Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 137: Why Am I Uncomfortable With Facebook Backlash?

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

DEEP DIVE: Why Am I Uncomfortable With Facebook Backlash? [1:16]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS: - How do I work deeper in a job that is inherently fractured? [17:29] - How do I switch tasks without everything going to hell? [23:21] - How do I build relationships with colleagues if I prioritize deep work? [26:50] - How can I reduce the craziness of my college schedule? [33:39]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS: - How can I relaxed if I'm extremely driven? [38:49] - Can on lead a life as a recognized intellectual outside of academia? [42:48] - How do I get better at thinking critically? [47:38] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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I'm Cal Newport and this is DeepQuestions. Episode 137. Now, I should note that at some point during the recording of this episode, I'm going to have to step away to do a TV appearance here from the Deep Work HQ. So I am better dressed than usual when I'm recording this podcast. So if you detect a more dignified character to my voice, that would explain it. Quick announcement, I wanted to just say thanks to everyone who bid on my prize for the Authors for Voices of Color Silent Auction. I was offering a private one-on-one episode of the Deep Questions podcast that this silent auction. ended recently. It raised a lot of good money for a good cause and that particular prize

raised thousands of dollars. So thank you everyone who bid so enthusiastically on that particular offering. Now we have a good show, a good collection of deep work and deep life questions from you, the listeners for me to answer. But before we get into those questions, I wanted to do a deep dive. A deep dive inspired by an article I was reading this morning in my copy of the Washington Post. A deep dive I will call, why am I uncomfortable with Facebook backlash? Now, I'm referring in particular to the backlash aimed at Facebook that is happening right now, backlash that I have been commenting on recently. The article I actually saw in the paper that spurred this particular deep dive was an article

that talked about how Facebook was taking a more defiant reaction and more defiant approach to reacting to this latest round of backlash. They weren't going to be doing as much apologies, and they were going to highlight more what they have done that's good. They're going to push back where they think attacks are not quite accurate. I don't really care too much about that PR narrative, but this article in general in the Washington Post was very negative on Facebook. it was clear that the writers of this article are very down on Facebook and it goes through and lists their sins. It's not really giving a lot of goodwill to Facebook. It's not giving them the benefit of doubt. It just straight up treats the company as this is a bad company.

So you would think that I would be quite happy about this turn of events that this type of reaction that we saw in the post is pretty widespread, especially in elite circles, especially in the media. I'm both the right and the left too, which is kind of interesting, that there's a lot of just anti-social media and in particular anti-Facebook backlash that's happening now. I've been no friend of social media companies. I'm sort of famously in that position, so you would think I would be happy about this.

But as I've hinted before on this show, there's elements of this current backlash that makes me uncomfortable. So I want to elaborate some of those reasons that I've hinted at before. So let me start with my own evolving stance on this issue. So we're standing on the same foundation when discussing the current backlash. I really began to write skeptically about social media probably around 2013, 2014. That's when you're going to see the first strident articles appearing on my website and in my email newsletter. And at the core of my critique was a humanist.

approach that eventually became what was known as the digital minimalism philosophy. But basically what I was observing is we were in this moment of exuberance in which we were all just accepting a model of universal social media use. That this is just something, of course, everyone should use, don't think about it too much. And this was a problem because this widespread adoption of, hey, might as well use it. It's cool. It's interesting. You just bought your first iPhone two years ago.

And now there's this nice, shiny Facebook app on it. The problem with this mindset was that it corresponded with a time period in which for revenue-generating reasons, the major social media companies were drastically transforming their applications to try to capture as much of your time, attention, and data as possible. So they became very addictive. And what would then occur is that overuse became the norm. So everyone started using these apps because they were interesting and cool, and Web 2.0 had a bubble of exuber and surroundings. And then you had this slick new technology injected into our culture from Steve Jobs, these shiny small glass rectangles that could deliver us these experiences. And the two melded together.

And it was fun. We enjoyed it. And then the apps got addictive. And then we were using it too much. And from a humanist perspective, I thought this was a problem. In part because of the content, sure. I mean, if you're an adolescent and you're seeing airbrushed Instagram photos, you can get negative body image issues. if you're an adolescent and you're seeing

Snapchats about parties that you're not invited to that the sort of alpha members of the group you're in are purposefully pushing towards you. It can be kind of torturous, right? I mean, there was bad content, but really the issue was just time famine.

We used it more and more and more, and it was taken attention away from other things that were more valuable, more meaningful to the human experience. And I thought this was an impoverished mode of existence. and what we needed was an approach that put the human first. This was digital minimalism. Figure out what you were all about.

Figure out what you want to spend time on. Get comfortable being alone with your own thoughts and thinking about your own world. Get comfortable getting pleasure and awe and joy out of what's going on around you, whether it's perfectly engineered or not. Do hard things, do important things, sacrifice on behalf of others. Form this deeper life and then say, how should I deploy technology to help what I'm doing? And then tech like social media platforms might still be used, but you're using it for a particular reason. When you deploy it for particular reasons, A, you get more benefit out of it, but B, it's easier to put fences around this use.

