Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Can I Be a Digital Minimalist in 2026? | Monday Advice

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

Back in 2019, Cal published one of the first books arguing that we rethink our personal relationship with online tools. Can his advice still work in an age of TikTok and ChatGPT? In today’s episode, Cal dives deep into the r/DigitalMinimalism sub-reddit to see what advice contemporary digital minimalists are following and offers his own thoughts and recommendations.    Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3U3sTvo   Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia   (0:00) Can I be a Digital Minimalist in 2026? (39:13) How can I capture notes if I’m land lining? (40:39) For cognitive fitness, is it better to be handwriting or typing? (42:07) A note on art museum visits (43:46) Reactions to an article about AI and software engineering (49:39) What the Deep Life really is (50:46) What Cal read (52:08) What Cal watched   Books:  The Jewish Way to a Good Life (Rabbi Shira Stuntman)   Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at https://peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeNNYMJwZtI https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalminimalism/ https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalminimalism/comments/1tv0k77/for_the_past_2_years_ive_been_living_like_its_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalminimalism/comments/1to631b/three_years_of_digital_minimalism_the_rewiring_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalminimalism/comments/1ty27lz/limited_my_14f_screen_time_to_3_hours_a_day_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalminimalism/comments/1tm9rce/where_do_you_still_find_human_curation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalminimalism/comments/1txskw9/deciding_once_instead_of_every_morning_is_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalminimalism/comments/1u74dob/ran_a_30day_intentional_solitude_experiment/ https://www.normaltech.ai/p/why-ai-hasnt-replaced-software-engineers   Thanks to our Sponsors:   https://www.vanta.com/deepquestions https://www.drinklmnt.com/deep https://www.expressvpn.com/deep https://www.wealthfront.com/deep   Cal Newport is not a Wealthfront client.   Thanks to Jesse Miller for production and mastering, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Nate Mechler for research and newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back in 2019, I published a book called Digital Minimalism. It argued that we should be much more intentional about what digital technologies we use and how we use them. Now, when I started working on the idea for this book, we were still in the tail end of that golden age of social media, where we still saw these devices as offering a societal good, a sort of inevitable evolution of the town square that would ultimately, empower us all, but by the time the book actually came out, people were beginning to get fed up, which turned out to be great timing for me. That book became my first New York Times bestseller, and it led to opportunities that I never would have previously imagined for myself. But here's the thing. A lot has changed since 2019. Back then, social media meant Twitter,

Facebook, and that old version of Instagram where you mainly just followed creators that you cared about. Today's social media by contrast has become a race to the bottom of the brainstem as every service is trying to copy the highly addictive algorithmically optimized short form strategy of TikTok. Existing global conversation platforms like Twitter now called X have given up any illusions of being a global town square and are really now just serving up, I don't know, straight up gonzow garbage for the most part. And then there's AI, which wasn't on my radar at all in 2019, but today is increasingly threatening to corrupt or co-opt every last occasion we might actually try to use our brains for original thinking. This all points towards a key question.

Is it still possible to be a digital minimalist in 2026? And if so, what has to change about this philosophy to keep it relevant? Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to go searching for some answers. All right, here's the plan. It turns out that there's a popular subreddit dedicated to all things, digital minimalism. So we recently read through a bunch of recent posts seeking those that describe specific suggestions or experiments that people have tried within the last few months to better embrace digital minimalism in our current moment. We ended up surfacing six interesting practical suggestions. And I'm going to go through these one by one. And because I'm a professor and I can't

help it, I will give each a letter grade to indicate how much I agree with it. And then once we're done reviewing the best suggestions from other people, I'll present my own proposal. I've been thinking a lot recently about what would I add? If I republish this book today, what would I put in a new chapter? And I will explain to you today my current thinking on what I would add to digital minimalism. All right. So if you feel like the time is right for you to declare independence over your devices and take back control of your life,

then this episode is for you. As always, I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. All right, let's dive in here. As mentioned, the goal is to review the six most interesting

pieces of practical advice we discovered reading through recent post on the digital minimalism subreddit. I'm going to grade each piece of advice as follows. An A means that I like it and heavily recommend it. A B means that the advice has some good elements, but there might be some other aspects that I might tweak or improve before putting it into action. C means I'm indifferent.

It might help, it might not. It's probably not going to hurt, but wouldn't it be something I would rush to recommend? And then a D would mean stay away. All right, that'll be our letter grading scale. Once we've gone through our six suggestions, I'll then give you my missing chapter. my own missing chapter for digital minimalism. All right, so let's jump in here. The first strategy I want to talk about from the digital minimalism subreddit is to use

90s-era technology. Let me read here from the post. I was born in 2004, got a small gist of how it was to live in that period, and couldn't simply forget about it. For my main and only mobile phone, I'm currently using a 2006 Nokia 1110, and I'm planning on having a landline installed. I own a PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2, a CRT TV, a mini hi-fi.

I burn my own games, music, and data on CDs. I daily carry a Sony CD Walkman, currently writing this at work for my Sony laptop running Windows 7. All right, so here we have someone who is embracing these single-purpose technologies, higher friction, but less distracting technologies,

of a past era. Now, I got interested. What were people going to say about this? So I jumped into this thread to read some of the other comments. All right. So just let's go a little deeper here. Someone asked what he does in his spare time without modern distraction advice is like a smartphone. Here's what the original poster said.

I do sometimes do nothing. But then again, I have my CDs and cassettes. I love to read books and old magazines or current newspaper, so I rarely have to do nothing. All right, then someone else asked him if he was, quote, happy with this lifestyle. All right. He kind of gave a revealing response here. Let's look at this. My family, of course, does not support nor understand it.

Ha ha. But thankfully, I live on my own with my wife, who also doesn't understand it, but she's patient with me and supports it anyways. And it's safe to say that I've sadly cut off any past friends that I did have. That's why I'm posting to Reddit, hoping to find someone to talk to. As for the peers, they don't care much. like it that way. I don't like to boast about my life because it suits me. It suits me, but not everybody, and that's okay. All right. So this is kind of an interesting collection of advice here. Here's what I like. It acknowledges that the technology you use shapes your experience of life, right? So if you change the technology in your life, it changes your experience of life.

