Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport _copy.pdf

Portfolio/Penguin An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2019 by Calvin C. Newport Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Newport, Cal, author. Title: Digital minimalism : on living better with less technology / Cal Newport. Description: New York : Portfolio/Penguin, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identiﬁers: LCCN 2018041568 (print) | LCCN 2018043187 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525536543 (Ebook) | ISBN 9780525536512 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525542872 (international edition) Subjects: LCSH: Information technology—Social aspects. | Internet addiction—Social aspects. | Technological innovations—Social aspects. Classiﬁcation: LCC HM851 (ebook) | LCC HM851.N49256 2019 (print) | DDC 303.48/33—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018041568 While the author has made every eﬀort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to oﬀer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone. Version_1 To Julie: my partner, my muse, my voice of reason Contents Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction PART 1 Foundations 1. A Lopsided Arms Race 2. Digital Minimalism 3. The Digital Declutter PART 2 Practices 4. Spend Time Alone 5. Don’t Click “Like” 6. Reclaim Leisure 7. Join the Attention Resistance Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author Introduction I n September 2016, the inﬂuential blogger and commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote a 7,000-word essay for New York magazine titled “I Used to Be a Human Being.” Its subtitle was alarming: “An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too.” The article was widely shared. I’ll admit, however, that when I ﬁrst read it, I didn’t fully comprehend Sullivan’s warning. I’m one of the few members of my generation to never have a social media account, and tend not to spend much time web surﬁng. As a result, my phone plays a relatively minor role in my life—a fact that places me outside the mainstream experience this article addressed. In other words, I knew that the innovations of the internet age were playing an increasingly intrusive role in many people’s lives, but I didn’t have a visceral understanding of what this meant. That is, until everything changed. Earlier in 2016, I published a book titled Deep Work. It was about the underappreciated value of intense focus and how the professional world’s emphasis on distracting communication tools was holding people back from producing their best work. As my book found an audience, I began to hear from more and more of my readers. Some sent me messages, while others cornered me after public appearances—but many of them asked the same question: What about their personal lives? They agreed with my arguments about oﬀice distractions, but as they then explained, they were arguably even more distressed by the way new technologies seemed to be draining meaning and satisfaction from their time spent outside of work. This caught my attention and tumbled me unexpectedly into a crash course on the promises and perils of modern digital life. Almost everyone I spoke to believed in the power of the internet, and recognized that it can and should be a force that improves their lives. They didn’t necessarily want to give up Google Maps, or abandon Instagram, but they also felt as though their current relationship with technology was unsustainable—to the point that if something didn’t change soon, they’d break, too. A common term I heard in these conversations about modern digital life was exhaustion. It’s not that any one app or website was particularly bad when considered in isolation. As many people clariﬁed, the issue was the overall impact of having so many diﬀerent shiny baubles pulling so insistently at their attention and manipulating their mood. Their problem with this frenzied activity is less about its details than the fact that it’s increasingly beyond their control. Few want to spend so much time online, but these tools have a way of cultivating behavioral addictions. The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life. As I discovered in my subsequent research, and will argue in the next chapter, some of these addictive properties are accidental (few predicted the extent to which text messaging could command your attention), while many are quite purposeful (compulsive use is the foundation for many social media business plans). But whatever its source, this irresistible attraction to screens is leading people to feel as though they’re ceding more and more of their autonomy when it comes to deciding how they direct their attention. No one, of course, signed up for this loss of control. They downloaded the apps and set up accounts for good reasons, only to discover, with grim irony, that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that made them appealing in the ﬁrst place: they joined Facebook to stay in touch with friends across the country, and then ended up unable to maintain an uninterrupted conversation with the friend sitting across the table. I also learned about the negative impact of unrestricted online activity on psychological well-being. Many people I spoke to underscored social media’s ability to manipulate their mood. The constant exposure to their friends’ carefully curated portrayals of their lives generates feelings of inadequacy—especially during periods when they’re already feeling low—and for teenagers, it provides a cruelly eﬀective way to be publicly excluded. In addition, as demonstrated during the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath, online discussion seems to accelerate people’s shift toward emotionally charged and draining extremes. The techno-philosopher Jaron Lanier