And because of that, it doesn't tend to metastasize over your daily schedule. It doesn't tend to take up so much of your time. It does not cause the same time poverty. The cost of benefit ratio skews significantly into the direction of the user. So that was my whole evolving thought on social media. It's a very humanist philosophy. It's what I've been pitching for quite a while now. Now, I really have to emphasize the degree to which this was seen as out of step with the mainstream

when I first really started articulating these ideas clearly. A couple examples I often give when I do talks about digital minimalism. The first is the TEDx talk I did titled Quit Social Media. I think this was done maybe the summer of 2016, if I'm remembering correctly. have that wrong. That's when I think it happened. At the time, that was a really unusual view. To the point that, you know, I told the organizers, this talk is called quit social media. I want it to be in people's face. I wanted to be confrontational, but they were uncomfortable with that. They thought that sounded weird. It was going to, in some sense, perhaps even diminish the

seriousness of the conference. So they changed the title to something like how to work deeply in a distracted world. Even though the talk was all about, here are four reasons why you should quit social media. I was very purposefully pointed about it. And I had to go back and say, no, you have to change the title back to quit social media. Now that talk has become very popular. I think on YouTube last I checked, it was eight or nine million views. So it's a popular video, but at the time, this was really considered a weird thing to say. Another example was around that time, I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that talked about social media not being as important as young people think for their career.

This idea that, vaguely speaking, if you invest a lot of energy in the social media, that it's going to help your career grow, I said there's not a lot of evidence for that. We should start pretending like that's true. There's things that are much more important, like building rare and valuable skills, etc. This caused an uproar. Again, it was considered eccentric and weird. This was a moment of exuberance around social media,

and the idea that it was bad upset a lot of people. How upset did they get? I began to get challenges for debates. Professors, there are some professors out there that were so incensed by this idea that someone, especially someone in the academy, would be saying something negative about social media. This was so far outside of the approved script that they were like, we have to debate, and they would bother me again and again, because they really couldn't compute how anyone could say that. It boggled their mind.

There was articles written about me in major publications that was just, this is crazy. Here's what's wrong with this. I was ambushed on national radio where they, you know, halfway through the interview, tried to ambush me with people to come on and make the strong counterclaim that social media was critical. The New York Times itself did something they rarely do. They commissioned a response op-ed, which they published in the paper the next week. They went out to the career manager, social media manager at monster.com or something like this, because there was such a backlash about how could you in a mainstream publication be saying social media is bad?

So I just want to really make this clear. My point of view was very much out of the mainstream. Then that all changed. The first rumblings of this changing actually occurred in conservative political circles. I was doing, this probably would have been radio or podcast interviews for deep work. And when I would come on more conservative shows, I began to hear this a lot. What do you think about the fact that conservative, are being censored on social media.

So this was the first bubbling of a larger backlash that, as we'll see, ended up with a much more political tribal characteristics. So conservatives begin to get concerned or frustrated about censorship on social media. So this was actually before that TED talk, before that New York Times op-ed, but that's because obviously the conservative culture runs roughly orthogonal to more progressive culture. Then after the Trump election, so later in 2016, backlash began to form from the left. And the backlash formed, you know, in part because Facebook and related tools helped Donald Trump.

They helped him get elected. But then I think they were upset that the social media platforms, I suppose, and Mark Zuckerberg in particular, sort of deviated from the right script. I mean, they said like this is a problem. Zuckerberg had his Yom Kippur essay in 2017 about like we need to be careful about foreign interference and misinformation. But also they were coming out and saying, but you know, we got to be careful about controlling what's on here, not it's on here. They seem to not be following this is the, this is the company line on this is bad stuff.

This stuff shouldn't be on social media. So they became a permanent enemy more of the left as well. And so we entered this age of political tribal back. to social media that spanned a whole political spectrum, though the underlying motivations for the ire varied dependent on where you were on the political spectrum. This is roughly the origin of the current moment of really big backlash that's happening again right now. There's this sense when you read something like the Washington Post article, for example,

there's this sense of these guys aren't on our team and we need to bring them to heal. That exact phraseology, current rules have not yet brought Facebook to heal. That is an exact quote from the Washington Post article today. This is really the core of a lot of the backlash has happened. Now, and from the right, it's still that same plot line. You know, we're being censored. We're being taken off Twitter, et cetera. This is the character of anti-social media argument that I'm uncomfortable with.

and the reason why I'm uncomfortable with it is though it is aimed at the same general goal as some of my work as being negative or skeptical about social media and its impact and though it does help accomplish the goal of breaking the image which I think has been completely broken now of universal social media that like a course this is something everyone should always be using all the time it is introduced into our cultural conversation the idea that you can judge these things and maybe choose not to use them

even though most people still don't. At least that's now, I think, enabled by these political tribal critiques. But the reason why they make me uncomfortable is that ultimately they are not aimed at reducing social media use or transforming social media use to be a better servant of the humanist quest for a satisfying or meaningful life. It's not the goal. The journalists that I think are out there most publicly leading this current political tribal anti-social media backlash have social media just intertwined

into their entire professional existence. I think there is no interest or appetite from that group to significantly cut back on the amount of social media use they have. Their followers on these platforms is core, sometimes even literally written into their contracts.

It's also at the core of their influence it's where they get all information. A significant part of the culture in which they're heavily involved in consuming and shaping is a digital culture that is existing largely in the back and forth of these small number of proprietary monopoly platforms. So they can't imagine a world in which this was not a major part of your life.

So because of that, the critique is all about not let's rethink how much we use this, but instead let's bring these platforms to heal. Not about less social media. It's about moving social media towards whatever vision the particular criticizer here has for how these platforms should be used. Now, I want to put aside the whole digital ethical discussion of, is that possible? Is a regulatory response something that we need? I am open to all possible answers in that space.