That was a key idea in my book, Digital Minimalism, and it's a key idea for any of you out there who are grappling with the distracted world to keep in mind. You don't have your life that you live. And then there's these like various tools that you use to do things, kind of on the side. The tool shape your experience of your life. If you're using 90s era technology, your day-to-day experience is going to feel very different than if you're using all of the modern 2026 technology.

What I don't like is it seems like this poster has pushed his commitment to 90s era's tools so far that it's also creating negative externalities in his life. He's losing friends. He doesn't talk to his family. His wife thinks he's weird. He's walking around with a Sony Disc Man and cassettes,

which I think is awesome, but is a little bit eccentric. It feels like there's a political statement in here, more so than just what is giving me the best balance of pros and cons to get the deepest possible life. So this is, he's probably taken an idea and pushing it into a identity, as opposed to just trying to say,

what's the best configuration for my life. So, you know, in the end, I'm going to grade this, a B. I think you should be willing to use simpler, higher friction technologies if they can bring psychological benefits that outweigh the inconvenience cost, but you don't necessarily want to go as far as this individual did, be a little bit more

selective in how you do it. All right, that's good advice, which was not in my original book. All right, second strategy we found in the subreddit, replace social media with reading. I'm going to read from the original post here. During lockdown, I realized I had a very unhealthy relationship with technology. I was spending huge chunks of my day on my phone and laptop. I was getting into heated political discussions on Twitter as seeking validation on Instagram,

scrolling on reels and shorts, and refreshing news apps constantly. I read digital minimalism by Cal Newport in 2023 and took some concrete steps to fix things. I did everything you'd expect, like setting time limits, carrying my phone on my rucksack,

only using desktop sites. Some of it worked, some of it didn't. But what really worked was entirely cutting myself off from Twitter and Instagram for six months. I fixed other habits too. Reading became my default,

boredom-filling activity. I begin to carry a notebook around. I tried a dump foam for a while. I switched out the phone in my pocket with an e-reader. Where I'm at now is kind of through the other side of tech addiction. I reinstalled Instagram a year ago and moved to blue sky. Neither really appealed much to me, and I've simply deleted both again. I deleted news apps about three months ago. I read about 15 to 100 pages a day now. I write every day. I notice a lot more. I feel more engaged in my real life and maintain a smaller number of important friendships. I can focus for longer periods. All right, so if we're going to summarize what's going on here, it wasn't just that he left a lot of these social media platforms that were causing him angst, but he replaced. I'm going to use his terminology here. He replaced his default boredom-filling activity with something else, in this case, reading, and he's reading a lot and getting a lot of benefits out of it. Well, I like this idea, first of all, that he's focusing not on the device, but the things you're using on the device. He tried going to a dumb phone, and then he kind of went back again, and you realize the issue was not the phone. It was the social media. It was reading. books on there.

Stop using social media, get an e-reader. The phone itself was not as much of a problem. I like this idea that eventually, and this is a key point, a sustained declutter of this type will rewire your brain. And the appeal of things like social media is going to dampen once you've downregulated that response that you trained yourself to expect, this sort of stimulation response from these tools. And as a result, after he had downregulated this reward center, when he put blue sky back on his

phone when he started using what else you use here, Instagram, he was like, this is not that interesting to me and he just deleted it again. So it takes time to wire your brain into these more addictive cycles. You can rewire them back out of them. I really like his core suggestion of having a new default activity because when you feel bored, especially when you're still down regulating those systems, you need something that's going to give you a reward. Otherwise, you're just sitting there white knuckling it. And reading is fantastic because it also is making you more cognitively fit. it's a really sort of completely encompassing or totalized experience. Your whole brain gets involved.

So I like a lot about this. What did I not like? I don't know, going back to social media. I mean, it only lasted a little bit and then he's like, I don't need this anymore, but I don't know. Why tempt fate? Instagram, TikTok, they'll be just fine without you. The world will still tilt on its axis.

You don't even need to mess around with that. So what great am I going to give this piece of advice? This is getting an A. If you follow that exact advice, your life will 100% be better. leave social media and read instead. There's no way you're not going to enjoy your life more. All right, let's take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible. Now, what's the one thing in business that's spreading as fast as AI? AI risk. Every new tool your team signs up for every vendor that turns on AI features, every new integration.

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For more information, please see the episode description. Terms and conditions apply. All right. Let's get back to the show. All right. Strategy number three. You can tell from the title this is very pragmatic. Let an angry teenager control your phone.

You guess you just go find one on the street. Okay, this is yours now. Let me read you the post here. Let me give you a little more context. I'm doom scrolling way too much. So I bought a brick and set up schedules, but then I just go scan and unlock it. Just, you know, a brick is like the,

that's the fob. Have you seen that before? You kind of talked about it. Yeah. It's like a physical device you have to touch to your phone to unlock it basically. So if you put it in another room, you're like,

oh, I have to go get it and come back and touch my phone and it gives you some more friction. I first saw a brick with the crew.

I was filming a segment for the minimalist new documentary and the film crew, one of the members of the film crew showed me as brick. I remember that.

It was pretty cool. All right, back to the Reddit post here. So I gave my teenage daughter my brick. I was feeling, I was feaning today. Do you know what feigning is?

like desiring is that I think so is that jinzy speak kind of like feaning for I've never heard it nicotine or something never heard it

interesting okay I was feaning today and asked her to unlock my phone obviously she won it so it worked piss your teen off with limiting their screen time

and allow the angry team to get drunk with power over control of your own screen time and now we're all miserable lull for real though we've got some kinks to work out but I have high hopes

this will be better for all of us in the lunch long run. All right. So the angry teen was his team. That makes more sense. All right, what I like about this, taking willpower out of the equation makes sense to me.