convincingly argues that the primacy of anger and outrage online is, in some sense, an unavoidable feature of the medium: In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts. For heavy internet users, repeated interaction with this darkness can become a source of draining negativity—a steep price that many don’t even realize they’re paying to support their compulsive connectivity. Encountering this distressing collection of concerns— from the exhausting and addictive overuse of these tools, to their ability to reduce autonomy, decrease happiness, stoke darker instincts, and distract from more valuable activities —opened my eyes to the fraught relationship so many now maintain with the technologies that dominate our culture. It provided me, in other words, a much better understanding of what Andrew Sullivan meant when he lamented: “I used to be a human being.” This experience of talking with my readers convinced me that the impact of technology on people’s personal lives was worth deeper exploration. I began more seriously researching and writing on this topic, trying to both better understand its contours and seek out the rare examples of those who can extract great value from these new technologies without losing control.* One of the ﬁrst things that became clear during this exploration is that our culture’s relationship with these tools is complicated by the fact that they mix harm with beneﬁts. Smartphones, ubiquitous wireless internet, digital platforms that connect billions of people—these are triumphant innovations! Few serious commentators think we’d be better oﬀ retreating to an earlier technological age. But at the same time, people are tired of feeling like they’ve become a slave to their devices. This reality creates a jumbled emotional landscape where you can simultaneously cherish your ability to discover inspiring photos on Instagram while fretting about this app’s ability to invade the evening hours you used to spend talking with friends or reading. The most common response to these complications is to suggest modest hacks and tips. Perhaps if you observe a digital Sabbath, or keep your phone away from your bed at night, or turn oﬀ notiﬁcations and resolve to be more mindful, you can keep all the good things that attracted you to these new technologies in the ﬁrst place while still minimizing their worst impacts. I understand the appeal of this moderate approach because it relieves you of the need to make hard decisions about your digital life—you don’t have to quit anything, miss out on any beneﬁts, annoy any friends, or suﬀer any serious inconveniences. But as is becoming increasingly clear to those who have attempted these types of minor corrections, willpower, tips, and vague resolutions are not suﬀicient by themselves to tame the ability of new technologies to invade your cognitive landscape—the addictiveness of their design and the strength of the cultural pressures supporting them are too strong for an ad hoc approach to succeed. In my work on this topic, I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-ﬂedged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to conﬁdently ignore everything else. There are many philosophies that might satisfy these goals. On one extreme, there are the Neo-Luddites, who advocate the abandonment of most new technologies. On another extreme, you have the Quantiﬁed Self enthusiasts, who carefully integrate digital devices into all aspects of their life with the goal of optimizing their existence. Of the diﬀerent philosophies I studied, however, there was one in particular that stood out as a superior answer for those looking to thrive in our current moment of technological overload. I call it digital minimalism, and it applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools. This idea is not new. Long before Henry David Thoreau exclaimed “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,” Marcus Aurelius asked: “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?” Digital minimalism simply adapts this classical insight to the role of technology in our modern lives. The impact of this simple adaptation, however, can be profound. In this book, you’ll encounter many examples of digital minimalists who experienced massively positive changes by ruthlessly reducing their time spent online to focus on a small number of high-value activities. Because digital minimalists spend so much less time connected than their peers, it’s easy to think of their lifestyle as extreme, but the minimalists would argue that this perception is backward: what’s extreme is how much time everyone else spends staring at their screens. The key to thriving in our high-tech world, they’ve learned, is to spend much less time using technology. The goal of this book is to make the case for digital minimalism, including a more detailed exploration of what it asks and why it works, and then to teach you how to adopt this philosophy if you decide it’s right for you. To do so, I divided the book into two parts. In part 1, I describe the philosophical underpinnings of digital minimalism, starting with a closer examination of the forces that are making so many people’s digital lives increasingly intolerable, before moving on to a detailed discussion of the digital minimalism philosophy, including my argument for why it’s the right solution to these problems. Part 1 concludes by introducing my suggested method for adopting this philosophy: the digital declutter. As I’ve argued, aggressive action is needed to fundamentally transform your relationship with technology. The digital declutter provides this aggressive action. This process requires you to step away from optional online activities for thirty days. During this period, you’ll wean yourself from the cycles of addiction that many digital tools can instill, and begin to