, well, you know, I need to be on Twitter for my business or something like this, right? I mean, they want just to lull you into this sort of online, unstructured phone-based experience. But the real pros, their interaction looks nothing like that. What do you do about a tool like Instagram that you can only post you from a phone? Again, whether or not Instagram, if you're a digital minimalist, whether or not Instagram is in your life depends on your answer to that question of what's really important to me and what's the best way to use digital tools to support it. So Instagram is an interesting example because I've met probably half a dozen minimalist who've done this exercise and do use Instagram.

They tend to be people who are in the visual arts or some sort of visual art or artistic related field. Because as it turns out, there's definitely a subculture on Instagram of artists. who share their work. And if you're at a creative artistic field, actually being exposed to interesting new work is really important because the input, right, the creative input is crucial for artistic creativity. You have to constantly be exposed to yourself to interesting work so that you have the basic building blocks you can reconfigure in your own work or play off of. So it's not uncommon for artists, for example, to say Instagram is important to me for that purpose. But typically what they'll do is they say, well, first of all, I've very aggressively curated my Instagram feed to be,

let's say, the 10 artists who at this moment I find most inspiring. They won't put it on their phone for the most part. And they have a schedule for when they do this. It might be a ritual. You know, on Friday night, I log in on my browser and I see one of these artists posted this week. It takes maybe about 10 people. They're posting one or two things a week. It takes about 10, 15 minutes, and I get that real value out of it. I get that creative inspiration. The other thing some of these artists do, depending on their medium, is they have a schedule. If I want to post something new that I created every whatever week or every month on Instagram, and that's a really valuable ritual for something they care about. And so it's a really good example of a way where a minimalist can take one

of these tools and use it in a very functional way, very intentional way. There returns a lot of value and yet avoids a lot of the potential cost. It sounds as though a lot of digital minimalism is really the art of attention management. That's an interesting way to put it, right? I mean, if you think you have limited time and attention, and you can imagine you get different returns for what you invested in, the whole digital minimalist concept is if you're not careful, because of the way that a lot of these tools have been designed and engineered,

they could take from you way more of your time and attention than you really wanted and therefore significantly reduce the return in terms of quality of life and flourishing that you're getting from your limited budget of time and attention. And this is what I heard, right? The reason I got into this whole topic is that, you know, after I wrote deep work, which was really about technology in the workplace, people kept coming up to me and said, yeah, but what about technology of my personal life? Because people had felt that there had been a shift.

I place it somewhere around two years ago, because I've been writing about this for a long time, somewhere around two years ago, people shifted, whereas they used to say, maybe tell self-deprecating jokes about how much they look at their phone, they began to actually feel a sense of urgency, right? Something's not right here. And attention management is a good way of encapsulating what it is that was starting to make people concerned. It was not this idea that, okay, this app was useless or that this tool I use is strictly, wrong. It's not like cigarettes or drugs or something where it's just clear I shouldn't be doing this and I am. So their issue was not that, hey, this is useless or this is bad, or even that my

time spent engaging with this tool is bad in the moment. What they were worried about is I'm spending more time that I know is useful and more time that I know is healthy on my screens and all these devices. And the reason that's a cost is because that's taking time and attention away from things you know are more valuable. And that's where these things really start to have a net negative impact on your life, right? You have to zoom out. It's not in this moment when I'm looking at an Instagram photo, is that terrible? No, it's not. But if I'm looking at Instagram photos an hour, two hours a day, and it's keeping me away for paying attention to my kid during bath time, well, now you start to see like, okay, the net cost here is negative

because I only have so much time in attention, and I'm spending less and less on the things I really know are valuable. The drastic measure of wiping everything out going to zero, and slowly adding things back in. While in concept it sounds great, I'm sure that there are many people listening to this, myself included, who think, well, intellectually I agree with it. Practically, I just don't feel that I could do it.

Would you encourage us to push through and do it, or would you encourage other tactics that would get us closer to a digitally minimalist life? Well, both, right? So what I've found is that ultimately the best way to become minimalist is to eventually make this more drastic change. And so the particular process I suggest, I call it the digital declutter. It takes about 30 days. I get into it into the book, but I could say last January, I led over 1,600 people through a digital declutter.

So I have a lot of sort of data and feedback on it. And the short story is it's very effective. I can talk a little bit more about it, but there are, in the meantime, some sort of nerve-building tactics that I can suggest. Things that will make a difference, but more importantly, we'll get you closer to a point where the minimalist mindset makes sense and you might be ready for a bigger change. And so the three smaller sort of preparatory tactics I suggest to people is one, take off of your phone any application where someone else makes money once you tap on it. I'm not asking you to quit yet. Still use these things. I'm just saying take it off your phone.

So it's no longer something that can pull out your attention at a moment's notice. Two, get into the habit of doing more and more things without your phone with you. This is scary at first. So at first, it might be relatively minor. Like I'm going down the street to the corner store back, but you can sort of progressively build up your comfort. I'm not saying abandon your phone, but not always have it with you. One subhack that some people do with this tactic is, If they're going out somewhere, they might leave it in their car glove compartment.

So if there's some emergency, like their car breaks down or something like this, they can still get their phone, but it's not in their pocket. And it's not easily accessible. And then the third, and this is actually a tactic that I learned during this large 1600-person digital declutter experiment, it was actually a surprise to be, is focus on systematically adding back to your life high-quality analog leisure activities. The type of stuff we used to use to fill our time back before we had ubiquitous internet and these glowing rectangles that are in our pocket. As it turns out, the more you add high-quality analog leisure back into your life, the less that you need the digital distraction as a crutch to sort of keep you protected from the existential void that you have to face if you just have nothing to do and don't know how to fill your time. And so when you fill in that void, you back fill it in with high-quality analog leisure, your taste for the digital distraction will really start to wane. And then it's become much easier to sift through what you really need and what you don't. It'll become much easier than to walk away from the things that you don't really need.

