I think this can be easily read as a summary because I comment on almost every point of the book. But the experience of reading it is worth something in and of itself, minus my commentary. the review is a bit on the critical side but I still recommend the read for sure, given you don’t take him at his word for everything.

This is where I would put a summary if I had the time and energy to make one. Someday I might organize these notes, but most likely not.

  • Introduction
    • it starts with Andrew Sullivan’s “I used to be a human being” article. i think i read this before? time to re read
      • opening seems familiar but maybe it’s become such a common narrative these days.
      • Sept 19, 2016 it says. 7 years ago!
      • “the once-unimaginable pace of the professional blogger was now the default for everyone.”
      • ok but i’m blogging now to get away from social media and this guy is saying blogging is what’s sucking up hs life. i think bc i dont blog about current topics it’s different though.
      • “every minute i was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter” well… some people just live far away. in evenings where there is no other place to meet, what can a guy do?
      • “not long ago, surfing the web … was a stationary activity. …the smartphone went and made the rabbit hole portable.” I think I’ve escaped this much at least.
      • 2015 study found young adults used their phones 85 times a day. I looked in my Screen Time and found around that number of phone pickups a day. And I don’t even use it much compared to others. (though thankfully it’s not 5 hours a day as mentioned in the article. I dont think i’ve ever hit an average of 5 hours, even in high school.)
      • image of screen time hours
      • image of screen time pickups
      • the idea of “freedom from the constraints of time” also being a type of freedom we are giving up
      • “You are where your attention is” – re, texting while watching something together or on phone during dinner. I guess I can see that. I think that’s why watching something together online doesn’t hit the same. Or calling in a group as opposed to one on one. When I’m in a larger discord call where I’m not the main speaker, they are just noise. I don’t really pay attention, I’ve got my other stuff going on.
      • mentions of how we used to craft things by hand is interesting. it’s true automation makes these crafts not a necessary life skill but rather a hobby. it’s also true that what we craft digitally is real, though a shocking amount of software engineers take up carpentry as a hobby. I guess we like to make things, but something about the result’s physicality appeals. We may not be too far from this physicality being emulated, though.
      • “commercial cacophony” something about this alliteration, i like it. bro can write
      • this talks of Burning Man, now I’m pretty sure I’ve never read this article before, only things similar to it.
      • there are some people who hate burning man… maybe a similar experience is possible on a smaller self-organized scale, though. I don’t know.
    • cal newport says he “never have a social media account, tend to not spend much time web surfing, phone takes a relatively minor role in my life”
    • so he does research to get into the headspace of the average guy who needs this book. this is kinda weird right? he doesnt have personal experience. i mean a lot of nonfiction self help uses anecdotes not from the author’s personal life but i raised an eyebrow for sure. (but malcolm gladwell may be a hack) like he doesn’t even work in the field!
    • this book was published 2019, by the way.
    • pretty sure i read a goodreads review saying the same and didnt pick this up. but then some other ppl on YT recommended it and i forgot i didnt want to read it. so here i am. i think it’s good to have a mutual point of reference when talking about this stuff (given: most people have read this book).
    • newport mentions social media manipulating mood: fomo, policital extremism. TBH majority of friends do not use social media like that though. It’s not really the negativity of the internet or seeing other people have fun that is draining. I think the action of checking in and of itself is the tiring part.
    • “fretting about the app’s ability to invade the evening hours you used to spend talking to friends or reading.” Well not really. I’ve never spent time with friends like that in the first place.
  • ch 1: a lopsided arms race
    • “it’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy” yeah this hits the nail on the head
    • it’s funny there’s a quote about Maher talking about checking your “likes” being the new smoking. Because I’ve said the same thing to my friends, when checking my phone I’m “taking a smoke break”.
    • Adam Alter -> if you have same bday as someone who does something horrible, you hate them even more than if you didn’t have that information. That, too, is something I understand…
    • but his point is that environment creates behavior. not about disliking people lol
    • Searched up cal newport’s blog to see if his Digital Minimalism still holds up in a post-COVID world and found this https://calnewport.com/neil-gaimans-radical-vision-for-the-future-of-the-internet/ I guess none of my thought is original. FWIW in 6th grade (2011) I prototyped smart glasses for a grade school project and in 2012 the Google Glass was announced. Very similar to Kurzgesagt’s new video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0). In the past few weeks, I keep thinking this: We’re coming to a collective consciousness. In the future, kids will be like, “damn, you lived like that?”