rediscover the analog activities that provide you deeper satisfaction. You’ll take walks, talk to friends in person, engage your community, read books, and stare at the clouds. Most importantly, the declutter gives you the space to reﬁne your understanding of the things you value most. At the end of the thirty days, you will then add back a small number of carefully chosen online activities that you believe will provide massive beneﬁt to these things you value. Going forward, you’ll do your best to make these intentional activities the core of your online life—leaving behind most of the other distracting behaviors that used to fragment your time and snare your attention. The declutter acts as a jarring reset: you come into the process a frazzled maximalist and leave an intentional minimalist. In this ﬁnal chapter of part 1, I’ll guide you through implementing your own digital declutter. In doing so, I’ll draw extensively on an experiment I ran in the early winter of 2018 in which over 1,600 people agreed to perform a digital declutter under my guidance and report back about their experience. You’ll hear these participants’ stories and learn what strategies worked well for them, and what traps they encountered that you should avoid. The second part of this book takes a closer look at some ideas that will help you cultivate a sustainable digital minimalism lifestyle. In these chapters, I examine issues such as the importance of solitude and the necessity of cultivating high-quality leisure to replace the time most now dedicate to mindless device use. I propose and defend the perhaps controversial claim that your relationships will strengthen if you stop clicking “Like” or leaving comments on social media posts, and become harder to reach by text messages. I also provide an insider look at the attention resistance—a loosely organized movement of individuals who use high-tech tools and strict operating procedures to extract value from the products of the digital attention economy, while avoiding falling victim to compulsive use. Each chapter in part 2 concludes with a collection of practices, which are concrete tactics designed to help you act on the big ideas of the chapter. As a budding digital minimalist, you can view the part 2 practices as a toolbox meant to aid your eﬀorts to build a minimalist lifestyle that works for your particular circumstances. In Walden, Thoreau famously writes: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Less often quoted, however, is the optimistic rejoinder that follows in his next paragraph: They honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. Our current relationship with the technologies of our hyper-connected world is unsustainable and is leading us closer to the quiet desperation that Thoreau observed so many years ago. But as Thoreau reminds us, “the sun rose clear” and we still have the ability to change this state of aﬀairs. To do so, however, we cannot passively allow the wild tangle of tools, entertainments, and distractions provided by the internet age to dictate how we spend our time or how we feel. We must instead take steps to extract the good from these technologies while sidestepping what’s bad. We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction. A philosophy, in other words, like digital minimalism. PART 1 Foundations 1 A Lopsided Arms Race WE DIDN’T SIGN UP FOR THIS I remember when I ﬁrst encountered Facebook: It was the spring of 2004; I was a senior in college and began to notice an increasing number of my friends talk about a website called thefacebook.com. The ﬁrst person to show me an actual Facebook proﬁle was Julie, who was then my girlfriend, and now my wife. “My memory of it was that it was a novelty,” she told me recently. “It had been sold to us as a virtual version of our printed freshman directory, something we could use to look up the boyfriends or girlfriends of people we knew.” The key word in this memory is novelty. Facebook didn’t arrive in our world with a promise to radically transform the rhythms of our social and civic lives; it was just one diversion among many. In the spring of 2004, the people I knew who signed up for thefacebook.com were almost certainly spending signiﬁcantly more time playing Snood (a Tetris-style puzzle game that was inexplicably popular) than they were tweaking their proﬁles or poking their virtual friends. “It was interesting,” Julie summarized, “but it certainly didn’t seem like this was something on which we would spend any real amount of time.” Three years later, Apple released the iPhone, sparking the mobile revolution. What many forget, however, was that the original “revolution” promised by this device was also much more modest than the impact it eventually created. In our current moment, smartphones have reshaped people’s experience of the world by providing an always- present connection to a humming matrix of chatter and distraction. In January 2007, when Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone during his famous Macworld keynote, the vision was much less grandiose. One of the major selling points of the original iPhone was that it integrated your iPod with your cell phone, preventing you from having to carry around two separate devices in your pockets. (This is certainly how I remember thinking about the iPhone’s beneﬁts when it was ﬁrst announced.) Accordingly, when Jobs demonstrated an iPhone onstage during his keynote address, he spent the ﬁrst eight minutes of the demo walking through its media features, concluding: “It’s the best iPod we’ve ever made!” Another major selling point of the device when it launched was the many ways in which it improved the experience of making phone calls. It was big news at the time that Apple forced AT&T to open its voicemail system to enable a better interface for the iPhone. Onstage, Jobs