And that was one of the major points that you made in your book is that high-quality leisure trumps passive consumption. Yeah, this is really more important than I even realized until I got deeper into this. topic. But you go all the way back to Aristotle writing the Nicomedean ethics, and you're going to find this idea that human beads really need activities that they do just for the sake of the activity, just for the quality of the experience, right? We've known all the way since the time of Aristotle that this is what allows us to find, in some sense, joy and beauty in the world, even in a life that often is going to have suffering, hard things, bad things. And that happen that are out of your control, this is what, in large part, helps you escape

existential despair, that you're still able to find beauty and joy doing activities just for activities sake. It's just very important to the human soul, the human philosophy, and flourishing. And this is why throughout history, whenever we find people or civilization where people are fortunate enough to actually have leisure time, which, of course, is not all people and not all times, but whatever the circumstances are right historically, that people have some leisure time, they fill it with these activities, these high-quality leisure activities to require real engagement, investment in time that they do just for quality's sake. So one of the unexpected consequences of the attention economy in the smartphone revolution is that we have lots of leisure time, but these devices can distract us enough that we can get away without developing these high-quality leisure activities.

even though we still kind of feel that void and we're still experiencing the negatives of not having these type of important activities in our life, we could just stay distracted enough to essentially ignore those emotions. And so part of what makes it really hard when you leave this world of digital distraction is if you have it developed these activities, you will at first feel a real void. But part of what's exciting, and I got this feedback a lot during my large digital declutter experiment is that when people really, discover these type of activities and shift their discretionary attention increasingly from the screen and into these type of activities, the feeling of satisfaction and resilience and peace and media that it generates often catches them by surprise. Even simple things, like I went to the library and got seven books. Just a head, I'm going to go home and I'm just going to, I'm going to sit outside.

I'm going to start reading these. Even the simple things like that were giving people sort of a sense of satisfaction that they hadn't even realized how much they were missing. At a conceptual level, what is the difference between reading a library book versus reading a Twitter feed? Well, because the library book is not algorithmically sort of generated a push stature to try to maximize engagement. It doesn't exist in an ecosystem like Twitter, which has been optimized to try to give you an intermittently reinforced stream of social approval indicators so that like a slot machine handle, you have to keep tapping, you have to keep coming back. and it's harder work. It requires more engagement with the brain,

requires more energy invested, and yet you get out of it a much richer experience. So, for example, if you're reading a novel, the reason this technology is so popular is that as you get into a novel, so you've been reading it for a while, your mind is actually constructing a simulacrum of this actual world.

It's starting to begin to actually, through mere neurons or similar neuronal mechanisms, simulate the minds of the other character in the novel. Part of the reason why this is such an engrossed experience is that you get to feel a little bit what it's like to be that person in that situation. This is why, you know, a thriller novel can get your heart rate going a little bit more, or a well-crafted Russian literary masterpiece will give you this sort of profound sense of insight into the human condition. I mean, it literally transports you into other minds, other circumstances, and increases your understanding of the human

condition in the world. I mean, there's something so deep in that that's just not captured by whatever it is, like browsing through weird Twitter and looking for funny memes, right? I mean, these old technologies are popular and they persisted for a reason. They're deeper experiences to require more from you, but reward that with a lot more in return. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. If you're a small business owner, you're juggling a lot. And while some of these things that you're juggling are great. Some things like filing taxes and running payroll, meh, kind of boring. That's where Gusto comes in. Gusto makes payroll taxes and HR easy for

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When they ask, how do you hear about us? Type in, afford anything. Again, freshbooks.com slash Paula. Freshbooks.com slash Paula. Try it free 30 days. What else did you observe when you led 1,600 people through a digital detox? Well, it took people about seven to 10 days, sometimes up to 14 days, to really get past that initial strong compulsion to I need to check something. In fact, there was one young woman who sent me a report that said at the beginning of the detox, she took all the,

the apps off, all the optional technology apps off the phone because she was doing the detox. But she had such a strong compulsion to look up and see information on her phone that the only thing left that actually was on her phone and had new information to give was the weather app. So for that first week, she was compulsively hitting the weather app that checked what the weather conditions were. And she's like, I'm not joking. For that first week, I can give you the hour-to-hour weather conditions in like 12 major cities in the country.

But by day 10, she was fine. And by day 30, because the key thing about this to clutter is it's more than a detox. Like the first piece of it is detoxy. But the other homework you have during these 30 days is that you have to start doing the self-reflection that's hard to do when you constantly have distraction. Now that you're free from that for a little bit, you have to do the needed self-reflection on what's important to you. And I ask that you start re-engaging with those type of analog high-quality leisure activities that we talked about. So by the time she got the day 10, she wasn't checking the weather app. By the time she got the day 30, she actually ignored my instructions, which says, wait a second, the clutter is not about a detox that you return to all your technology.

You're supposed to just carefully reintroduce only the most valuable things after the clutter is over. Well, she ignored the instructions. It was like, I'm excited. I'm just going to put everything back. And she found she had lost her taste for most of it. She's like, yay, I got whatever, like Facebook back. And she was doing a little bit of this and the swipe eat or whatever. And I was like, I don't enjoy this anymore.

It's like when you stop eating sugar for a month and then you go back to the candy bar, you're like, this is sweet. Like this is weird, you know? And so to me, that was a heart-need case study. So it takes a while at first to sort of lose your immediate compulsion. But if you did actually do the hard work of intentionality, what do I value, start finding analog activities that support those values. it just really transformed your relationship to tools.