I mean, if your plan is to white knuckle it and say, I am feeling there's a very strong motivation to pick up the phone because my short-term reward center is firing off votes for that action furiously. And I'm going to resist that. Good luck. You might for a little bit. But if you're tired, you have something else going on, you've been resisting for a while, you're eventually going to pick up that phone.

So by giving the control of his phone to his teenage daughter, willpower left the equation and made it much more likely for him to actually succeed here. There's some things here I don't like, though. First of all, there's signs of a more sort of serious addiction here. Like, you're really having a hard time staying away from this phone. You're giving control to someone else. I mean, this feels a little bit like you're giving the liquor key, the key to your liquor cabinet to your daughter and like, man, I'm drinking too much.

You take this key, don't let me drink anymore. You'd be like, well, this is like an issue that, like, there's a bigger substance abuse problem here and you maybe need to get that stuff out of your house. get some more professional help. It's not your daughter's job to manage your addiction, and it just reinforces the idea to her that these are very powerful, desirable things, and that we should and will be using them all the time unless there's sort of extreme circumstances to try to get in the way of that. I would, if I was you, A, maybe seek some of this more like structured help for digital

addictions. Go back and listen to my episode from last month with Anna Limkeye about how that works with dopamine systems and support groups. as part of that they'll probably get you off of using the social media channels altogether but have a way to help you figure out what damage they're doing to make that more sustainable. The way I would deal with my daughter and her screen time is I would landline and I'd force my daughter to do the same. I'd say this is the new household rule. For phones that we pay for, like your phone, it's not your phone, it's ours, we're lending

it to you, we pay for, it's not your phone, not your property. There's nothing in the Constitution that says 14-year-olds get an unalienable right to their Snapchat account on their family's iPhone plan. When we're at home, the phones are plugged in in the kitchen. It's called landlining. If you need to look something up, you go in the kitchen and look it up. If there's a text conversation, you're going to stand there in the kitchen to do the text conversation.

If a phone call comes in, you'll hear it ring and you'll go into the kitchen to actually take that call. So anything else you're doing at home or your daughter's doing at home watching TV at a meal reading, there is no phone in your hand to be drawing your attention. And that's just the house rules. have to do it too. You're doing it. They do not have the option of ignoring that rule and having their phone with them, you know, if they want to. They don't, but you have to do it too. So I think it's a way that you both could find some improvement here. So overall, I'm going to give this strategy a C.

It's cute and cruelly effective, but I think it's a detour from what you really need to do, which is to more aggressively deal with the underlying addictions here. All right, strategy number four, prioritize human curation. Let me read from the post. I'm interested in where people still discover things to human taste rather than feeds or recommendation engines. This could be books, music, films, art, places, food, ideas, events, local culture, creative work. Where do you still find recommendations to feel genuinely human? What makes them different from algorithmic recommendations?

All right, so this strategy is proposed more as a question in this post, but it's kind of clear what the underlying strategy is that's being implicated. which is to seek out places where content is being curated and recommended by other humans and not algorithms. So I looked at some of the replies to this question because he posed this advice as a question. People wrote in with a lot of interesting suggestions about where you can still find human curation for content instead of algorithmic curation. I'm going to read you some of the responses from farther down in this thread. All right. Someone said, your local newspaper is probably a good place to start. Some of my local newspapers recommend restaurants, shows, concert, art, pop-ups, books, movies, etc. It's likely a staff writer doing the recommendation. What makes them different from algorithmic recommendations is that they're usually more interesting. Humans are weird, and we have such different tastes. It's cool to hear from other people about what they enjoy. That's not something the algorithm can ever really replace. Someone else said libraries are an interesting one. Another person said cultural events.

are a great opportunity. Someone else said, spend a lot of time at the local library and local bookstores. One of the bookstore sells blind date with the book things.

So I found a lot of gyms. I wouldn't have usually picked up through those. Our local bookstores, people book here in Tacoma Park does that. The books wrapped in newspaper. You don't know what it is.

You just buy it and they've curated it and you just read it. Other people say, I do books by the mail with librarians pick and go to antique mall. Someone else said podcasts for sure.

My favorite podcasters are always having an interesting guest on and I get into their work too. as someone else said, our university radio station as volunteer DJs and a mission to play community programming. It has everything from language programs, genre specials, and local bands. All right, those are

all really good suggestions. So what do I like about this advice? I think human curation often is much better than algorithmic curation, right? Because the latter algorithmic curation is trying to build the model of your responses and just to show you the things it knows for sure

are going to give you a good positive reward response. Those can be things that are very similar to things you've seen recently in light with some random exploration thrown in there. You're much more likely to find whole new categories of things you didn't even know about but might like by following chains of human curation. So I think that's important. We get more pleasure out of things we have reason to consume and enjoy, right? So knowing that there's someone out here who really recommended this song or movie means

us as social beings get more satisfaction out of it, we're willing to take more risk and go through things that aren't just like immediately pleasurable in the moment. moment. I also have argued for a long time that human curation leads to interpersonal webs of trust, which is important. It impedes radicalization and other antisocial behavior that we see online. This is a key point, which I'll just say very briefly. But webs of trust are important, right? If it's, okay, I know this person and trust them, they recommended that person. This person's recommending a movie or they have an opinion on something. I'm going to take that seriously. There's a chain of trust. I trust another.

person I know. That person trusts this person. There's a chain of interpersonal trust. And because these chains are their origins, their first links are people that you've met or known or have reason to like or trust, they lead you to places that, in other words, are more trusted and they keep you away from sort of weird places. Human curation also moves more away from the homogenized interfaces you see on things like social media platforms where everything looks the same, every tweet looks the exact same, whether it's from an esteemed music critic. or from an AI slot bot or from, you know, some Ku Klux Klan member in a basement somewhere. It all looks the exact same.

Whereas when you move away into like the more messy human world, there's all sorts of indicators that we're good at picking up of who this person is and how they believe. Are we on the same wavelength or not? And you're like, you know, this guy who's trying to recommend this book is wearing a clan hood and talks in a weird way. And his website's kind of messy. Like, I'm not going to listen to that. So you get rid of this sort of homogenizing. a flattening of context

that you get in social media as well. So I really like human curation, webs of trust. I think a more human internet is actually a much more, I think it's less radical, safer internet, it's more interesting internet.