I am completely open to the idea that there is some regulatory things that need to happen. I mean, if social media is going to be heavily used, maybe there's some regulatory action that lowers its harm footprint on people, on democracy, etc. I'm open to that. I'm also open that when smarter minds really think this through, it turns out that that's not the right approach, right? that actually this is a cultural zeitgeist problem. It's like teen smoking. There's only so much regulation can do, but we have to change the culture. Maybe this is through advertisements and influence campaigns.

Whatever, right? I'm not even speaking about what we should do in this current moment for some of the acute problems being targeted by the political tribal backlash. I'm just arguing that this particular backlash, no matter how it is implemented, is not going to bring us to where I think we need to be, which is this much more minimalist, humanist, interaction with these tools, which is I am putting you to use strategically on behalf of my vision of a life well-lived. So that is why I'm not waving the pom-poms in these recent years. It's why, though I have been one of the major commentators on this topic, though I've talked about this topic on most of the major morning TV shows, Good Morning America, CBS this

morning on most of the major national NPR shows. My stances on this I've both written about and been written about in the pages of the New Yorker, in the page of the New York Times, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, in the pages of the Financial Times, in the page of the economist. I mean, I'm obviously a major voice in this debate, and yet I'm also viewed with a lot of skepticism by a lot of people in media. And I think it's because this friction is apparent. I have a particular approach I'm taking to what I see the issues be from social media.

The current backlash is different. So I am viewed with a side eye. You know, we're roughly aiming at the same enemy here, but I don't think we're fighting for the same army. There's definitely that sense that's out there. So I don't have a conclusion to make here. I just thought it's an interesting deep dive to go into that there's a lot of different approaches to understanding reactions to discontent with social media, and they're not all the same. And we should be critical about all of them, including my own, and try to understand what they're

trying to accomplish and where that's going to get us there. Because I think this is a lot more complicated picture than some of us would like to believe. And so it's something that we need to, we need to watch with interest. We need to watch with care. So thanks for indulging me in that off-the-cuff rant there. Let's get on to your questions. We'll start with, as always, with some questions about deep. work.

And our first question comes from Jeff. Jeff says, in your writing, you discuss how context shifting disrupts flow in deep work. My job is a series of context shifts all day with several of those contexts requiring focus in production. How can one achieve deep work in a job that is inherently fractured? So Jeff gives a little bit of an elaboration here on his situation. He's a drug addiction counselor. I'm looking at his elaboration here. There's a lot of paperwork, he says.

He says, I have to, he has to manage the charts of the patients he sees. And this involves writing case notes, faxing other offices, auditing charts, writing letters, to name a few. So a lot of what he's doing is paperwork. And he says he tries to block out time for doing this work, but ultimately, quote unquote, I'm available to the patients on my case. they need me, end quote. So if I've dedicated 30 minutes to write notes and there's a knock on my door that I must shift my focus from my computer screen to a live person who made you to discuss a traumatic event that has occurred in their life. All right, and it goes on a little bit. Well,

I mean, Jeff, there's two things to say here. One, there are jobs that are inherently fractured. It goes from thing to thing to thing and some things have to be interruptive. And one response those type of jobs is that the goal there should not be the most pure forms of deep work, where you're going long periods of time without any distraction, giving something your full concentration. I mean, some jobs just make that impossible, but they have other things they're asking of you.

That you're able to apply your experience consistently, that you're able to keep all the trains running on time, the right paperwork gets to the right places, the notes gets to the right files. I mean, this in itself could be, you know, very beneficial. And it doesn't involve you needing to concentrate for an hour at a time as hard as you can. So that might just be an inherent property of your job. I don't make a moral distinction that deep work is the only good work.

And if it's not deep work, it's not good work. I just make the argument that undistracted work in which you focus hard is often in knowledge, work jobs, at a good way or a major producer of value. so we should be careful to treat that with respect, but that doesn't mean every job, that's what they need to do. In your particular circumstance and not knowing much more details

than just the notes you provided, I might also push back on how casual you said, and I'm looking here to get the wording right, ultimately I'm available to my patients on my caseload whenever they need me. There is a difference between I am there for my patients and I must be available to them

in every moment. It's already not the case that that's true for you, okay? Because you also do counseling sessions, the counseling sessions that you have to later write these notes about. When you are in a counseling session with a patient, you do not allow another patient to knock on the door and walk in the room and start talking to you at the same time. You don't kick your existing patient out, for example, right? So already, it is true probably in your particular drug addiction counseling practice,

that there is certain times where you can't be reached directly during that time. So then the question becomes, what if there was slightly more of those times? What if, for example, when you have a counseling session, there's a 20-minute piece added to it where the patient is no longer there, but the case dose for that session get written, and you treat it as if the session went 20 minutes longer. It's within the exact same paradigm you already have. If there's occasional scheduled counseling sessions during which I'm not interrupted, it's the same paradigm.

You're adding a little overhead, and now those notes are getting done while they're still fresh and in protected time so that you don't have to pay the price of context shifting. What if you have extensive office hours in which you're available for drop-ins,

but it's not the entire day? There's periods in which you're not available. What if, you know, you have a, whatever system you use for scheduling patients, be it an electronic thing or literally just an in-session board you put on your door, what if you schedule one

virtual patient every day. I'm putting the patient here in air quotes, which is actually paperwork time. But you treat it just like any other patient. You put the in-session thing on the door, you block it in your calendar if it's electronic, but that's actually dedicated for paperwork. So that you have these windows where you get freedom from context shifting and therefore get a lot more done in that time that it gets done into higher quality and ultimately it better serves your patients. And that's the only pushback on making here, Jeff, because I think there's a lot of people in different types of jobs that have a similar mindset. They are mixing the idea of I need to be, generally speaking, available to a client, to a customer base, to a patient base.