They stop having this control of your time and attention. And they start to look more like the things you have in your garden shed. Like, oh, like this thing has a very specific use. You know, like, yeah, my leaf flower. When I have to clean my leaves, I use the leaf flower. You know, like they become these functional tools that you're putting to work for these really important things in your life, which is such a different relationship than then, okay, I'm done with work. Attention economy, you're in charge now.

You know, here's my break. You know, let me know when you're done in the morning. You know, that's just such a different experience once you're a minimalist. Right, right. Nobody ever says, okay, I'm done with work. I'm just going to pick up my leaf blower for a little while. Yeah, exactly. Or go in the Home Depot and just grab something off the shelf and be like,

I don't really know what this does, but it looks nice. And I bet I'll find some use for it, you know. No one does that. But it's tools. These things are tools as well. I mean, there's no reason to see it any different. What is the difference between being a digital minimalist versus being a Luddite? Well, so we talk about Luddism, there's really two things there.

There's the actual Luddite philosophy, then there's probably what you're talking about, which is sort of the current cultural understanding of it. So, I mean, as a quick aside, the actual Luddite philosophy is interesting. It's actually an economic philosophy. I mean, essentially at an early stage in the Industrial Revolution, in the UK, there was basically a movement that said, well, wait a second, you're going to replace us with these automated steam looms. And that'll make more money for the mill owner. But it's going to make everyone in the town's life worse off because we won't have jobs. This doesn't actually seem like the right decision, right? Now, this was before we had more complex sort of free market economic theory. This is before we knew about creative destruction. So this was basically an early economic. theory, the hypothesis being maybe what we should try to do is whatever, maximize the total utility of the area with our economic decisions, right?

So original Luddism, where they went and destroyed the automated steam blooms, was actually, for its time, a plausible and relatively sophisticated economic philosophy. It turns out as we got more economic philosophy, that probably it's not, it doesn't work, right? It turns out it's creative destruction and so much is much more complicated than that. But it was actually less reactionary than it was utopian. And that's an aside. So I'm sorry, that's me being a professor.

No, that's really interesting. I had no idea that that was the origin of the Luddite philosophy. Yeah. So it was actually, I think it's a very, I mean, at the time, I think it's a very plausible philosophy to advance. The way it's used in modern sort of cultural use is what's also sometimes known as Neo-Luddism, which is basically most new technologies in active force for bad. and so you should avoid or reject new technology. This comes up a lot.

I write in this space, and I'm not sure that I've ever really met a real Neo-Ludite. Like, I'm not sure that they exist. I mean, it comes up a lot as a straw man, but I'm, you know, I guess they're out there somewhere. I guess the Utabomber. The Unabomber was a Neo-Ludite. So I guess there are some. But that's a really rare, it's a really rare philosophy that almost know it obscribes, you know. I mean, certainly I know it.

I'm a computer scientist. I mean, the reason of a computer scientist. scientists is that, you know, I'm a geek. I love technology. So you take a philosophy like minimalism and, you know, it has nothing to with ludism. It's just about optimization. Yeah, there's lots of tech innovation. There's lots of tech tools. If you look at the history of technology or the philosophy of technology, we know that one of the key things in terms of the relationship between technology and culture is that it requires a lot of active engagement from the culture. You have to think really hard about, okay, what does this technology mean?

How do we want to use it? What don't we want to use? I mean, you have to constantly, be engaging with technological innovation or you in some sense lose some control, you lose some cultural authority to the tools itself, which is a dangerous state to be. So minimalism is just in that tradition. Great innovations, really exciting things happening, but they're so powerful that, man, we really got to have our act together in terms of figuring out how do we want to integrate these into our culture. And I think something as simple as work backwards from the things you know are important and put technology to use for those, it's just a very sort of simple philosophy for succeeding with that goal.

In the future, as new technologies emerge, and I'm thinking specifically about AR and VR and as these become more integrated into people's lives, how do we make decisions about future technologies that we are not yet aware of? What framework or decision-making process do we use? Well, it's a good question because we face some unique dangers, especially I think AR, augmented reality. From my perspective as a computer scientist, it's augmented reality and artificial intelligence that's going to define our technological future the next 30 or 40 years. And there's some very potential powerful things coming down the line that we have to be prepared for. The main interest in augmented reality is that it's going to eat the hardware industry.

Once we get the field of view and resolution sufficient and we get the form factor of devices plausible and usable, something that people are willing to use, I mean, imagine. what we've just created. I can now create any type of screen I want anywhere in my space. So I don't need a phone. I could just make a screen pop up anytime I want to send a text or look at the web. I don't need a TV. I can make the largest widescreen TV I want show up anywhere I wanted to show up in my space and it's going to be seabless. I don't need a laptop. I can make a laptop screen hover right in front of me. You know, offices don't really, the notion that you need a dedicated office just for you, that's going to go away because there's

nothing you need to own that can't just be projected virtually into your world. So it's going to be an incredibly disruptive innovation. But I think you're concerned that you're hitting out here is a real one, which is once your engagement with all these technologies is essentially entirely virtualized into the AR ecosystem, you have to be concerned that you're going to lose control. Now the companies that control this ecosystem are just going to, now you're going to use this. Now, hey, by the way, you now have an iPhone. You have a smartphone. Like we can put all these things in front of you. So that's why I think now is the time that really get your act together in terms of figuring out your philosophy of technology use so that as these things get more