I just think it's better. All right. What don't I like? I don't know. Not much. I think human curation is great. Except for libraries. I think we should start

to hate libraries, Jesse, like in the TV show, Parks and Rec, where they just have a hate of libraries. And I'll tell you why. I want people to buy my books. I don't want them.

to borrow my books. I want to pay for my books. Even though you go to the library a decent amount, don't you? I do. I know. I like libraries, but I feel like I should dislike them. Be like, no, you should have multiple copies of books and then if you lose one, you just buy another copy. I mean, libraries buy a lot of copies of books too because you have to stock a bunch.

But yeah, whenever my wife's like, no, the library is great because you don't have to spend all this money and you can hand it back. I was like, no, support authors. Buy as many books as you can. Full retail, hardcover. All right, but I'll give that grade in A. All right, strategy number five. remove discipline from the equation. Let me read from the post here.

It's not about using your phone less in some abstract way. It's about whether you're choosing it or just reaching for it on autopilot. And for me, the morning was always pure autopilot. Grab phone, scroll. Then suddenly 40 minutes are gone and I haven't had a single thought of my own yet. The thing is, I tried to fix it the willpower way for ages. Leave it across the room. Tell myself I won't check it until 9, et cetera.

And I lasted about two days every time I tried. What finally worked was just making the difference. decision once. I have my phone lock overnight now, so I physically can't get in first thing. And really, that's been so much easier than trying to resist it every single morning because there's no resisting involved. The choice is already made. I wake up. The phone's just not an option for a while and the morning is mine. Genuinely, the biggest shift has been realizing how much of the discipline stuff I was failing at could just be removed as a decision rather than fought as a habit. All right, so I think we can generalize this advice by saying when it comes to

controlling your digital habits, just try to take discipline out of your digital minimalism equation as much as possible, right? If you have to apply willpower to resist an otherwise compelling activity, you will fail eventually. It's draining. Like you'll succeed sometimes, but you're not going to be able to succeed with that consistently. So finding ways to avoid that, I think, is important. The name some other examples, landlining like I talked about works. The phone's just not with you. It's in the kitchen. So when you're watching TV, you're having dinner. You can't easily grab it. That's much easier than trying to resist grabbing it. Using strong string control software like a brick or giving your partner the access to your screen time and they have the pin code. That works too. You're like,

I just don't have an option of using this right now. I mean, like, unless like I really got in it and tried to hack to security grid. Taking social media or any other application where they make money off your attention off your phone also helps. You're just like making the decision for you at once as opposed to having to resist clicking on those apps every time you're there. So things I like about this is that I just agree that will-powered-based restrictions will eventually fail. How long it takes depends on other factors, but they will eventually fail. Maybe some things I don't like is that it's kind of like putting elaborate locks on your junk food cabinet. I mean, eventually you want to just permanently and sustainably change your eating habits,

not just have more rules in place to make it harder for you to get access to the junk food. So this is really like I think a first step towards digital minimalism and not a permanent solution. So grade-wise, I will give this a B. This definitely helps, but it's not by itself a full answer. All right, let's do one last piece of advice from the discussion boards here before we get to my missing chapter. Our final strategy, schedule intentional solitude. And let me read from the post here. Most digital minimalism experiments focus on screen time as the target.

I flipped it. For 30 days, I scheduled block. of completely alone time, no phone, no background noise, no productive activity, just sitting with my own thoughts, and let screen time be whatever side effect it was going to be. Here are the results after 30 days. Screen time dropped from around 6.2 hours a day to 1.4 hours a day, and this was the side effect, not the goal. Time to fall asleep dropped from 45 plus minutes to roughly 10. A low-grade anxiety I'd basically normalized was mostly gone by week three. What surprised me most, the hard part wasn't avoiding the phone. It was sitting with boredom long enough,

for it to turn into actual thought. We've engineered boredom out of our lives so completely that most of us have forgotten what's on the other side of it. Following a small framework for structuring these solitude blocks made the difference between this feeling restorative versus just feeling like forced isolation. Naturally, I was fascinated, so he referenced he had a small framework for structuring solitude blocks. He elaborated on it farther down in the thread where he said, the short version is that

I stopped treating solitude blocks as time to fill and started treating them as time to not fill on purpose with a couple of constraints around it. The fix for me was shorter blocks, 20 to 25 minutes not open-ended, with literally nothing to do, no phones, no chores just sitting. It feels unbearable for the first few minutes, then something shifts. All right, I think there's some key inversions in here on the digital declutter that I proposed in my book because it doesn't directly focus on your technology. It instead focuses on what technology helps us escape.

And by doing so, you end up spending less time on technology. So it gets you alone with your own thoughts, the thing that we try to get away from with our devices. And once we make peace with that, we don't feel as compelled to try to flee it. We don't flee boredom. We don't flee being away with our own thoughts. And I like this, right? I think boredom cues are one of the major drivers to pick up a phone for simple distractions. So if you become more comfortable with boredom, the power of those cues diminishes and your phone becomes less desirable.

That's exactly what we saw here in this example. And as I write in digital minimalism, I have a whole chapter on this. Solitude, that is time alone with your own thoughts is critical to personal development. And if you have no solitude in your life on a regular basis, it creates anxiety, which is exactly what this person responded is that when they started putting solitude back, time alone with their own thoughts, their low-grade background anxiety went away. I get into that in the book. If you never have time just to be alone with your own thoughts and process what's going on in your life,

you will be anxious. Your brain needs it. it gets exhausted without it. I think something I don't like about this advice is that, you know, boredom is a strong cue, and I think about it in the same context as other strong cues like thirst. It's not intrinsically valuable on its own. It's valuable because of what it pushes us towards. So if you're thirsty, there's not a value just in being thirsty.