was also clearly enamored of the simplicity with which you could scroll through phone numbers, and the fact that the dial pad appeared on the screen instead of requiring permanent plastic buttons. “The killer app is making calls,” Jobs exclaimed to applause during his keynote. It’s not until thirty-three minutes into that famed presentation that he gets around to highlighting features like improved text messaging and mobile internet access that dominate the way we now use these devices. To conﬁrm that this limited vision was not some quirk of Jobs’s keynote script, I spoke with Andy Grignon, who was one of the original iPhone team members. “This was supposed to be an iPod that made phone calls,” he conﬁrmed. “Our core mission was playing music and making phone calls.” As Grignon then explained to me, Steve Jobs was initially dismissive of the idea that the iPhone would become more of a general-purpose mobile computer running a variety of diﬀerent third-party applications. “The second we allow some knucklehead programmer to write some code that crashes it,” Jobs once told Grignon, “that will be when they want to call 911.” When the iPhone ﬁrst shipped in 2007, there was no App Store, no social media notiﬁcations, no quick snapping of photos to Instagram, no reason to surreptitiously glance down a dozen times during a dinner—and this was absolutely ﬁne with Steve Jobs, and the millions who bought their ﬁrst smartphone during this period. As with the early Facebook adopters, few predicted how much our relationship with this shiny new tool would mutate in the years that followed. It’s widely accepted that new technologies such as social media and smartphones massively changed how we live in the twenty-ﬁrst century. There are many ways to portray this change. I think the social critic Laurence Scott does so quite eﬀectively when he describes the modern hyper- connected existence as one in which “a moment can feel strangely ﬂat if it exists solely in itself.” The point of the above observations, however, is to emphasize what many also forget, which is that these changes, in addition to being massive and transformational, were also unexpected and unplanned. A college senior who set up an account on thefacebook.com in 2004 to look up classmates probably didn’t predict that the average modern user would spend around two hours per day on social media and related messaging services, with close to half that time dedicated to Facebook’s products alone. Similarly, a ﬁrst adopter who picked up an iPhone in 2007 for the music features would be less enthusiastic if told that within a decade he could expect to compulsively check the device eighty-ﬁve times a day—a “feature” we now know Steve Jobs never considered as he prepared his famous keynote. These changes crept up on us and happened fast, before we had a chance to step back and ask what we really wanted out of the rapid advances of the past decade. We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life. We didn’t, in other words, sign up for the digital world in which we’re currently entrenched; we seem to have stumbled backward into it. This nuance is often missed in our cultural conversation surrounding these tools. In my experience, when concerns about new technologies are publicly discussed, techno- apologists are quick to push back by turning the discussion to utility—providing case studies, for example, of a struggling artist ﬁnding an audience through social media,* or WhatsApp connecting a deployed soldier with her family back home. They then conclude that it’s incorrect to dismiss these technologies on the grounds that they’re useless, a tactic that is usually suﬀicient to end the debate. The techno-apologists are right in their claims, but they’re also missing the point. The perceived utility of these tools is not the ground on which our growing wariness builds. If you ask the average social media user, for example, why they use Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, they can provide you with reasonable answers. Each one of these services probably oﬀers them something useful that would be hard to ﬁnd elsewhere: the ability, for example, to keep up with baby pictures of a sibling’s child, or to use a hashtag to monitor a grassroots movement. The source of our unease is not evident in these thin- sliced case studies, but instead becomes visible only when confronting the thicker reality of how these technologies as a whole have managed to expand beyond the minor roles for which we initially adopted them. Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we ﬁnd more valuable. What’s making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control—a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen diﬀerent ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child’s bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience. It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy. The obvious next question, of course, is how we got ourselves into this mess. In my experience, most people who struggle with the online part of their lives are not weak willed or stupid. They’re instead successful professionals, striving students, loving parents; they are organized and used to pursuing hard goals. Yet somehow the apps and sites beckoning from behind the phone and tablet screen—unique among the many temptations they successfully resist daily—managed to succeed in metastasizing unhealthily far beyond their original roles. A large part of the answer about how this happened is that many of these new tools are not nearly as innocent as they might ﬁrst seem. People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable. Earlier I noted that we seem to have stumbled backward into a digital life we didn’t sign up for. As I’ll argue next, it’s probably more accurate to say that we were pushed