    • Also important: Cal is a guy with a family. Not like we who grew up digital.
    • the value people get from social media sites is not any sort of feedback mechanism but more for reading news from others. so take away the likes and people can still find it useful.
    • we are wired to crave social approval / “likes” from people. this is evolutionary. so the people saying “just don’t care about the likes” think we can go against our deepest instincts, which is totally unfair. Need a better method to navigate things.
  • ch 2: digital minimalism
    • here I started highlighting things as I read (e-book from the library, I wouldn’t mark a physical library book). because I didn’t have my laptop on me for notes. so there might be some missing thoughts as I forget why I highlighted certain sentences.
    • maximalism = any potential for benefit is enough to start using a new technology. minimalism = the use of a certain technology must be the best way to achieve their values. eg. “what if there’s something you’re missing” isn’t enough reason to start a social media
    • Newport mentions people joining social media for standard reasons: career, keeping connected, providing entertainment. I wonder. I wonder about queer / marginalized communities who find their people through the internet. This is something important that he does not seem to touch on ever.
    • Thoreau’s new economics: Seeing screen distraction as “sacrificing your (life / time / attention)”. Eg. Twitter for 10h a week is too high a time cost for its potential benefits. I guess this comes from an inherent belief that people can produce things “of worth”, which I don’t really know if I agree with. We all rot in the end. Newport talks about men with legacies, who invented things or created lasting discoveries. I don’t think the amount you revolutionize the world or how famous your work became reflects what one “should” aim for in life, though. He keeps talking about meaningful this, high-value activity that. It’s not for him to dictate. I guess this is more semantics, though; it’s moreso that life feels more meaningful (brain chemical happy) than meaningfulness as a universal truth in and of itself. Maybe he appeals to our self-awareness of mortality.
  • ch 3: the digital declutter
    • Here he introduces a phrase that I see a lot in similar writings and communities (eg. r/nosurf). “Losing lightweight contact with your international friends might help clarify which of these friendships were real in the first place, and strengthen your relationships with those who remain.” what the fuck does a “real” friendship mean? I never figured this out and every time it’s mentioned, it annoys me immensely. Do you measure the realness of your friendships by what value they provide you? If so, what does that say about you as a person? Do you judge your friends by their priorities, that those who have obligations aren’t as real as those who are more easily available? Every discussion about “real” friendship feels utilitarian, selfish, and pretentious. If someone sends you a text, it’s not that they’re bums cheating high-effort conversation. They thought of you, and that’s nice and appreciated – appreciated even if you don’t have the mental or physical capacity to respond quickly or at all. Imo, each relationship needs to be individually evaluated and blanket statements can’t do it justice. Someone not having the means (this includes if they aren’t there yet mentally) is not equivalent to someone not worth your effort. Anyway, by their definition, do I have “real friends” at all? I don’t think so. And am I a “real friend” if I refuse to communicate in methods that don’t convenience me?
    • i recognise that friendships are always semi transactional, so pretending there exists some purity or realness is…. annoying. imo friendships can be categorized as simply personally desirable or undesirable, and these categories change as both sides’ lives change, no harm no foul.
    • If Cal Newport’s vision of you having really existed is by persisting academic or industrial discoveries that impact many, one can just as easily lived a full life by socially brightening in the lives of many.
    • in his experiment, he mentions participants go back to their hobbies since before they got into the screen habit. Very interesting …. so, what about we who grew up with screens?
    • He writes to ask yourself this about tech: “Does this technology directly support something I deeply value?” This is interesting. I don’t know what I value. Maybe I should figure that out.
  • ch 4: spend time alone
    • Sometimes I think about reading books is categorized weirdly as a “positive pursuit”. I don’t doubt it, but it’s different from the other things for sure. Newport says solitude is when you avoid input from other minds (in which case books don’t count). And you get satisfaction from gaining physical skills or crafting (which books don’t give). What you are interested in reading, for its value to yourself, may not be what others want to talk to you about. I guess it’s more of a “training concentration for long periods” thing?
    • solitude gives insight & emotional balance from “unhurried self-reflection”. I like that phrase.