unavoidable and more seamlessly integrated in an unavoidable way in your life, that at least you really know what you're about and that you have at least a philosophy you've been practicing on for how you try to engage with these tools. How should parents govern their children with regard to their children's technology use? Should they set rules and parameters or let the kid be the decision maker with input from the parents? What would be the approach from a parenting perspective? Oh, you need to set strong rules. Yeah, just the same way that you're not going to let your kids decide, like, whether they have access to your cigarettes or, you know, whether they want to get the key to your liquor cabinet or not. I think some of these technologies, especially those in the attention economy space

where time of attention is monetized are very, very powerful, especially for a developing brain. I'm pretty convinced see the research and the data that I'm seeing starting to develop, looking at the psychological impact of especially social media and some related tools, is that my guess is that maybe within about the next five years or so, our culture's understanding of what's appropriate with respect to smartphones and social media and young people is going to radically change. I have three boys, but they're young. The oldest is six. I think by the time that my oldest is a teenager, the idea that you would ever let a 13-year-old have. social media account is going to seem oddly dangerous or quaint. Now, I'm not sure if I'm right, but just seeing the research I'm seeing, I think it's going to be like cigarettes, right?

It's just going to be something that we're going to change our understanding as a culture. I think it's going to happen pretty quick where we say, no, I'm not giving it a 13- or 14-year-old smartphone. I'm not giving them access to social media. This is crazy. Yeah, maybe, you know, maybe when they're 18 or go to college or something. And I could be wrong, but that's my guess. One of the philosophies that you talk about in your book is,

The slow movement. Can you talk about the slow movement and how that relates to digital minimalism? Well, the slow movement is essentially its subsets of minimalist movement itself. So it emerged with slow food. I think this emerged in Italy. I think it emerged in Rome right around the time that the first McDonald's was open in Rome. And the slow food movement really focused on handcrafted, high quality, carefully constructed food, right? where there's a long food tradition behind this dish.

It's of the area. A chef actually constructed this carefully. And then you really enjoy the process of eating it. In Italy, for example, food culture is very deep and variegated. It has these long roots. And so the slow movement was let's remain or retain this connection to the sort of the cultural process of sort of creating and enjoying really high quality food with other people. It's definitely an intentionality over convenience type situation that this is more important than the convenience of. be able to get a hamburger at McDonald's.

But the slow movement shows up in other places. So I talk in the book about the slow media movement, which is, okay, I don't just want to be bombarded with clickbait and things that algorithms have selected to try to outrage me or to keep me clicking. I don't want to see all this breaking news on Twitter. Like I'm some sort of deadline producer for CNN or something. I'm not. I don't need to see that. The daily paper will probably have the news I need to know. getting away from like sort of low quality, high intensity, engineered content, the slow media

movement says you should just have really high quality, very carefully curated high quality sources of really good information about things you care about that you slowly consume. Maybe you sit down with a really good newspaper and take time over a cup of coffee or on Sunday you've curated the best articles from three magazines you really respect and you go to the coffee shop and read them one by one. And so that's like the slow media movement. But just more generally, this notion of slowness really does dovetail with minimalism, which is take the things you know are valuable, do them really, really well,

and don't worry so much about what you're missing out. In all of the interviews you've done, the conversations you've had and the people that you've led through this, have you encountered examples of people who embraced minimalism for a while and then regretted some aspects of the consequences that emerged. And if so, what? Well, I've certainly met people who have shifted the metabolism and then, depending on your perspective, regressed or shifted back to something that's more maximalist. I saw this in the digital declutter, for example, people for which the declutter didn't stick.

So of the groups of people for whom the declutter did it stick, there was two things that we're pretty predictive of this happening. So one thing that was predictive of this happening was just treating the experience as a pure detox. So just thinking like, oh, if I just take a break, then I'll be better when I go back. You know, that doesn't work. And we don't think about detoxing that way in other context, right? I mean, I don't tell someone who's having like a drug abuse problem, like, I've got this great idea. We're going to spend 30 days. You don't have to take any drugs. And then, you know, when the 30 days are over, you go back to the drugs. And that's not usually, usually a detox is followed by a wholesale lifestyle change.

So that was one issue. The other place where I saw people have the declutter dot stick is that they didn't do the work to fill in the void. So they just sort of white knuckled to the clutter. And they're like, okay, now I'm back in the world. I didn't know what to do with themselves. They were alone with their own thoughts. It was terrified. They were bored.

They didn't have, I don't know what to do. Like, what am I supposed to do tonight? I have an established, you know, an alternative real world social life. So now I just have no social life. And so where I see minimalism not stick is where it's just treated as, well, if you could just get away, this detox type thing. If I could just get away from these for a little bit, everything will be better. And actually, that's just a start. That's just a start of the transition to minimalism.

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Get a free $30 Mrs. Myers gift set at grove.com slash afford anything. That's grove, g-r-o-seo-o-a-fort-anything. With regard to filling in the void, one of the conveniences of constantly checking your phone is that you can fit it into the tiny margins and tiny crevices of your life. So, for example, as we talked about in our last interview, when you push the button for an elevator and then you have 20 seconds when you're waiting for the elevator to actually appear and you reach you. to your pocket and you pull out your phone and you engage with your phone for those 20 seconds, right? That's the way in which a lot of people use their phones. Or if you are at the doctor's office and you're in a waiting room and there's a relatively short wait, but let's say it's a five or seven minute wait, you engage with your phone during that time. In terms of filling in the void,

a lot of activities such as building a table, cooking a nice meal, socializing with a friend over a game of racquetball, those require a larger batch of time. How do you, how do you circle the square? Right. Well, I'm smiling because I'm imagining in my mind someone bringing their half-built table to the doctor's waiting room. Their table saw going in there, it's trying to jack play down the legs or something. So this is a good point you bring up. This is one of the, one of the primary ways which people engage with their phones. Now, in my book Deep Work, I mentioned this sort of professional justification

for not doing that, a very sort of functional justification. And I said, well, it's good to be bored from a purely cognitive capacity point of view because that helps to train your mind to disassociate boredom with stimuli.