into it by the high-end device companies and attention economy conglomerates who discovered there are vast fortunes to be made in a culture dominated by gadgets and apps. TOBACCO FARMERS IN T-SHIRTS Bill Maher ends every episode of his HBO show Real Time with a monologue. The topics are usually political. This was not the case, however, on May 12, 2017, when Maher looked into the camera and said: The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T- shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking. Maher’s concern with social media was sparked by a 60 Minutes segment that aired a month earlier. The segment is titled “Brain Hacking,” and it opens with Anderson Cooper interviewing a lean, red-haired engineer with the carefully tended stubble popular among young men in Silicon Valley. His name is Tristan Harris, a former start-up founder and Google engineer who deviated from his well-worn path through the world of tech to become something decidedly rarer in this closed world: a whistleblower. “This thing is a slot machine,” Harris says early in the interview while holding up his smartphone. “How is that a slot machine?” Cooper asks. “Well, every time I check my phone, I’m playing the slot machine to see ‘What did I get?’” Harris answers. “There’s a whole playbook of techniques that get used [by technology companies] to get you using the product for as long as possible.” “Is Silicon Valley programming apps or are they programming people?” Cooper asks. “They are programming people,” Harris says. “There’s always this narrative that technology’s neutral. And it’s up to us to choose how we use it. This is just not true—” “Technology is not neutral?” Cooper interrupts. “It’s not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that’s how they make their money.” Bill Maher, for his part, thought this interview seemed familiar. After playing a clip of the Harris interview for his HBO audience, Maher quips: “Where have I heard this before?” He then cuts to Mike Wallace’s famous 1995 interview with Jeﬀrey Wigand—the whistleblower who conﬁrmed for the world what most already suspected: that the big tobacco companies engineered cigarettes to be more addictive. “Philip Morris just wanted your lungs,” Maher concludes. “The App Store wants your soul.” Harris’s transformation into a whistleblower is exceptional in part because his life leading up to it was so normal by Silicon Valley standards. Harris, who at the time of this writing is in his midthirties, was raised in the Bay Area. Like many engineers, he grew up hacking his Macintosh and writing computer code. He went to Stanford to study computer science and, after graduating, started a master’s degree working in BJ Fogg’s famed Persuasive Technology Lab—which explores how to use technology to change how people think and act. In Silicon Valley, Fogg is known as the “millionaire maker,” a reference to the many people who passed through his lab and then applied what they learned to help build lucrative tech start-ups (a group that includes, among other dot-com luminaries, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger). Following this established path, Harris, once suﬀiciently schooled in the art of mind-device interaction, dropped out of the master’s program to found Apture, a tech start-up that used pop-up factoids to increase the time users spent on websites. In 2011, Google acquired Apture, and Harris was put to work on the Gmail inbox team. It was at Google where Harris, now working on products that could impact hundreds of millions of people’s behaviors, began to grow concerned. After a mind-opening experience at Burning Man, Harris, in a move straight out of a Cameron Crowe screenplay, wrote a 144-slide manifesto titled “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention.” Harris sent the manifesto to a small group of friends at Google. It soon spread to thousands in the company, including co-CEO Larry Page, who called Harris into a meeting to discuss the bold ideas. Page named Harris to the newly invented position of “product philosopher.” But then: Nothing much changed. In a 2016 proﬁle in the Atlantic, Harris blamed the lack of changes to the “inertia” of the organization and a lack of clarity about what he was advocating. The primary source of friction, of course, is almost certainly more simple: Minimizing distraction and respecting users’ attention would reduce revenue. Compulsive use sells, which Harris now acknowledges when he claims that the attention economy drives companies like Google into a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.” So Harris quit, started a nonproﬁt called Time Well Spent with the mission of demanding technology that “serves us, not advertising,” and went public with his warnings about how far technology companies are going to try to “hijack” our minds. In Washington, DC, where I live, it’s well-known that the biggest political scandals are those that conﬁrm a negative that most people already suspected to be true. This insight perhaps explains the fervor that greeted Harris’s revelations. Soon after going public, he was featured on the cover of the Atlantic, interviewed on 60 Minutes and PBS NewsHour, and was whisked oﬀ to give a TED talk. For years, those of us who were grumbling about the seeming ease with which people were becoming slaves to their smartphones were put down as alarmist. But then Harris came along and conﬁrmed what many were increasingly suspecting to be true: These apps and slick sites were not, as Bill Maher put it, gifts from “nerd gods building a better world.” They were, instead, designed to put slot machines in our pockets. Harris had the moral courage to warn us about the hidden dangers of our devices. If we want to thwart their worst eﬀects, however, we need to better understand how they’re so easily able to subvert