The value is in drinking water, and this is a drive that drives you to this valuable thing. Well, when you're bored, I don't think the boredom itself is intrinsically valuable. we feel boredom because it drives us to go do meaningful activity, and it's the meaningful activity that's actually the reward. So I think, you know, this advice is spending 20 minutes being bored does get you more comfortable with boredom and being alone with your own thoughts, but I would elaborate it, and I would ride the boredom wave. When you feel bored, aim that boredom towards slower, more meaningful activities,

and let that fulfill the sense of boredom. close that habit Q response loop. Now what's going to happen is you'll grow a new reward circuit here in a short-term reward center that when you feel that boredom, competing with the reward that looking at your phone will give you is, oh, if I go to a slow, meaningful activity, there's an even deeper reward I'm going to get, and you get more and more used to going and doing things that are actually rewarding

as opposed to distracting. So I don't think it should just be sitting with the boredom. You need to ride that boredom to see what it's pushing us towards, which is meaningful activity. All right, so I'm going to give this a B. I'm okay with this idea, but I would elaborate on it and add after getting used to boredom,

writing the boredom wave to meaningful activity. All right, there we go. That's the advice we found. Jesse, no D's. No D's. Yeah, people are doing pretty well out there. No D's so far. Have you watched a Raffa documentary on Netflix?

I don't think so. Rafael Nodal. The tennis player? Yeah. No. There was a big... He's a tall. That would be my documentary.

It would cut to me as a talking head. I'd be like, yeah, he's pretty tall. And then credits. There was a big component about how you had serious anxiety for like an extended period of time. Yeah, the sports is so anxiety producing. You couldn't like, always felt like you were choking. Yeah.

I can imagine all that pressure. I mean, athletes just get used to anxiety. Like, that's just, like, part of it is you're going to feel anxiety, and that's part of like people in plays do as well. Athletes, just like relief pitchers and stuff like that. And you just sort of get used to it after a while. All right. So let's talk about what I would add.

What missing chapter would I add into the book if I was republishing it today? There's three things. I mean, this shifts. I was thinking about it last week. There's three things I think I for sure would want to put into a new chapter in digital minimalism. One, I would deal directly with AI. and I would say be wary of the diversionary allure of AI.

And I would say long conversations with a machine is really a form of emotional fraud. If you're having a conversational interaction with a chatbot, your brain is simulating another mind on the other side that doesn't actually exist. And that's doing weird things to you. You're interacting with another mind, with all the social cues and social psychodynamics to go with such interactions without another human mind on the other place. And I'd say, just don't do that. It's not your friend.

Do not have relationships. with AI. I would also say with respect to AI that writing is good for your cognitive fitness. Don't fear it's hardness. Yeah, it feels bad to look at a bank page and have to feel it. And so it's tempting to say, can't AI just do this writing for me and I'll just polish it a little bit and I'll avoid that feeling of strain. But I'm telling you, don't avoid that strain. It's like feeling the slight burn in your legs when you take the stairs instead of the escalator. It's good for you. Don't let AI write for you. And certainly don't pass off text as if you wrote it if AI wrote it. If you're using AI to put together information to send to someone, it should be

in a clear sort of mechanical format, not trying to simulate a human bullet point list or sales of a spreadsheet. Finally, that AI portion of this missing chapter would say only use AI tools for specific purposes where the benefits are clear. You are not part of the marketing department for these AI companies. You do not have to figure out an experiment how to make this useful. If you're not a computer programmer, you do not need to be learning how to use coding agents right now and command line interfaces to try to 10x your productivity. Use AI where there's clear benefits, not as just like a general substrate of your information ecosystem.

All right. The second thing I would have in this missing chapter that was not in the original book, which is you might need help unwinding your digital addictions and that's okay. I think my interview with Anna Limke from, I don't know, I think a month ago or something like that, was very clarifying because she was saying, look, These different addictions, substance or behavioral, they have a similar thing they do. They downregulate dopamine receptors enough that it becomes hard to find motivation or engagement or even just get back to a sense of normal without the hyperstimuli, right?

So if you have like optimized TikTok videos, this can down, and you're looking at these when you feel a little bit of boredom or to escape bad thoughts or to try to feel better when you're tired or things are otherwise going hard, they're so highly stimulating that it downregulates your dopamine and you need more and more of this like more intense stimulation just to get back to normal and now you can't put your phone away you feel terrible about it it's hard to overcome that you got to you have to change the the receptors there over time you have to take away the stimuli you have to build up new stimuli and you might need some help this is not necessarily something that you can just white knuckle it's not just a character flaw that you should just bucket up in response you should read her book dopamine nation for more on the this, but in our interview, she talked about the growing IT addiction-oriented versions of AA is a big thing, and professional therapy with addiction specialists can really help you walk through this. So that, I don't think this idea was as, you know, it was a very controversial idea when I was

working on this book. I talked a little bit about addiction. A lot of people really wanted to separate behavioral from substance addictions, and I've been more convinced now. There's a lot of people who need some help, and that's fine. That's not a failing. It's your brain has gotten rewired in a severe way. you don't have to just try to fix this on your own.

The third practical suggestion I would put in the book. So in the practical suggestions part, I'd put landlining. I talk about it so much now. That would just be like my table stakes in digital minimalism. Your smartphone is plugged in in the kitchen when you're home. Just do that. And then we'll talk about everything else. But just do that as you start this book.

And then later in the book, we'll get back to like what you should do next. It has such, it's so simple. It has such an effect. It's something the whole family can do. And now you're helping your entire family, including critically your teenage kids, repair their relationship with their brain. So I think landlighting would have a major position if I added a new chapter to the book.

So there we go. Can you be a digital minimalist in 2026? Yes, you can. But we have to keep evolving our suggestions and advice to keep up with modern technology. I want to take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible.