If your mind thinks that boredom always gives you stimuli, then when it comes time to do something deep that requires sustained concentration, your mind won't tolerate it. say, I'm bored towards my stimuli. So that was my professional justification for just being okay with that boredom. But in this new book, there's actually, as I found, a much deeper reason why you should be

worried about that habit affiliated every little space of downtime. What this does is that it creates a state that is basically unique in the entire history of the human species, a state that I call solitude deprivation. So solitude is an interesting topic. The definition of solitude I like comes from this book called Lead Yourself First, which talks about solitude in the context of leadership. But it has a good definition of solitude, which is freedom from input from other minds. So it has nothing to do with whether you're physically isolated. You know, if you're on top of a mouth that in the back of a cave but listening to a podcast, you're not in solitude.

On the other hand, if you're in the busy, you know, doctor's waiting room, there's a lot going on. you're surrounded by people, but you're not reacting to inputs from other human minds. You're not looking at your phone. You're not reading. You're not talking. You're not listening. You're just there with your thoughts. You are, even in this busy context, in a state of solitude.

So what ubiquitous high-speed wireless internet and the smartphone revolution allowed us to do for the first time in our history is get rid of all solitude in our day, which is something we were never able to do before. It was just unavoidable. You were going to have to regularly spend times where it was just you and your own thoughts and no input from other minds. And I think it's a really radical and scary thing to do to try to remove solitude from your life because we know that we need it. I mean, solitude when you're alone with your thoughts is the time that you can actually process all of those inputs that you receive during the day into something meaningful.

From a professional perspective, solitude is necessary to take interesting ideas and actually produce knowledge out of it or produce interesting ways forward. from a self-reflection perspective, solitude is when you can actually process things you've heard and figure out what it means for you. I mean, if you're listening to this podcast right now, you're going to get a fraction of the value out of it if you don't then have some time at some point to just think about what you heard

and what does it really mean and how does it integrate with your life and your current beliefs. I mean, this time where it's just alone with your thoughts is crucial for almost any cognitive insight. Also, we know that when you're not in a state of solitude, it's really taxing on the brain. our brain takes other people seriously.

We take socialization seriously. So when we're reacting to an input from another mind, maybe it's just a tweet, but our brain doesn't know about tweets. So it treats it the same way as if, hey, here's someone across from you at the tribal fire who's yelling at you about something, right? Your mind's like, okay, this is really important, all hands on deck. We've got to really process this. We've got to put ourselves into the mind of this other person.

We've got to get the emotional systems fired up so it's draining. And so if you're in this state of anti-solitude, all day. day long, it's exhausting. And we have evidence that it essentially short-circuits your brain. It gives you anxiety, this sort of low-grade hub of listlessness and anxiety. So I become a pretty serious solitude booster as I research this topic more. I would say you should be just as wary of banishing all solitude with your phone during moments of bored as you would be, for example, saying, like, I never get sunlight or I never get fresh air. Like, it really is that important. How much solitude should a person get per day or week?

Week is probably the better metric because it can vary day by day. But something I think is useful is to just in most days have at least multiple occurrences where you're doing something without a phone nearby. Go places without your phone or keep it in the car, keep it turned off in the bottom of your backpack. Not all the time, but just regularly have this experience. I'm raking leaves. I'm making dinner. I'm going to the store to pick up some medicine or whatever.

Just do things like this without a phone and just be alone with your thoughts. So some days it might not be the same. that much, but other days, it's good to get a few hours in a row of just you thinking, go for walks by yourself, you know. These type of activities, I think, we're learning are more important that we used to think. And is it okay if during that time of solitude, your mind doesn't necessarily go to anything reflective or deep or process any of the inspiration that you've taken in? So, for example, if I go to the grocery store without my phone and between driving there, shopping and then driving back, that's an hour, hour and a half without my phone.

But during that time, my mind hasn't really done anything. Has that solitude still served its purpose? Yes, because your mind is doing things. I mean, one thing is we're charging. The second thing, you have the default mode network firing up. We still don't 100% know what the default mode network does. All we know is that once you start processing other. inputs it goes away, but we suspect it's important. And so you're getting recharge, you're

getting background processing, you're letting all sorts of things that we don't even know what their value are happen. And so there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, I was filming something yesterday. The cameraman was telling me about, you know, his flight over. And he said, you know, I forgot how much flying used to be about people watching at the airport. And there's probably actually some value in that. That's that sort of zoning out. Like you're kind of, you know, you're watching people. there's some part of your mind that's just, you know, thinking, look at that person, what's this person doing? Oh, that's interesting. I'll look what those two people are doing.

Just that sort of observational background processing. We don't even know all the ways in which that's important, but we strongly suspect it is. What's interesting to me is that notion that if you are alone, but you're listening to a podcast, then you are not in solitude. And that was a bit of a shock to me because I spend a lot of time hiking alone or taking walks alone, but listening to podcasts or listening to audiobooks as I do it. And I thought that I was getting that solitude, but apparently not. Yes, you're getting other benefits, but yeah, that's not solitude, at least not by this definition. A lot of the people who are listening to this are interested in the fire movement, financial

independence retire early. What applications does this have to fire? Well, I've been a long time sort of fad of the fire movement and follow a lot of the writing to thinking in it. To me, there's a lot of overlaps in terms of what people are trying to do in this movement and the type of minimalism I'm talking about, which is why, for example, one of the, endorsement quotes, you know, on the book is from Mr. Money Mustache. Pete was telling me when he was reading the book that sort of ironically, he was having a hard time getting time for it. And so what he did was he took a chair and pulled it out into his yard under a tree.