our best intentions for our lives. Fortunately, when it comes to this goal, we have a good guide. As it turns out, during the same years when Harris was wrestling with the ethical impact of addictive technology, a young marketing professor at NYU turned his prodigious focus to ﬁguring out how exactly this techno- addiction works. Before 2013, Adam Alter had little interest in technology as a research subject. A business professor with a PhD from Princeton in social psychology, Alter studied the broad question of how features in the world around us inﬂuence our thoughts and behavior. Alter’s doctoral dissertation, for example, studies how coincidental connections between you and another person can impact how you feel about each other. “If you ﬁnd out you have the same birthday as someone who does something horrible,” Alter explained to me, “you hate them even more than if you didn’t have that information.” His ﬁrst book, Drunk Tank Pink, cataloged numerous similar cases where seemingly small environmental factors create large changes in behavior. The title, for example, refers to a study that showed aggressively drunk inmates at a Seattle naval prison were notably calmed after spending just ﬁfteen minutes in a cell painted a particular shade of Pepto-Bismol pink, as were Canadian schoolchildren when taught in a classroom of the same color. The book also reveals that wearing a red shirt on a dating proﬁle will lead to signiﬁcantly more interest than any other color, and that the easier your name is to pronounce, the faster you’ll advance in the legal profession. What made 2013 a turning point for Alter’s career was a cross-country ﬂight from New York to LA. “I had grand plans to get some sleep and do some work,” he told me. “But as we started taxiing to take oﬀ, I began playing a simple strategy game on my phone called 2048. When we landed six hours later, I was still playing the game.” After publishing Drunk Tank Pink, Alter had begun searching for a new topic to pursue—a quest that kept leading him back to a key question: “What’s the single biggest factor shaping our lives today?” His experience of compulsive game playing on his six-hour ﬂight suddenly snapped the answer into sharp focus: our screens. By this point, of course, others had already started asking critical questions about our seemingly unhealthy relationship with new technologies like smartphones and video games, but what set Alter apart was his training in psychology. Instead of approaching the issue as a cultural phenomenon, he focused on its psychological roots. This new perspective led Alter inevitably and unambiguously in an unnerving direction: the science of addiction. To many people, addiction is a scary word. In popular culture, it conjures images of drug addicts stealing their mother’s jewelry. But to psychologists, addiction has a careful deﬁnition that’s stripped of these more lurid elements. Here’s a representative example: Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding eﬀects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences. Until recently, it was assumed that addiction only applied to alcohol or drugs: substances that include psychoactive compounds that can directly change your brain chemistry. As the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-ﬁrst, however, a mounting body of research suggested that behaviors that did not involve ingesting substances could become addictive in the technical sense deﬁned above. An important 2010 survey paper, for example, appearing in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, concluded that “growing evidence suggests that behavioral addictions resemble substance addictions in many domains.” The article points to pathological gambling and internet addiction as two particularly well-established examples of these disorders. When the American Psychiatric Association published its ﬁfth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in 2013, it included, for the ﬁrst time, behavioral addiction as a diagnosable problem. This brings us back to Adam Alter. After reviewing the relevant psychology literature and interviewing relevant people in the technology world, two things became clear to him. First, our new technologies are particularly well suited to foster behavioral addictions. As Alter admits, the behavioral addictions connected to technology tend to be “moderate” as compared to the strong chemical dependencies created by drugs and cigarettes. If I force you to quit Facebook, you’re not likely to suﬀer serious withdrawal symptoms or sneak out in the night to an internet café to get a ﬁx. On the other hand, these addictions can still be quite harmful to your well-being. You might not sneak out to access Facebook, but if the app is only one tap away on the phone in your pocket, a moderate behavioral addiction will make it really hard to resist checking your account again and again throughout the day. The second thing that became clear to Alter during his research is even more disturbing. Just as Tristan Harris warned, in many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features. The natural follow-up question to Alter’s conclusions is: What speciﬁcally makes new technologies well suited to foster behavioral addictions? In his 2017 book, Irresistible, which details his study of this topic, Alter explores the many diﬀerent “ingredients” that make a given technology likely to hook our brain and cultivate unhealthy use. I want to brieﬂy focus on two forces from this longer treatment that not only seemed particularly relevant to our discussion, but as you’ll soon learn, repeatedly came up in my own research on how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval. Our brains are highly susceptible to these forces. This matters because many of the apps and sites that keep people compulsively checking