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Let's hear what our audience has to say. On these Monday advice episodes, we'd like to open up our inbox and read your messages. If you have a question or a response or something interesting to share with us, send it the podcast at calnewport.com and we'll take a look. All right, Jesse, what's our first message today?

our first messages from Martin, who has a question about landlining. Well, there we go. We were just talking about that. All right, Martin says, I started landlining, great term, after hearing about it on the podcast. It's been a great experience so far. The only thing I struggle with is how to capture quick notes while I'm about the house, like adding something to the grocery list or making a note for some repair or other chore. I used to quickly add those into my phone, but now I might need to run down to the kitchen

or carry around a notebook all the time. Any recommendations? I have three thoughts here. Yeah, thought number one. Yeah, keep a notebook by the phone in your kitchen. It's really not that hard to have to walk down there when you want to remember something. It's probably less often than you think that you have a thought. And hey, you get a little bit of exercise there.

That would be the easiest. Number two, you can create a, keep a field note style notebook in your pocket. So one of these like sort of small portable notebooks with a pins clipped on is in your pocket. You take notes on that throughout the day and you can process it when you're, I would say when you do your daily time block plan each morning, go through that notebook and get those notes into wherever they need to actually go. Or you could go 2005 mode

and maybe have something like a hipster PDA. This was Merlin Mann's idea. Basically, it's index cards with a binder clip. Put it in your pocket, and it's a good way to keep track of information that you remember. Google Hipster PDA, and you'll see Merlin Man,

his old post from those early online productivity blog days in 2005. All right, what else we got here? our second message is from Tim who asks about the role of handwriting in cognitive fitness all right so Tim says see here for cognitive fitness is it better to be handwriting or typing I've read that students taking notes in classes remember more when they're writing my hand if I'm writing something longer though I'd rather type as it's quicker and easier to edit

afterwards well Tim there is a clear tradeoff here if you look at the research literature writing my hand does seem to help you remember things better You move slower and it involves more brain regions to actually make the writing process happen. So you have more ways for that information to hook into your brain. There's good research on that. I write about a little bit in my new Deep Life book. I talk briefly about that. On the other hand, it's slower to produce handwriting than typing.

It's more cumbersome to read, edit, and adjust what you wrote as well. So when you're writing to work out complicated thought, handwriting might actually reduce the complexity of your embodied thinking, right? so when you can type quicker and move things around, you can work out much more complicated, longer thoughts, especially if you're not a very experienced handwriter. So it depends on your purposes and preferences, right? If you're trying to remember something like taking notes,

maybe you want to handwrite, or for portability purposes. But if you're trying to work out or long notes or complicated thoughts, you know, typing where you can cut and paste and have long thoughts and review them very quickly, is actually a pretty good technology. All right, what do we got next? next we have a note from amy sharing her reaction to our recent episode about cognitive training

where you suggested going to an art museum to look at paintings and then think that's from our cognitive gym episode from a couple weeks ago all right here's what amy said i used to skip high school jump on the train and go to the national gallery of art i would read and contemplate a specific art piece and then go and write poetry one time while hiding back home i stopped by the barns and noble that was on the way to the metro and i sat there and found your book. At this point of my life, I felt like I was going to amount to nothing as I wasn't good at school. Your first book motivated me to keep learning, even if I felt like I was horrible. It's a school thing. I picked up every one of your books since then. I feel like your books

have helped me in every stage I've hit. I moved out of the area, and now I'm a working mother with four boys. My husband and I homeschool our children, and we are trying to navigate teaching our children how to cultivate their minds to think deeply and to know and love what is true, good and beautiful. All right, well, first of all, homeschooling four boys, Jesse, let's send them some bourbon. Right? You know what I'm talking about? Like, that's... I have three. That's hard

enough in homeschooling. I mean, we homeschooled for one year during COVID. Ain't no joke. No, I appreciate this note. I mean, look, it shows this stuff, right? This stuff matters. It's not just nostalgia. You know, like actually caring about the role of technology in your life, caring about your mind, carrying about thinking.

has a huge impact on your subjective experience of life, but also the experience of your kids as well. So I appreciate that note. You know, I'm hoping this advice actually does matter. All right, who do we got? Shifting gears, Duncan sent us an article about AI and software engineering. Okay, this one we can load. Let me see here. All right, this one we can load in the tablet here.

This is from Arvin Narianianen's blog, AI as Normal Technology, and the title of this article that was sent to us by Duncan is why AI hasn't replaced software engineers and won't. So we can take it off there because I put some excerpts on here. Arvin, by the way, I like. I once briefed the Senate with him, Professor Computer Science at Princeton, and runs, I think it's the Center for Technology Policy there. So I think a really great thinker and AI realist, and I highly recommend him. All right, I'm going to read a few quotes I pulled from this article because I think it's interesting to have some counterbalance to what we're hearing so often about AI and what it's doing and software jobs in particular we hear a lot about. All right. So in the setup of the article early on, the author said the following.

Oh, I should say Arvin wrote this along with his student, Syash Kapoor, who they wrote this cool report. AI is normal technology. They wrote that together for the Knight Foundation. Definitely checked it out. All right. The setup to the article says there is. is great anxiety and uncertainty about AI replacing jobs. How can we move past vague warnings and bombastic predictions

or bring data to bear on this question? One good way is to look at the profession where AI capabilities are furthest along and adoption has been exceptionally rapid. Software engineering. All right. If we jump ahead in the article, they say, many tech leaders, like the CEO cited above,

report the percentage of code written by AI alongside reports of layoffs or predictions of future job losses. This feeds into the simplistic mental model that once AI writes all the code, there is no need for coders. Fortunately, this mental model is wrong. This AI written code metric is almost completely disconnected from what matters for labor displacement. Here's why.