That if they can never reach me, it's a problem. They mix that with, I have to, at every moment, be interruptible. And it's not a disservice to these patients if there's moments where they can interrupt you, because, again, you already do that. It's not a disservice to your clients if you're a consultant if they can't just call you. It's not a disservice to your clients if you're a lawyer and you don't check your email constantly so they can get a response right. right away, but you have a different system in place for how they get this to you. To be available means I have a way of getting to you and getting the assistance or help I need from you in a timely fashion and with clarity about how this happens.

I can trust that that you will be there for me. That is typically in these situations what people need. There better be a way that right now in this minute I can be interacting with you in this minute. Those are two different things. There are two different things. The first thing allows you to actually minimize some of the negative impacts of context shifting, but both of them get you to a place where you are of service.

All right, we have a question here from Laura. Laura says, can you talk more about transitioning between tasks? I do find concentrating on my chosen task during a block, but when it comes time to switch, everything goes to hell. Well, Laura, a few things that suggest here. One, you mentioned blocks, so I assume you're at least dabbling with time block planning. That, of course, is going to be the foundation. Give your time during the workday a job.

Give every minute a job. Don't just go by the list reactive method of saying, what should I do next? Okay, so that's good. Make sure that if you're in a task block, you have clearly enumerated. These are the tasks I'm doing during this block. You could do this during your planning at the beginning of the day.

Or when you get to the block, you could go look to your list and gather the whatever it is, two, three, four things you're going to do. One, two, three, I'm going to do them and cross them all. as I get them done. So it's very clear. This is what's happening during this task block. Another piece of advice is

gather the materials first. So you say, okay, I'm going to work on these three tasks. My first thing I'm going to do is just gather all the materials. I have to get some stuff out of my email and off the internet.

Let me gather that all here. Good. Now let's go execute. That can help. Another thing to suggest is make sure that your time block schedule is reasonable. If the reason why things are going to hell

is that you're getting distracted. You're going down rabbit holes on the internet. You're going to social media. You're going to your phone and long text threads. Make sure that you have regularly scheduled reasonably length blocks in your schedule for that type of release, for that type of distraction, for checking in on those text conversations, whatever it happens to be. So that you do not feel impoverished as if this is crazy. I can't get through my whole day without any break, so I might as well take one now. Then the final thing I'll say is you put in place rules for particular block types.

There's an idea I talked about in the book Deep Work. Make them clear. Write them down. Paste them on your computer on an index card if you need to. When I'm doing this type of block, no email, no internet web surfing, no phone, whatever it is. You list them out, one, two, three. This is how task blocks go. I spend the first five minutes gathering the material and then, you know, whatever.

None of those things I can look at. this really helps because now it means for you to allow your focus to go to hell, what has happened is you were specifically violating some of these rules. It's a psychological trick that actually is pretty strong. I don't want to actually acknowledge that I'm violating Rule 1 and 3 now. Like I'm actually crossing this organizational Rubicon here by looking up the internet, looking at the phone. So when you make it explicit, here's the rules for these type of blocks.

it makes it explicit that you are breaking the rules and you're actually going to be less likely to do it. So those are suggestions. And then beyond that, Laura, it's just practice. There is a discipline to building good time block schedules. There's an even harder to develop but more valuable discipline to sticking to time blocks when you're in them. There's a sort of professional maturity that grows as you do this more and more. It becomes part of your identity. I am in charge of my time.

I build reasonable schedules. I treat myself with respect. I'm not going to burn the midnight oil day after day. but when I build my schedule, I execute my schedules. I'm a professional. Aim towards developing that discipline. This will get easier. This podcast is sponsored by Magic Spoon.

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But to get that, you need to go to ExpressVPN.com slash Deep. All right, we have a question here from Amanda. Amanda asks, how does one build relationships with colleagues while doing deep work? She elaborates, I've been trying to implement deep work into my life, but I find that most of my social interactions with colleagues are when I'm interrupted with a question or chatting on the way to the printer. She goes on to clarify that as she's gotten more control over her time, time blocking, doing more uninterrupted. work, she is finding that she's having many fewer of these informal ad hoc interactions. All right, Amanda, this is a good question.

It's something that comes up a lot. It came up a lot during the discussion surrounding remote work. There are certainly companies that are advocating. We need to all be on Slack, for example, because there's all this informal back and forth that happens and these type of interactions are important. You hear this argument like you're talking about Amanda that when you're back in an office, you're spending more time lockdown and focusing. you're not in the coffee break room, you're not picking up things from the printer, you don't have

your door open, you're not stopping by and chatting to people. Here's my main response to that. I think having good relationships with people at work is important. I think this requires effort. I think these are efforts that you should isolate and optimize independently from your decisions of how do you want to be most effective at doing your work. I simply do not buy this comment argument that the only way to foster good relationships at work is to adopt inefficient methods of working.

I think we can isolate these into two separate issues. How do I best get things done? In other words, how do I best use my brain and the skills embedded into my brain to add value to information, the primary goal of a knowledge worker? A question whose answer is going to involve long, probably uninterrupted times of focus as you're trying to actually get the most out of your brain. Answer that question separately from how do I make sure that I get to know my workers and have a good, did I work with my colleagues and have a good relationship with them.