their smartphones and opening browser tabs often leverage these hooks to make themselves nearly impossible to resist. To understand this claim, let’s brieﬂy discuss both. We begin with the ﬁrst force: intermittent positive reinforcement. Scientists have known since Michael Zeiler’s famous pecking pigeon experiments from the 1970s that rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern. Something about unpredictability releases more dopamine —a key neurotransmitter for regulating our sense of craving. The original Zeiler experiment had pigeons pecking a button that unpredictably released a food pellet. As Adam Alter points out, this same basic behavior is replicated in the feedback buttons that have accompanied most social media posts since Facebook introduced the “Like” icon in 2009. “It’s hard to exaggerate how much the ‘like’ button changed the psychology of Facebook use,” Alter writes. “What had begun as a passive way to track your friends’ lives was now deeply interactive, and with exactly the sort of unpredictable feedback that motivated Zeiler’s pigeons.” Alter goes on to describe users as “gambling” every time they post something on a social media platform: Will you get likes (or hearts or retweets), or will it languish with no feedback? The former creates what one Facebook engineer calls “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure,” while the latter feels bad. Either way, the outcome is hard to predict, which, as the psychology of addiction teaches us, makes the whole activity of posting and checking maddeningly appealing. Social media feedback, however, is not the only online activity with this property of unpredictable reinforcement. Many people have the experience of visiting a content website for a speciﬁc purpose—say, for example, going to a newspaper site to check the weather forecast—and then ﬁnd themselves thirty minutes later still mindlessly following trails of links, skipping from one headline to another. This behavior can also be sparked by unpredictable feedback: most articles end up duds, but occasionally you’ll land on one that creates a strong emotion, be it righteous anger or laughter. Every appealing headline clicked or intriguing link tabbed is another metaphorical pull of the slot machine handle. Technology companies, of course, recognize the power of this unpredictable positive feedback hook and tweak their products with it in mind to make their appeal even stronger. As whistleblower Tristan Harris explains: “Apps and websites sprinkle intermittent variable rewards all over their products because it’s good for business.” Attention- catching notiﬁcation badges, or the satisfying way a single ﬁnger swipe swoops in the next potentially interesting post, are often carefully tailored to elicit strong responses. As Harris notes, the notiﬁcation symbol for Facebook was originally blue, to match the palette of the rest of the site, “but no one used it.” So they changed the color to red—an alarm color—and clicking skyrocketed. In perhaps the most telling admission of all, in the fall of 2017, Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, spoke candidly at an event about the attention engineering deployed by his former company: The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the ﬁrst of them,... was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. The whole social media dynamic of posting content, and then watching feedback trickle back unpredictably, seems fundamental to these services, but as Tristan Harris points out, it’s actually just one arbitrary option among many for how they could operate. Remember that early social media sites featured very little feedback—their operations focused instead on posting and ﬁnding information. It tends to be these early, pre-feedback-era features that people cite when explaining why social media is important to their life. When justifying Facebook use, for example, many will point to something like the ability to ﬁnd out when a friend’s new baby is born, which is a one-way transfer of information that does not require feedback (it’s implied that people “like” this news). In other words, there’s nothing fundamental about the unpredictable feedback that dominates most social media services. If you took these features away, you probably wouldn’t diminish the value most people derive from them. The reason this speciﬁc dynamic is so universal is because it works really well for keeping eyes glued to screens. These powerful psychological forces are a large part of what Harris had in mind when he held up a smartphone on 60 Minutes and told Anderson Cooper “this thing is a slot machine.” Let’s now consider the second force that encourages behavioral addiction: the drive for social approval. As Adam Alter writes: “We’re social beings who can’t ever completely ignore what other people think of us.” This behavior, of course, is adaptive. In Paleolithic times, it was important that you carefully managed your social standing with other members of your tribe because your survival depended on it. In the twenty-ﬁrst century, however, new technologies have hijacked this deep drive to create proﬁtable behavioral addictions. Consider, once again, social media feedback buttons. In addition to delivering unpredictable feedback, as discussed above, this feedback also concerns other people’s approval. If lots of people click the little heart icon under your latest Instagram post, it feels like the tribe is showing you approval—which we’re adapted to strongly crave.