    • I think about my summers in high school where I would put leave my phone at home and go on long walks. 3 miles, 6 miles. Once 12 miles but that was because I had a garbage sense of direction and walked the wrong way for 3 miles on the path home. I only realized when I ended up in front of the neighboring high school and then squinted at the bus stop map. (My mom called the police that day. In retrospect perhaps I should have told people I was going out, but I never did and never do – I don’t like being asked how it went.) At the time, I hadn’t read anything about the benefits of solitude or walking. There was just something in me that told me it was what I had to do, and I wonder if it’s in all of us.
    • smartphone banishes solitude with “the quick glance” at the slightest hint of boredom. That’s something I understand… I’ve removed most nonessential apps on my phone and I still keep watching the mostly-blank screen. Even if it’s not new content, I think the screen is engaging in and of itself. It’s just such a wonder of technology.
    • Newport talks about many experiencing and accepting a “background hum of low-grade anxiety that permeates their daily lives” as a result of lack of solitude. I’m not too sure if that’s exactly the cause, but I understand what he means by low-grade anxiety.
    • In recent years, we started caring about being contact-able all the time. Before, we were all fine living life without cellphones. He writes about the modern non-cellphone subculture: “Life without a cell phone is occasionally annoying, but it’s much less debilitating than you might expect.” I wonder how much of this remains true post-COVID with restaurants doing contactless menus and contactless checkout. Some of the payment relies on QR code scanning. I suppose there is an assumption that at least one person in your group will have a smartphone on them. This is also extremely North America-centric because places like China require wechat / alipay for everything. I think it’s also way harder to live without a phone as an introvert. Thinking about the time my car broke down on the highway and I called the towing company rather than waving my arms for someone to come help me.
    • an interesting phrase from Newport that smartphones create “solitary deprivation”. I forgot what else I was originally thinking when I highlighted this phrase.
  • ch 5: don’t click “like”
    • This chapter introduces the default network as the neural network / circuit that activates when we aren’t actively doing anything else. This network focuses on thinking about our own social life. This is interesting because I originally heard about the default mode network (DMN) from Dr. K. He said that depressed people have overly active DMNs and you can counteract it with active tasks like meditation. This is also where addictions come in – to distract yourself from your own DMN.
    • “someone in the highest quartile of social media use was three times more likely to be lonelier than someone in the lowest quartile… the data was clear. The more time you spend ‘connecting’ on these services, the more isolated you’re likely to become.” Sooooo this is correlation and not causation :/ I think the opposite is more likely: the lonelier / more socially outcast you are to begin with, the more likely you are going to build your life online.
    • at around 30% of the chapter: Carnegie Mellon University research mentioned woo! (image of “brazil mentioned” meme but it’s CMU)
    • Newport talks about how “high quality” conversation should come have analog cues, such as voice tone or facial expressions. This is exactly why autistic people prefer texting lol.
    • he recommends letting go of people whose relationship with you exists only over social media. Then talks about how the weak-tie social value is an “invention of the past decade”. Though weak ties are exactly what many people give talks about keeping for career growth, so I am skeptical of where his claim comes from.
    • A strategy is to set up conversation office hours, where you have a consistent slot where people can contact you; eg. 5:30 pm when you are driving home from work. When I first started my job, I tried scheduling an intro meeting with my manager’s manager. She declined my invite and told me to drop into office hours. Well I have insane social anxiety so I just never talked to her again. I guess there is a difference because her office hours were not 1:1 exclusive, but there’s this sort of standoffish”my time is more valuable than yours” feeling. Well, it’s not like I have a standardized consistent schedule that I can do this with anyway. I like order, though, so it sounds appealing.
    • another suggestion: become a regular at a place and people will come find you. this is kind of like furmeets, i guess. “cultivating a group of regulars that come hang out.” But where can we do this free of charge and at random intervals? This is just the lack of third places in the world. An aside about furmeets, I don’t really like going because there is no activity besides socializing. I’d rather work at a cafe with friends or do literally anything with an activity.
  • ch 6: reclaim leisure
    • physically playing an instrument being more fun than doing so digitally. can agree. Satisfaction from making physical stuff is real and why SWEs keep taking up woodworking. I personally don’t find carpentry terribly useful but maybe I can cook instead?