I just can't imagine that the right, the only answer to that second question is you have to work in a hyperactive hive mind style interruptive workflow. I think where people get thrown is that the answer to that second question is not trivial. So Amanda says in her answer like, oh, we tried something like doing this lunch thing and didn't work well. So her conclusion was essentially, I guess I should go back to a very interruptive workflow. No, I would say try harder. And I don't mean to be flip or facetious about it.

What I'm trying to say here is, yes, we should prioritize relationships and interaction, and this requires a lot of effort. And we really got to think through how do we maintain these bonds? Is it through events? Is it through an approach to the day where we all gather during certain times? Is it social things outside of work? Social things during work? Is it mandatory attendance-style brown bag lunches or talks? Is it a culture of posting to some internal style bulletin board things about your hobbies or your interest?

I don't know. I think it's hard, but it is probably pretty important. We need to put in that effort. And they simply say, well, let's not put in that effort, but just like let work be more interruptive and that'll kind of solve it. You know, that's robbing Peter to pay Paul. You're making everyone miserable and bad at their job so that they're slightly more social interaction. We can solve that problem more directly better. This came up a lot in an interview I did recently with the tech entrepreneur Chris Hurd.

So I recently had an essay in The New Yorker that was about Chris Hurd's vision for the future of remote work. And it's an interesting article. I'm not going to get into all the details, but I do recommend reading it. It is kind of an interesting article. But he talked about this issue. There's a couple points I want to mention. So he has this vision called Remote First Work that means that companies don't own offices, but in his vision, teams meet in person on a semi-regular basis, maybe once a month or so.

And he makes that point because he says, yeah, this is very important. It's annoying and expensive or whatever to get people together, but we got to get people together. These relationships are important. And he actually has his vision in which there's going to be specialized resorts that, teams come together from these remote first companies that don't otherwise have offices. And there's particular facilitators that help them work on whatever they're working on, be it brainstorming, be it strategizing or whatever it happens to be. So he's acknowledging, you know, the future of work, even without offices,

needs to have a lot of effort that goes into how do we actually build relationships and spend a non-trivial amount of time together. But another point he made to me when he talked is this idea that, you know, work is where we get most of our our social value in our life. That work is where our main friends are. That if we can't gather out an office and see people all day at that office

that we're going to somehow feel socially impoverished, he makes this argument, which is kind of interesting, that work friends are not as these are not as solid of friendships as people actually think. His main point of evidence is ask anyone who has switched from one job to another so they used to work here

and now they moved across the country and work there and say, how many of your old colleagues do you regularly see and keep in touch with? And the answer is usually basically none. So one of the points he's making is if we switch to a remote first world, people need to put a lot of energy into making friends outside of work. That in some sense, it's not the goal of work to be the source of all of your social validation and interaction. That is something you should be protecting and cultivating and optimizing outside of the world of work. So now we have these two interesting views.

I'm going to kind of put together these different ideas. If you work in an office, it is important that you know and have a good relationship with your colleagues, but find ways to do this. And this might take a lot of effort that's independent of how you actually organize and collaborate about your work. Two, taking Chris Hurd's argument, don't over-emphasize in your mind the social importance of these office relationships. You want to work well. You want to be on the same team. You want to be able to collaborate well with your office mates,

but this should not be the primary source of social validation in your life. Keep putting that energy into your life outside of work. Because if Chris Hurd is correct, if this vision he has that I talked about in the New Yorker comes to pass, we may all lose that option at some point, at least those of us who are in knowledge work jobs, we may all lose that option soon of having the office be the primary place where we get our social validation because there won't be offices to go to. So maybe now is the right time to start broadening how we think about building these types of relationships.

Let's do a student question here. This one comes from Billy. Billy asks, how could the college schedule be better designed to support deep work? He elaborates that between multiple classes and all the assignments they come with and extracurriculars and part-time jobs, college seems to inherently support the kind of jumping around shallow work that is antithetical to the deep life. Well, Billy, this used to be my main point of focus. I used to travel around the country giving talks at colleges about students being too overloaded. Their schedule being too chaotic and what they should do about it.

If you want a deep treatment on this, search for my old essays on the Zen valedictorian method and the Romantic Scholar method. But let me just give you very briefly some bullet points from that older chapter of my life. Number one, a lot of the overload and busyness of college students is self-imposed. they double or triple major, they take very hard course schedules that aren't required for hitting their graduation requirements. They take on way too many extracurricular activities

and then they turn around and say, man, I'm overloaded. Why do they do this? Well, typically it is because they have an ambition to succeed at school. Like, I want to do well and be impressive, but they don't really understand the mechanics of how that works. How does someone at college become impressive?

And they roughly carry over from the high, high school experience of going through the admissions process, this notion that doing a bunch of stuff seems impressive. That becomes the main lever they can pull. We inculcate this into students who go through competitive college admissions. We inculcate this idea that one of the main levers they have for impressing people is inducing them this reaction of, whoa, you do a lot. That sounds killer.

How do you manage it all? And so we get to college and we try to replicate that effect. Here's the reality, Billy. No one cares how hard your schedule was. No one cares that you did 19 extracurricular activities. No one cares the total quantity of what you took on at college. What is the job world going to judge you on? What's graduate school is going to judge you on?

Where did you go to school? What did you major and what's your grades? The rest they could care less about. They're not pouring over your transcript. They don't care about the clubs you joined. So make your schedule much easier. I often would recommend the people take the easiest possible schedule you can that keeps you on track for hitting the requirements for your major and for the university.