He sat down on the tree and read the whole book. I was like, oh, there's something, of wonderfully functional about that. But the reason I was talking to him about it, why I'm happy to be on your show, is that fire really is a minimalist movement, right? I mean, it's about getting down to what's important and trying to see, how can I maximize the time I spend on this. I mean, this is really one of the big motivations behind financial independence is that you cut out of your life, all these expenditures that aren't really directly and aggressively helping to things that matter boast. And by doing so, you're able to gain this financial independent so that you can really invest more time and energy into the things that really matter. So to me, there's this natural

congruence behind, you know, between what I'm talking about and what people already really know well in the fire community. So, you know, just like people might say to me, like, ah, you know, I'm worried if I go off Facebook, then what if, you know, I don't have this or this small thing or that small thing? It's the same thing you hear when you're working on a fire plan. Like, well, wait a second, if I'm saving 50% of my income, but, you know, I can't go out to dinner and I like going out to dinner, right? You know, it's all about these small inconveniences, these small losses, but people in the fire community know, yeah, but the intentionality of taking control of your life and focusing more energy on the things that really matter far outweighs the inconvenience of, you know, not being able

to order out most nights during the week. And so, you know, I've been such a long-time follower of the fire movement that I'm sure some of these ideas influence my thinking. I mean, in some sense, I'm probably stealing some of the ideas that you guys have long known when it comes to sort of what you spend your money on and say that minimalist philosophy works just as well when you're thinking about investing your time into various digital pursuits. That absolutely makes sense. Within the fire movement, it's if you approach your expenses such that you are only buying the things that matter most and cutting away the fluff, that starts a chain reaction that then allows you ultimately to cut away work that doesn't matter, cut away that fluff, so that you can focus on work or other productive activities that do matter more.

So in that regard, there is this chain reaction where cutting fluff leads to the ability to cut more fluff. This is a similar dynamic. And sort of interestingly, one of the examples that helped me understand the value of analog leisure, for example, is that I was talking to Liz Thames, the, you know, Ms. Frugal ones. I said, you know, you're actually a really good example of, it's like a controlled experiment. What is it that human beings crave to do? So I say, here's someone who's young and energetic, but due to financial dependence,

has a lot of options about what her and Nate want to do with their time. So they have lots of options, like what's good. And also because they're involved in financial dependence, they're used to sort of the discipline pursuit of what's important. So let's use them as experiment to see, well, what did they do with their time? And they've invested a lot of it into these sort of high quality analog outdoor activities. Mr. Money Mustache does the same. What did he do?

Here's someone who's highly disciplined in the pursuit of what they like. It has a lot of free time. What is he doing with his time? Well, he's constantly building things and renovating things and learning how to weld. And so this was the other insight I got from the fire community is that there's this great case study of if you want to try to isolate. what are the type of things that help human beings thrive? And so, you know, the clear action that comes out of this community, it tends to be these

both socialization, like socializing, like log reform, socializing, like you see at these meetups and high-quality analog activities. So, you know, I guess I actually am stilling quite a bit from your community. Well, there's a natural connection between the notion of minimalism and the notion of financial independence. And digital minimalism, of course, is an expression of broader. minimalism. And minimalism really itself is the philosophy of focusing on what matters and letting go of what doesn't. And it's been very influential historically. I got reintroduced to the

sort of latest incarnation of the minimalism movement is the sort of online minimalism movement that started the early 21st century. So these are the online minimalist blogger. So at first I, sort of like Leo Babuda and Zinhabits. Leo was an early source of advice on my blog way back win and you have like Courtney Carver and Joshua Becker. And so you had this movement online. It was pretty disruptive. And then you got new figures like the minimalist, my friends, Joshua and Ryan, who have really done so much to take this idea and spread it very broadly in the culture.

And so for most of my adult life, I've sort of been seeped in this sort of minimalism 2.0 movement. And I've always thought fire is basically was just a natural extension of what was going on. I mean, it was taking minimalism. was getting a little bit more, here's a particular action-oriented case study. So it's not just about stuff. Let's think about minimalism in terms of expenditures. And once you do that, then suddenly you have these huge levers you can pull. And so the digital minimalism is like, okay, let's take the same philosophy and let's apply it to your digital life. And similarly, you start to get these

really big return. So yeah, I really agree with you that this is a, this less is more concept. It's not going away. It keeps coming back. And every time we find a new place to apply it, it tends to create really disruptive but really exciting results. And so this must be some sort of natural law, basically. There's something about this that makes it very effective every time it shows up. That makes a lot of sense. And it connects with what we talked about at the beginning of this conversation when we talked about the kind of similarities between the digital minimalist philosophy

and essentialism or the 80-20 principle, which again is this philosophy of ignoring the noise so that you can focus on the few things that produce outsized results, which can be applied in any arena of life. Right. Like essentialism is minimalism applied to your work. And so you're right. I mean, you can apply this idea, this 80-20 notion of focus on the things, as much energy as possible to the small number of things that are most important and be okay missing out

on the rest. It's so widely applicable. Yeah. And you're right. every time you apply it somewhere, it creates a community or creates a hit. I mean, you can find it, this is what the Roe was argued at Walden. You find it in sort of some agent Roman philosophy. You find it at Eastern wisdom traditions.