Writing code isn't and never was the bottleneck. When we did our analysis, it revealed three things as the real bottlenecks. One, deciding and specifying what the bill, two, verifying and being accountable for what is delivered. And three, the deep human understanding of the code base, the business, and the environment required to carry out both of these. In other words, software engineers work consist of a decide, execute, deliver sandwich,

with understanding being a prerequisite for all three. AI has largely compressed the middle of the sandwich but has left the other two ends largely unchanged. Later in the article, they conclude, we argue that there is enough evidence to reject the narrative that once AI capabilities reach a certain threshold, it will cause mass layoffs. Given that this is true, even in a sector

with very few regulatory barriers, most other professions are likely to be even more cushioned. All right, I think that is a good argument. I mean, we get into this a lot in the AI reality check episodes of this show, but I just want to mention two brief things. There's two issues here that I think are related. One, I think this is more easily dismissed, is that we had a whole slate in earlier this year of what Annie Lowry called AI washing, which was software companies that were laying off to compensate for overhiring during the pandemic and blaming it on AI. This got called out. they said, no, you overhired, and now you're laying people out, because if you'd look closer,

these layoffs would be roles that had nothing to do with AI or programming, and you would often look closer and see that these companies had, you know, doubled their payroll starting in 2020 and now had to sort of cut back to closer to what they were before the pandemic overspend. A couple prominent voices like Mark Andreessen said, this is stupid. Like the AI technology that we're excited about now just came out. How are you already replacing, you know, 20,000 people's jobs that you're just making this up. Jensen Wong from the video came out and sort of similarly pushed back and said, this is

dumb, this is just CEO's trying to sound smart. And that phenomenon's kind of gone away. And you don't see a lot of AI wash anymore where software companies that were doing normal layoffs are trying to blame it on AI as opposed to other issues. So that was kind of, that's an example of why you have to be careful about narratives that makes sense mentally but might not actually map to the real world. The other thing that's happening specifically in computer programming is that everyone now uses agents to help produce their computer code.

So again, the narrative, like Arvin talks about here with Syash, is that, like, oh, that means all these jobs are automatable and or everyone is now 100x engineer, and what are we even going to do with all this new productivity? But I've been following this closely. I talk to a lot of engineers. I survey a lot of engineers. I read everything about it. We don't know yet know what this means.

Yes, AI, if you give it a given up description, can produce code for that thing you're describing. But we don't know how to work that in yet. does that mean for software development? There are these sort of like high hype ideas of like I'll have agents, supervising agents, supervising agents, and it's all going to sort of do my work for me. But this is like 2007 era Tim Ferriss sort of over the top hyping. And no one is really doing this at scale in these big companies. And now there's this kind of concern where people are like, it's really hard to specify what you want if you don't really know what you're doing. And

there's the senior developers spending a lot of time reviewing code. So we haven't even figured out yet how to integrate agentic AI code development effectively in the software development. It's in there, but the work processes aren't great yet. So there's going to be some sort of new acronym that will emerge as people figure out new ways of working with this. It will lead to more productivity, but not the 10x, 100x things that people are talking about. And we've seen other big jumps and productivity due to technology and computer programming along the line.

So it's an interesting story to follow, but we don't even yet know what's going on there. And as this article says, that is the best case scenario right now for AI knowledge work. And even there, it's very confusing to understand what's working and what's not and what we want to do with it. So good article. Who sent that, Jesse? This was Duncan. All right, Duncan, I appreciated. Let's do one more.

We got time for one more. I thought we could end with a funny observation from Aiden. All right. So Aidan says, you've probably heard a variation of this a bunch of times. But the deep life really is just living the life. your smartphone is jealous of. Does it make sense? Kind of makes sense.

Like the gist, like the vibe is right. But I guess in this scenario, the phone is jealous of intentional living. Trying to crack this. I like the vibe of it. Yeah. I'm not sure if we're ready to put it on a t-shirt yet. I guess a smartphone technically doesn't have to encompass the apps.

Yeah. Social media. Yeah, but does this mean like your smartphone wants to do more like woodworking and thinking walks? See, now I'm getting more. confused. Who sent this? Jesse, or not Jesse.

Aden, I think you're close to something. We've got to workshop this a little bit more before we put that, before we put that on a hat. All right, so I think that's good for our inbox segment this week. Thank you everyone who sent in their thoughts. We like to end our episodes on Monday by checking in with what I am up to. We will start, as always, with what I've been reading. All right, last week, Jesse, I finished the book, The Jewish Way to a Good Life by Rabbi Shira Stutman from here in D.C. I don't know why I do this to myself, Jesse. This was a book that I, it was one of the

books I was thinking about for a chapter I was writing in my new book on the deep life about religion and this sort of tension between the kind of secularized algorithmic nature of my deep life thinking and the sort of wisdom tradition approach to that through transcendence. But I didn't get to it. I didn't read it. And now that manuscript is locked in. And now I read the book after the manuscript was already locked in, which you really shouldn't do because you're for sure going to see something that you wish you'd included in the book, but I went ahead and read it anyways. And there were some good ideas in it that I probably would have included. But it was a good book. It goes through different areas of your life. And it's meant for a general audience, right?

Like you wouldn't have to be Jewish. It's just pulling ideas from the sort of oldest of the wisdom traditions that are around. So I survived reading a book research book after locking in the book manuscript, but it's not something I recommend in general that people do. long? No, I don't think it was that long. Yeah, I'm trying to think. It was like a 200-something pages maybe. Okay.

Yeah. All right. What did I watch? Well, first of all, my boys and I watched Rookie of the Year because that just came to Netflix. Do you know this one, Jesse? Is it an older movie? Our childhood.

Yeah, yeah, I've seen it. The kid who breaks his arm. Yeah. And when it heals, the tendons heal in such a way that he can now throw like 100, 1002 mile per hour fastball. Yeah, so that came the Netflix. We watched it. I missed that type.

You know, my kids loved it. They don't do this anymore. Like, they made that movie for like $7 and $10 million. Like, they used to just make these movies. You spend $10 million on them. TV wasn't great back then. And you'd just like go in the 90s and just see these. And they didn't have to be great.

You spend $10 million. It made $50 million. Like, it's a good investment. They don't really do that as much anymore. It was goofy, you know, Daniel Stern, who directed it's in it. And it just plays like a goofy character that always gets stuck in, things and they just loved it, right? And there was baseball scenes and they thought it was fun. I did have some issues with it, Jesse. I wrote him down at bullet points because the baseball

and rookie of the year wasn't quite accurate. Again, the premise here is a 12-year-old kid breaks his arm. It heals with the tendons in some weird way that allows him to suddenly throw the ball. They show it at around like 100 to 103 miles per hour. I got to go over these, Jesse, because I think it's important. And it's critical for our audience. audience to understand some of the potential inaccuracies in this movie. The final game in the sort of a pendulimate game, not the penultimate, the final game in the movie, the conclusion, the announcers, John Candy announces if they win this, they will clinch the division championship. So the Cubs, it's the Cubs, and they're in the NL Central. Then the announcer says, this means the Cubs will go to the World Series.