This involves not taking extra courses, balancing necessary hard courses with known easier courses, balancing types of courses. If you have a programming course and a computer science major, maybe you want to balance that out with a course that is completely reading and writing based. Get the easiest possible semesters that you can. If you have extra credits because of AP courses that you can use to get out of taking some courses, have a couple semesters where you're taking less than a normal course load, absolutely do that. So you want the easiest possible schedule that still keeps you on track so that you have more than enough time to focus on the courses you are taking to do very well in those courses. Doing very well in the courses you take is exponentially more important than taking more courses. Same thing with extracurriculars.

Stop it. There is no admissions officer in your... your future who's going to say what an impressive diverse load of activities you did. So do less, do less activities. In particular, I say minimize activities that are going to bring with them non-negotiable time commitments.

It's fine to go to a lot of things or join things that you can just voluntarily attend or not, but don't be the secretary of 17 different clubs. All right? So make your life as easy as possible. Once you've done that, then my final bit of advice is to have what I call the student work day schedule. For all of the work that happens regularly in your classes,

the prom sets you know are due every week, the reading assignments that have to happen every week, the labs that have to be done every two weeks. Figure out when and where you do that work each week. Put that on your calendar and stick to that schedule. Figure out in advance. It's Tuesday mornings is when I do my lab work. I work on my prom set assignments.

I start them Wednesday after class and then I do a session Thursday morning. Make that super. regular. So you're not running around thinking what's next, what's next. Oh my God, six things are due tomorrow. You're executing your pre-configured student workday, which is set up to give you more than enough time to get the work done for your classes calmly without you having to make decisions on the fly. Preventing pile-ups is going to make your life seem much slower. If you cannot easily come up with one of these schedules because the amount of work you have and the amount of free time you actually have available just doesn't match up, that means you're doing too much. That's

your warning sign. It should be easy to make your student work day. If it's not, you have too many classes and or you have too many other things laying claim to your schedule. All right, that's a condensed version, Billy, of a lot of the advice I used to give to college students, but I do appreciate the chance to return to that older chapter of my career as a writer. All right, let's move on to some questions now about the deep life. And our first one comes from Oscar. Oscar asks, how can I relax if I have exceptionally high conscientiousness? He elaborates that in the Big Five personality test, I scored 99th percentile in conscientiousness. I have very easy time working and pursuing goals, but have a hard time relaxing during the summer.

How can I do this in order to avoid burnout? Now, well, Oscar, for someone like you who is motivated and highly driven, likes accomplishing goals, likes making progress, is nervous about not taking action. A trait, by the way, I share. So you have my empathy. For someone like you or for someone like me, the vision aspect of your quarterly plan is going to be critical. It's a discipline I've talked about many times before on the show that, you know, you have your quarterly plan, which influences your weekly plan, which influences your daily plan.

In that system, your quarterly plan has at the top a more stable vision. So for your professional quarterly plan, there is a vision of what you're trying to accomplish. And it's a vision that you evolve over time. But the goal is that it's something that speaks deeply to you. It's aspirational. It's true to your values. It's an image of life that resonates. Now, once you have that image really strong, this is what I'm trying to

go for. When you build a plan each quarter for that quarter, you want to come up with a plan that given what you have available, what opportunities there are, how much time there is, what else is going on in your life, is a reasonable plan for leveraging what's available to make progress towards that vision. Think through that plan, you know, maybe in the summer, it's less than it is in the fall, et cetera. And then you trust that. Now, if you trust that, then when you get to your weekly and daily scales of this planning, you're saying this week, am I making good progress on this plan? Yeah, put aside some good time for it. Great. When you get to your day, you're looking at your weekly plan. What should I be working on

today? Okay, I have a good time block plan, execute and shut down when I'm done. All of these pieces click in the place. And you can have confidence that what you're doing right now in the moment connects up this temporal chain all the way up to this bigger picture vision that you really believe in. So if what you're doing in the moment is not much, because your time block plan shut down your work early today at 4. And that time block plan said you could do this because your weekly plan was pushing for you to have a couple light days this week because the week before was heavy. But that weekly plan also has some good sessions that are making progress on your quarterly

plan. And that quarterly plan takes a nice swing at progress on your vision. So you trust in the moment what you're doing leads all the way back up properly to the big picture things you care about. And you relieve that stress from that highly driven, chattering part of your mind that in the moment is like, what could we be doing? Should we be doing something more? And you say, I don't need to be making that decision in the moment. I don't need to listen to that insistent, urgent energy towards what else should I be doing.

I thought that through. So let's just execute. And if the thing we're doing now is going for a long hike, you know, in the afternoon, I can just enjoy that because it's part of a bigger plan where that makes a lot of sense. So what I'm trying to say, Oscar, is that for someone like you or someone like me who's highly driven, highly conscientious on the Big Five personality trait test, having these multi-scale visions is critical. If you just rely on what feels like the right thing to do in the moment, someone with that personality will burn out.

And that's not going to, A, that's not going to get you where you're going much faster, but B, what's the point? What's the point of going towards this vision if you're burnt out along the way? you have to be prioritizing your life right now in addition to the life you're aiming towards in the future. Our next question comes from Chris. Chris asks, can one lead a deep intellectual life outside of academia and be recognized for it? Well, yes. I mean, this happens all the time.