It's an idea that has legs. I guess I'll put it that way. Thank you so much, Cal. Is there anything else that you'd like to emphasize? I mean, I think the way I would summarize all of this is there's a lot of value to be gained when you take back control of your digital life and stop letting it control you. There might be a lot of ways to do this, but the one thing I've really learned studying this topic is that the small fixes, the tips, the tricks that just turning off notifications, the just New Year's resolution willpower

and I try to look at my screen less. It just really doesn't seem to work. The cultural forces and the technological forces driving you back to that screen are so strong that you need a big philosophy. And so if you're in the fire community, basically all I'm asking you to consider is this radical philosophy that you believe in and applied with such success to your finances and just test out what happens when you turn it towards your digital life as well. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much, Cal. Great.

Thank you, Paula. Where can people find you if they want to know more about you? Obviously, you've got your book, Digital Minimalism, your newest book. Where else can people find you? Not Twitter. Not Twitter. I've never had a social media account. It turns out that's allowed.

But I am a big fan of blogging. So if you go to Cal Newport.com, you know, I have a decade. or more than a decade at this point worth a blog post. And so that's a way to explore some of these ideas. And you can find my books anywhere where books are sold. Thank you so much, Cal. What are some of the key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Here are seven.

Number one, plan your how and your when of social media use. Let's assume, for the sake of example, that Facebook is a very useful tool in your life. It helps you keep in touch with distant friends and family members. It helps you gather recommendations and referrals. You can participate in educational forums, in group conversations. You can take part in networking activities. So it does have significant benefits in your life, but it also has the potential for distraction

because as you're scrolling through the news feed, you see these headlines that are like, you'll never guess with this adorable puppy had for lunch. And then you click on that article and then you go down this huge distraction spiral. and the next thing you know, 45 minutes of your life have gone by. So you don't, in this example, want to cut Facebook from your life completely, but you also don't want it to overtake your life. So what you want to plan is how to use it and when to use it. And conversely, how not to use it and when not to use it.

What a bitableness would do is they would say, well, I'm not just going to say, okay, I use Facebook now. I click on their phone 50 minutes a day on Facebook products like the average American user, they would say, okay, how and when am I going to use Facebook? And there they might say, well, of course I'm not going to have it on my phone. It's just going to be on my computer. I'm going to use the News Feed Eradicator plugin. So I'm not going to see any of these algorithmically selected articles that the app is trying to use to distract me.

And I check in in the evening every other day for about 15 minutes to see what's going on with my family. That's classic minimalism. So when you think about the how and the win and not just the what, you're able to take the cost of benefit ratio of these tools and push them decidedly in your advantage. It's like a real hack for getting a lot more out of the tools that the tools are getting out of you. By virtue of planning, the how and the when,

you put yourself into a position in which you get more out of the tools than the tools get out of you. Remember, your technology is there to serve you. Not the other way around. So if you feel beholden to your smartphone, then you need to turn the tables. So that's key takeaway number one. Key takeaway number two, being intentional is more important than any minor inconveniences that may arise. Intentionality trumps inconvenience.

And so this is one of the reasons why you shouldn't worry too much about, well, some bad things or inconveniences. will happen. There will be events I don't know about. There'll be maybe something I miss out on. I mean, there's, you know, whatever, a party I don't hear about or whatever it is, I mean, at almost any of these minimalist activities, you're probably putting on the table, when you, when you take something off your plate, you're putting on the table a potential inconvenience or missed opportunity. But an important principle is that living intentionally, saying I'm being in control of what matters in my life and how I'm best going to support it, in most context, This is going to return way more value in your life than what is lost to the inconveniences.

If you use social media platforms with intention, then you will miss out on some experiences. It's going to happen. Somebody might send you a message on Facebook that says, Hey, we're all having dinner in an hour. And you're not going to see that message until a week later. And that is okay. Accept that these minor inconveniences will appear in your life. And that is the trade-off for the time, the energy, and the attention that you reclaim.

The benefit outweighs the cost. So that's key takeaway number two. Key takeaway number three. Digital minimalism is the art of attention management. Attention management is a good way of encapsulating what it is that was starting to make people concerned. It was not this idea that, okay, this app was useless or that this, this tool I use is strictly wrong. Like, it's not like cigarettes or drugs or something where it's just clear I shouldn't be doing

this and I am. So their issue was not that, hey, this is useless or this is bad. Or even that my time spent engaging with this tool is bad in the moment. What they were worried about is I'm spending more time that I know is useful and more time that I know is healthy on my screens and all these devices. And the reason that's a cost is because that's taking time and attention away from things you know are more valuable. And that's where these things really start to have a net negative impact on your life, right?

You have to zoom out. It's not in this moment when I'm looking at an Instagram photo, is that terrible? No, it's not. But if I'm looking at Instagram photos an hour, two hours a day, and it's keeping me away from paying attention to my kid during bath time, well, now you start to see like, okay, the net cost here is negative because I only have so much time and attention and I'm spending less and less on the things I really know are valuable. Social media companies are part of what's known as the attention economy, meaning that their asset is the attention that they have from their users. And they sell access to that attention to the companies who run ads on their platforms. And that's okay. You know, it's, it is wonderful and helpful to pay attention to a curated and cultivated selection of social media feeds.

that provide high educational or inspirational value. I can say without a doubt that there are many blogs, podcast, Instagram feeds, social media feeds that have improved my life for the better. They've taught me new ways of thinking. They've taught me new information. They've kept me motivated and inspired. Those things are great,

but absent-mindedly scrolling is not. There's a distinction. And so if you apply a greater degree, of curation to your use of technology, you are taking charge of your attention. So this is a way in which you can be deliberate about what you pay attention to. Remember, there are resources that you need to manage. Money is a resource to manage. Time is a resource to manage. And your energy and your attention are also limited resources to manage. So that is key takeaway number three. Key takeaway Number 4. Don't worry about what you might be missing out on.