Well, they're skipping the playoffs. And in the 90s, it was one round the playoffs. you would have had the play in the NLCS in the championship series. So no, you don't go to the World Series by clinching the division in the regular season. You still have playoff games to play. And so that was a problem. They also showed the main character, Thomas Ian Nicholson, something like that. He was, is shown before he breaks his arm as being terrible at baseball.

Like he can't catch a ball, right? Like he's just like very uncoordinated. And yet once his arm gets this tight tendons, a lot of them to throw forward, fast. He doesn't just throw the ball fast. He's able to throw fastballs with command. So a kid that's like so uncoordinated, he can't catch a baseball can now not only throw the ball fast, but he actually has really good command. I mean, it's hard, because my son pitches now off on full-size fields. It's hard to throw, forget power. It's hard to throw a fastball from a 60-foot mound, right? Like just to get it that far into a target this big, he just does that without practice. They show

them with the radar gun throwing 100 to 103 and the major league pitchers in hitters rather in the movie just can't touch it. They're just like oh, oh, major league hitters can hit 100 to 103, especially if you're pitching it just straight down the middle without any other breaking

pitches to pitch off of it. I mean, Nolan Ryan, talk to Nolan Ryan, right? They'll hit him. You had the, you know, you had to have command, you had that good spin rate, you had to have strategy and you had to have breaking pitches to come off of it, which this kid doesn't have any of that. So I think he'd be more hitable

Most egregious however And I think this is important Like a public service announcement Here's how the movie ends Well first of all they bring in This aging relief relief pitcher Played by Gary Busey And they're like

You're gonna start the game This like clinching this key game Because you have experience They've got a core of starting pitchers Like sure don't they have experience too So anyways, they bring in this reliever, pitch of six innings, and then they bring in the kid.

And the kid is, you know, throwing a 100 mile power fastball as no one can hit, strike everyone out, gets to the ninth, all right? So the second pitcher they've used. The kid trips on the way out to the mound,

on a ball, falls the same way he fell the original time. It undoes his injury somehow. Now he can't throw. He goes to warm up and is like, I can't throw it fast anymore. The conclusion of the movie is them finding clever ways

to get three outs, the end the game. Here's the thing. you could have just brought in another pitcher. They've only used two pitchers. No starting pitchers. This is a key game. They have all of their starters available off the bench.

They have their entire relief core off the bench. They just need to get three outs. Everyone's like, uh-oh. The 12-year-old can't throw hard anymore. I guess we have to find, like, clever ways to get. It makes no sense. There was no, I mean, first of all, it's injury. So even today, you could get taken out without the three battle roll.

But back then, you didn't have the three battle roll. He could have left whenever he wanted. You could be like, hey, manager, I can't throw the ball fast anymore. Like, well, obviously, we're not going to be. going to keep you in there to do tricks to get people out. We'll just bring in our closer because we're a major league baseball team that's probably carrying seven relievers and we have, you know, five starting pitchers we could pull off the bench that closed this key game.

And then one of the ways they got one of the outs was with the hidden ball trick, which is not legal. That would be a ball. You're not allowed to do that. There's actually a little league team that tried that against a junior's team. I won't say what league they're from, interleague play, that tried the hidden ball trick against my son's 13 U team that I coach. Really?

Yeah. The hump was like, you can do it in lacrosse. You cannot do it in coming out of a timeout. You cannot do it. They did it coming out of a timeout, the third baseman brought the ball with them. And the ump was like,

get this out of here. What are you talking about hidden ball trick? So people don't know that's where you have a mound visit. And then one of the players secretly brings the ball back to the base with them. And the runner on base thinks the pitcher still has the ball. And when the runner takes your lead, they tag them out. So they tried to do that to us.

So I have two quick comments about that. Yeah. So your observations there are, very Mad Dogg-esque. He does the same thing. Mad Dog would also have issues with that. Yeah. But can I tell you what?

My sons were like, this is great. This is so fun. So they didn't mind at all. So I guess it was good movie making, but I was like, come on, guys. And secondly,

apparently when his Redford just passed away, and he was in the natural, right? And that was like Black Sox essentially. Yeah. So they went into a big time of Shoeless show Joe Jackson was a right-handed hit. He didn't even though he hit it lefty or vice versa

or whatever it was. And they went nuts about that. for a long time. Oh, because Redford was hitting righty and shoeless is a left-hander. Yeah. These things matter. The only thing people care more about than me talking about baseball is me talking about processor clock cycles like last week.

That's what we should be doing here. I also saw Toy Story 5 where the villain is technology. The kid's technology is like the villain because they need to play with real toys. But then they kind of reach some detont towards the end of the movie. We're like, well, the technology is okay, but only if you use it to like set up occasions to play in real life with your friends or something. So I was like, oh, that's kind of like digital minimalism. But also they're nine and they shouldn't have the technology at all.

A lot of judging going on in that movie. A lot of judging. But it was good. Twistory movies are good. All right. That's, I think that's enough. I think it's all the time we have for today.

We'll be back next Monday with another episode. We've got to go to interview that it's very, makes me think about summer. I think it'll be good. I don't know if there'll be an AI reality. Check this Thursday or not. I'm traveling. And so it's kind of hard to do those.

we travel, but I'll do my best. But we will be back next Monday with an advice episode. What should we recommend? I feel like we should tell people to review the show or something. That seems good. Yeah. Review the show. I don't ask very often.

Give it a good review. Let me put it that way. I say, I come for the baseball analysis, but I stay for the microelectronics discussions. All right. That's enough. We'll see you next week. Until then, as always, stay deep.