We can use myself as an example. most of the intellectual work for what I'm known for is not that related to my primary academic focus on distributed algorithm theory. Now, that's been changing in recent years as my more formal academic role is formally encapsulating more of these questions of technology and society. But until recently, you could think of Cal the public figure talking about technology and culture was existing outside of the official academic establishment. If you survey the world of influential intellectual writers, there's a lot of them that do not have formal academic appointments. David McCola, the historian, does not have a formal academic appointment.

Malcolm Gladwell at the New Yorker does not have a formal academic appointment. Douglas Rushkoff, who I've met on multiple occasions and very much enjoy his thinking, I believe he also does not have a formal academic appointment. Kevin Kelly, technology futurist, former editor of Wired Magazine. He does not have a formal academic appointment. So, you know, of course, yes, I think it's 100% possible to be a recognized intellectual, have an impact on the world of ideas in a respected way, without an academic appointment. The thing that does seem to unify all these examples is their professional writers.

Writing is a medium that allows people to develop themselves as a public thinker and public intellectual. even if they don't have, let's say, a professorship. And I think that's one of the nice things about the world of writing, be it professional book writing or professional magazine writing. So if we pull on that unifying thread, Chris, it would say if you wanted to be a recognized intellectual and you're not an academic, you should be working on writing. You should be working out your thoughts and trying to make your presence known

through the published written word. But let me just add a quick coda here. let's say you're someone's listening, you're someone who is listening and you're interested in a deep intellectual life, but aren't that interested in being recognized from it? Well, this is even more accessible. This is something that you can obtain through the consistent and intentional engagement with books and articles. Anyone really can run themselves through a curriculum of big thinkers, read what they've written, beat a book, meet an article, and over time have a personal, rich, satisfying intellectual life. Of course, this is also easier said than done.

I do not like advice. It just says, all you got to do is just read it. It'll change your life. Read Augustine. Read Aquinas. It'll change your life. Read McLuhan. It'll change your life.

Read some Jung. It'll change your life. Well, here's the problem. If you just jump into some of these advanced books without sufficient foundation, it won't change your life. You won't understand what the hell's going on. So there is a whole art. And not really art.

Let's call it a practice. There is a practice to building up your foundation of knowledge and reading comfort towards more and more complicated swaths or categories of books. And so it's something you build up over time until you can engage with a particular class of otherwise impenetrable books and you get a lot of value out of it. And now let's say you want to understand this corner of literature. Well, it may take some work to get there. You may have to read some secondary sources.

You may have to do some online courses, but you will get there, get more comfortable, now suddenly you understand what the Russian realist novels of the 19th century were offering, and you understand how that became somewhat redundant after the advent of the moving picture in the early 20th century. But none of this stuff is just going to be apparent. There's a sort of self-imposed curriculum required. But the point I'm trying to make here is that anyone who is willing to put in the effort can over time develop an increasingly deep personal intellectual life. And it's something that I put a lot of effort into,

and it's something I think is very rewarding and I recommend. If you also want to be a recognized intellectual, you also then have to write about these things. And yeah, that's hard. You know, it's hard to get book deals for intellectual books. It's hard to write for intellectual magazines. It's not impossible. And if you think you can make a go at it, you should.

But if you're not interested in making a go at being the next Malcolm Gladwell, you can still get a lot out of reading some of the great books, learning how to interpret them, learning how to get value out of them, reading some of the great articles. there's a whole richness there, I think, that's open to just about everybody. All right, I think we have time for one more deep life question here. This one comes from Marco. Marco asks, how do I get better at critical deep thinking about any topic?

As an ardent Newportian believer, I do my best to time block and prioritize deep work. However, whenever I need to think about a topic deeply, whether work, related or life related, I find that I'm not particularly structured and somewhat haphazard. Well, Marco, it's an interesting question. We could break the topic of critical thinking or deep thinking into two different broad categories. We call it the pragmatic and the philosophical. So the pragmatic is, I need to figure out, like you suggest, a new design architecture for a feature or figure out, like, should we move and what house should I buy?

These are examples you gave in your elaboration. And you're trying to pragmatically get to a decision or understand a situation in a way that's useful. Then we have philosophical critical thinking, which is about engaging complex thought in a way that you're able to internalize and it enriches your understanding of the world and increases your toolkit for dealing with the world. So it's sort of a more intellectual academic notion of critical thinking. Both are important. it. Now, I don't know that I have a lot of good advice for how to get better at the pragmatic deep thinking. There's a whole spectrum of people's natural ability with this. Like a lot of mathematical types, pragmatic critical thinking is something that comes pretty natural to me. I mean, I'm able to sift through a lot of irrelevant details and try to cut to the quick.

Like, well, this is the key first question. Figure this out. That constrains us to these two options. Figure that out. Now we need to get to the answer. So there's some sense you could try to repletable. some of that option pruning when you're doing pragmatic critical thinking. If you're thinking about, oh, should we buy a new house and where should it go? The critical thinker might come in and be like, well, what's the foundational question that has to be answered before we can get more specific? And that's maybe how much money do we have available? Well, okay, what's the value of our house?

We've got to get that information. How much money do we have in savings? So if we sold the house, we owe this much in our mortgage, we could probably do about this much down payment. and this is what's comfortable with our budget. So now this gives us a range, a price range of houses. That cuts off a lot of random thinking. And then there's like a location question.

This would be the second key question. What are we generally, why would we want to move, but also what locations would satisfy these criteria? Well, there's a job we need to stay near. And maybe we no longer need to steer near a job. And it's about outdoor activity that matters or being near family or whatever. We need to be closer to a job. That's what we're trying to do.