Getting away from like sort of low quality, high intensity, engineered content, the slow-medy move that says you should just have really high-quality, very carefully curated, high-quality sources of really good information about things you care about, that you slowly consume. Maybe you sit down with a really good newspaper and take time over a cup of coffee or on Sunday, you've curated the best articles from three magazines you really respect and you go to the coffee shop and read them one by one. And so that's like the slow media movement. But just more generally, this notion of slowness really does dovetail with minimalism, which is take the things you know are valuable, do them really, really well. And don't worry so much about what you're

missing out. FOMO, the fear of missing out, is not a good reason for decision making. Everything has a trade-off, everything comes with a cost. The question is, merely, does the benefit outweigh the cost? One philosophy that I think helps create a mental model for this framework for asking questions is the slow movement. Because the slow movement is a philosophy that prizes fewer but better experiences. So the slow travel movement, for example, values visiting fewer countries, but lingering for a long longer period of time in each nation. So rather than visit six different European countries over the span of a month, you might go to only one country and spend the whole month there. And rather than worrying about the fact that you are quote unquote missing out on seeing

the tourist sightseeing sites of those other five countries, you instead revel in the fact that you are absorbing these subtle nuances of the one country that you're spending that full month in. So that's the slow travel movement. The slow food movement, as we discussed in this episode, is a movement that values eating a handcrafted, carefully selected array of choice, real foods, rather than just stuffing your face with convenience foods. And you don't worry about the fact that you're missing out on Twinkies and Little Debbie snack cakes because what you gain is so much better than what you miss. And so this philosophy of digital minimalism

is very closely tied to the slow movement. It advocates indulging in a carefully chosen selection of high quality social media feeds, games, apps, the things that bring the greatest amount of value to your life. You indulge in that, you enjoy it, and then you ignore everything else.

The buzz, the noise, the distraction. So that's key takeaway number four. Key takeaway number five, smartphones may have killed solitude. So what ubiquitous high-speed wireless internet and the smartphone revolution allowed us to do for the first time in our history is get rid of all solitude in our day, which is something we were never able to do before. Solitude is the time in which you have no other input. It's a time for reflection in which you process the inputs that you've taken in throughout the day. So if you are alone but you're listening to a podcast, you are not in solitude. If you're hiking alone, listening to an audiobook, that's technically not solitude, even if you are the only human being on that hiking trail.

If you are sitting home alone, but you're reading Twitter, you're not in solitude. You're reading other people's thoughts. Now, it's great to take in other ideas, other thoughts. That's how we learn. It's how we grow. But it's also important to set aside some time every day for reflection on these ideas. And because of smartphones, it is now possible for us to spend our entire lives without any solitude even if we are alone. We can spend a full weekend going camping by ourselves, but not be in solitude. So remember to take some time for reflection, sometimes. truly quiet time so that you can process all of the inputs that you've learned and heard throughout the day. That's key takeaway number five, and key takeaway number six is an action item that can help you achieve this. But something I think is useful is to just in most days have at least multiple occurrences where you're doing something without a phone nearby.

As Cal says, to bring solitude back into your life, engage in at least one activity, per day without your phone. You can keep your phone in your glove compartment. You can keep it nearby in case there's an emergency, but don't compulsively take it out. So for example, don't check your phone. I did this the other day, actually. I was sitting at the gate at the airport waiting for my flight to board, and I resisted the urge to check my phone. I sat there at the gate for my flight and just sat there and looked around and people watched. Try bringing little examples like that into your life. Finally, key takeaway number seven,

the philosophy of digital minimalism and the philosophy of the fire movement share a lot in common. Fire really is a minimalist movement, right? I mean, it's about getting down to what's important and try to see how can I maximize the time I spend on this. I mean, this is really one of the big motivations behind financial independence is that,

You cut out of your life all these expenditures that aren't really directly and aggressively helping to things that matter boast. And by doing so, you're able to gain this financial independent so that you can really invest more time and energy into the things that really matter. If you save an aggressive percentage of your income, you will encounter some minor inconveniences. You'll cook at home more often rather than ordering takeout. And that is minorly inconvenient. You may vacation by camping rather than staying at first.

five-star luxury hotels, and that has some minor inconveniences associated with it. But those tiny inconveniences pale in comparison to the advantages that come from having a turbocharged savings rate. And so both the fire philosophy and the concept of digital minimalism share the core belief that you should focus on what matters most and be okay with missing out on the rest. Even if the stuff that you are quote-unquote missing out on is stuff that the rest of society thinks of as normal. Forge your own normal. Those are seven key takeaways from this conversation with Cal Newport. If you enjoy today's episode, I want you to think of somebody in your life you think either checks their phone too much, maybe they're always on

Facebook or somebody in your life who has complained about the fact that they feel tethered to their phone all the time. They feel like an employee of their smartphone. And I'd like you to please share this episode with that person. You can send them the show notes at afford anything.com slash episode 176. That also contains a player for this podcast episode. Or you can just share this episode with them directly. We're on Spotify. We're on YouTube. We're on every major podcast player, so let them know how they can access this. If you enjoyed today's episode, please also hit the subscribe button or the follow button in whatever podcast playing app you're using.

That way you won't miss any future upcoming episodes. And finally, please leave us a review if you go to afford anything.com slash iTunes. That'll redirect you to a page on the Apple Podcast website where you can leave a review for the show. Thank you so much for tuning in. my name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast. I'll catch you next week. Do you have any questions for me? So is it true as I learned out of your podcast that I need $30,000 a month to support my parents when they retire? Because I'm getting pretty worried.

Thu. Thu. Thu. Thu. Thin. Thank you.