    • Bennett says that we should keep doing stuff in the half of the day we don’t spend working, instead of being idle. Because doing activities helps us be happier and even increases the value of the business eight. He claims that mental faculties are “capable of continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change – not rest, except in sleep.” I honestly can’t relate because my mind is not up for drawing when I come home from work. A better way of approaching this is that you want to use different parts of your brain, I guess.
    • Newport definitely an INTJ or something.
    • v diff argument. for going to IRL groups, newport says you cant see the benefits immediately. but for arguing against spending time online, newport tells you to ask yourself whether you immediately feel better when doing it. it’s faulty to analyze two things with two very different methodologies to prove a point.
  • ch 7: join the attention resistance
    • I agree that not using tech the way big tech wants us to is an act of resistance that is worthy of taking up
    • newport mentions how advertising makes us the product. I think about how things like Discord and Telegram basically have no ads. Right now, value itself is just the number of users. The potential. Or maybe the personal information.
    • services as a foundational tech – sometimes we don’t think about why we use something, because it seems socially weird if you don’t. This vagueness lets people use something without a concrete purpose. Discord again – “Your place to talk.” They changed it from “chat for gamers”. Now it is purposefully ambiguous.
    • “What makes general-purpose computing powerful is that you don’t need separate devices for separate uses, not that it allows you to do multiple things at the same time.” Old timey computers used to only have one task in the focus at a time. How can we replicate this again? The Freedom app was mentioned but I haven’t really checked out how it works.
    • Newport touches on the obvious uses of social media, such as keeping up with friends, family, or the times. A very natural solution to decrease use is to block them during your work hours and only check them sporadically during downtime. He appears completely oblivious of walled-garden networks also being prominent content distribution networks, be it game wiki Discords, github project development support Discords, twitter threads, reddit posts, etc. I can only say this is a blocker because I’ve tried it, I wouldn’t have independently thought of this problem otherwise. I really hate the lack of public protocols for supposedly-public information these days. You really can’t control how to get information. (by the way, my approach is having a separate twitter/etc account that is completely empty, just for viewing content that people send me. of course things get messy with group-chat-social-media-combinations. Where the group chat has important info and a ton of useless stuff.)
    • dumphones. honestly I think these things are super cool / aesthetically, it’s like making a statement. But as of now, the best I can do is removing lots of functions on my smartphone. I don’t have social media on there anymore. I use a third-party Discord client that allows me to selectively receive just DMs and not messages from bigger servers. TBH I struggled a long time with no-social-media-on-phone because I would keep accessing twitter on Safari. Ended up randomly generating a new password and writing it on a physical slip of paper in my room. twitter is your furry social lifeline so I can’t really close it down.
    • (not book content) minimalism reddit post talked about how “my smartphone / laptop bring me minimalism because I can do so many things without buying specialized devices”. OTOH “neo-luddite digital minimalism” culture is about having more dumb devices and less smart ones. Like your smartphone is replaced by a GPS, camera, and flip phone. Anyway I don’t agree with OP; the very possibility of features you don’t want (and hard to control yourself around it) is the antithesis of minimalism.
  • overall: cool ideas but too many sweeping authoritative statements don’t work in such a little-researched topic.
  • very little said about messaging apps and online-only communities.
  • I read some writing by a friend that referenced another writing about how the structure of a social media or technology reflects its manifesto. (Not too sure about wording.) And whether going back to personal mini sites would cause self centeredness. I think about Newport’s praise for solitude; is that self centeredness? Actually, how selfish something is becomes very difficult to think about past the most obvious surface level examples. It also depends whether you define the “self” as an individual, a family, or a community. In general I don’t think one will be faulted for any of this, and selfishness isn’t the core of the social networking debate.
  • So. This guy runs an experiment on his readers and writes a book about his results. That’s really it. He talks about only using technology if we are sure it’s the best use to accomplish a particular task. So I apply this thinking to his book: are we sure his methodology is the best way to execute digital hygiene? There was no control group or alternate methods researched here.
  • The study above talks about forming good relationships as the foundation of happiness. That’s pretty different than Newport’s argument. Newport isn’t completely contradicting – he says that solitude and careful picking of relationships deepen existing ones and lead to a good life. But that assumes existing bonds. It is not so simple to form these deeply enough to make someone care about you (and vice versa).
  • This is one of the most popular videos from Kurzgesagt. The solution to loneliness here is to reach out. And the easiest way to start these pathways is through connection.