So now you have a location, right? So I'm just, I'm walking through an example here of a pragmatic critical thinking. You're pruning with question asking and question answering. Now you have a price range is in locations. You're going to go gather. Do these houses that really appeal to us within our price range exist at any of these locations? If not, like we have to go back to the drawing board. But maybe like these two locations, what we can do, this opens up some interesting options.

And now, like, think about how much you've simplified this. You're looking at a small number of locations, a price range that you know holds houses. are probably interesting, and now you can sit down and talk to a realtor in a real focused manner. So again, I'm not an expert on pragmatic critical thinking, but for those of us for which it comes naturally, it's all about you have this huge tree of options, and you're pruning, answering key questions that prunes it, then the next key question that prunes it some more. So it's a tree pruning algorithm that's implemented with strategic sequential question asking and answering. So maybe thinking about that way will help.

But it comes to more philosophical critical thinking, there's a few principles here that I think are important. So, you know, one I would say is gradualism. As I just talked about in my answer to the prior question, I'm not a big believer in this school of just jump on in. Read Moby Dick, it'll change your life. Bring the seven-year-old to the modern art gallery and just somehow through asthmosis, they'll learn to appreciate art.

Practice has to be done. intellectual practice has to be done to get you ready to understand and appreciate a given category of intellectual engagement. So gradualism is building up the number of categories through which you're comfortable. It's partially through practice, a lot through secondary source consumption, so consuming sources that talk about the category you care about so you can understand what's going on in that category, and some through education. This is what you would get out of the liberal arts education out of college, but you can also get this out of cell. education courses you take online or like I did last week you could read a 600 page film history textbook which by the way I completed so I am ready now to go watch citizen cane I got through my 600 pages of introductory film theory but there's that gradualism

so you want to stretch but stretch into a zone where you're comfortable don't die right into a Derrida book if you've never heard the term semiotics you know in fact maybe just avoid Derrida altogether if you can. I'm just joking. Another thing that I think is important if we are thinking about philosophical, critical thinking would be getting better at reflection.

So a big part of internalizing information learned from what you're reading from that Nietzsche book you just read, from that Jung book you just read, from Moby Dick, is time alone with your own thoughts where you can mull over, clarify, and begin to integrate into the existing framework through

which you understand your world and yourself integrate those ideas. That's where you actually are able to extract a real value out of the consumption of intellectually challenging information. So you have to be used to time alone with your own thoughts, and you have to dedicate a lot of time along with your own thoughts, those walks, you know, those long drives, those sitting in the back of the room and you're not really paying attention to the speaker, you're just contemplating something. You've got to be comfortable with that type of.

of internalization, that reflection, if you're going to really get a lot of value, a lot of critical value out of intellectual content that you're consuming. A course, a corollary to this is that if, for example, you feed your mind distraction from your phone and tablet at the slightest hint of boredom all throughout your life, this is the type of reflection and internalization that you're going to get bad at. This is one of the hidden cost of constantly feeding yourself distraction is that it makes you intellectually impoverished. You lose the ability to go on that long walk and make sense of thorough.

If your body has been trained, my God, I'm uncomfortable because there's not a stimuli. Get me something shining on this little piece of glass. There's a little corollary there. The final thing is an idea that I talk about off and on for a while now on the show, which is the dialectical method. Again, it's one of the best ways to really understand something critical is to also encounter the smartest alternative or counterpoint that you can find. We've known this since Socrates that the collision,

the collision of these alternatives or counterpoints, that collision itself is going to generate a deeper insight than encountering any one of these approaches in isolation. I mentioned this in last week's show that some people are uncomfortable with the dialectical method because they worry that, A, is betraying their tribe to consume something that is not approved by the, their tribe or that they might be tricked into giving up on their deeply held values.

And, you know, what I argue there is, okay, first of all, that you might be tricked. It's rarely people thinking about themselves. It's usually people thinking about other people. They say, I won't be tricked. I understand what's right. But these other people will be. So let's try to stop them from encountering other information. But my point is, that's not a betrayal.

If something is deeply held and is valuable to you and it's a correct stance for your moral foundations and your whatever, right? Encountering strong counterpoint of alternatives will nuance and strengthen your understanding of the thing you care about. People do not get tricked out of stances. Yes, over time, their beliefs about things might shift, but that's usually actually a productive shift if that shift is coming from these dialectical encounters. But in the moment, it's going to make what you hold deeply more nuanced and stronger, and it's going to root out the things that you're holding because, you feel an obligation or social pressure to, but maybe aren't quite right. So that dialectical method is also critical.

Right. So just to quickly summarize, if we're talking about critical philosophical thinking, you need a gradualism. Purposefully and pragmatically increasing the categories under which you can meaningfully engage intellectual input. Two, we worry about reflection. You need to be comfortable with time alone with your own thoughts to actually make sense with and internalize your internal frameworks, the information you encounter. That's what enables it,

makes it ready for application in your life. And then three of the dialectical method when encountering a strong idea, also encounter a strong counterpoint or alternative so you can get a depth or nuance that goes well beyond just encountering one particular take on something. Do those three things,

and I think your ability to think critically about the world and ideas is going to be significantly increased. Most people don't do this. most people probably should. And what I should do is probably wrap this up. As mentioned at the beginning of the show, I have a TV appearance that begins now in eight minutes.

So I need to go turn on my lights and get my camera going. So I will be back on Thursday with some listener calls. And until then, as always, stay deep.