* The other side of this evolutionary bargain, of course, is that a lack of positive feedback creates a sense of distress. This is serious business for the Paleolithic brain, and therefore it can develop an urgent need to continually monitor this “vital” information. The power of this drive for social approval should not be underestimated. Leah Pearlman, who was a product manager on the team that developed the “Like” button for Facebook (she was the author of the blog post announcing the feature in 2009), has become so wary of the havoc it causes that now, as a small business owner, she hires a social media manager to handle her Facebook account so she can avoid exposure to the service’s manipulation of the human social drive. “Whether there’s a notiﬁcation or not, it doesn’t really feel that good,” Pearlman said about the experience of checking social media feedback. “Whatever we’re hoping to see, it never quite meets that bar.” A similar drive to regulate social approval helps explain the current obsession among teenagers to maintain Snapchat “streaks” with their friends, as a long unbroken streak of daily communication is a satisfying conﬁrmation that the relationship is strong. It also explains the universal urge to immediately answer an incoming text, even in the most inappropriate or dangerous conditions (think: behind the wheel). Our Paleolithic brain categorizes ignoring a newly arrived text the same as snubbing the tribe member trying to attract your attention by the communal ﬁre: a potentially dangerous social faux pas. The technology industry has become adept at exploiting this instinct for approval. Social media, in particular, is now carefully tuned to oﬀer you a rich stream of information about how much (or how little) your friends are thinking about you at the moment. Tristan Harris highlights the example of tagging people in photos on services like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. When you post a photo using these services, you can “tag” the other users who also appear in the photo. This tagging process sends the target of the tag a notiﬁcation. As Harris explains, these services now make this process near automatic by using cutting-edge image recognition algorithms to ﬁgure out who is in your photos and oﬀer you the ability to tag them with just a single click—an oﬀer usually made in the form of a quick yes/no question (“do you want to tag... ?”) to which you’ll almost certainly answer yes. This single click requires almost no eﬀort on your part, but to the user being tagged, the resulting notiﬁcation creates a socially satisfying sense that you were thinking about them. As Harris argues, these companies didn’t invest the massive resources necessary to perfect this auto- tagging feature because it was somehow crucial to their social network’s usefulness. They instead made this investment so they could signiﬁcantly increase the amount of addictive nuggets of social approval that their apps could deliver to their users. As Sean Parker conﬁrmed in describing the design philosophy behind these features: “It’s a social-validation feedback loop... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” Let’s step back for a moment to review where we stand. In the preceding sections, I detailed a distressing explanation for why so many people feel as though they’ve lost control of their digital lives: the hot new technologies that emerged in the past decade or so are particularly well suited to foster behavioral addictions, leading people to use them much more than they think is useful or healthy. Indeed, as revealed by whistleblowers and researchers like Tristan Harris, Sean Parker, Leah Pearlman, and Adam Alter, these technologies are in many cases speciﬁcally designed to trigger this addictive behavior. Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character ﬂaw, but instead the realization of a massively proﬁtable business plan. We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors. A LOPSIDED ARMS RACE As argued, our current unease with new technologies is not really about whether or not they’re useful. It’s instead about autonomy. We signed up for these services and bought these devices for minor reasons—to look up friends’ relationship statuses or eliminate the need to carry a separate iPod and phone—and then found ourselves, years later, increasingly dominated by their inﬂuence, allowing them to control more and more of how we spend our time, how we feel, and how we behave. The fact that our humanity was routed by these tools over the past decade should come as no surprise. As I just detailed, we’ve been engaging in a lopsided arms race in which the technologies encroaching on our autonomy were preying with increasing precision on deep-seated vulnerabilities in our brains, while we still naively believed that we were just ﬁddling with fun gifts handed down from the nerd gods. When Bill Maher joked that the App Store was coming for our souls, he was actually onto something. As Socrates explained to Phaedrus in Plato’s famous chariot metaphor, our soul can be understood as a chariot driver struggling to rein two horses, one representing our better nature and the other our baser impulses. When we increasingly cede autonomy to the digital, we energize the latter horse and make the chariot driver’s struggle to steer increasingly diﬀicult—a diminishing of our soul’s authority. When seen from this perspective, it becomes clear that this is a battle we must ﬁght. But to do so, we need a more serious strategy, something custom built to swat aside the forces manipulating us toward behavioral addictions and that oﬀers a concrete plan about how to put new technologies to use for our best aspirations and not against them. Digital minimalism is one such strategy. It’s toward its details that we now turn our attention. 2 Digital Minimalism A MINIMAL SOLUTION Around the time I started working on this chapter, a columnist for the New York Post published an op-ed titled “How I Kicked the Smartphone Addiction—and You Can Too.” His secret? He disabled notiﬁcations for 112 diﬀerent apps on his iPhone. “It’s relatively easy to retake control,” he optimistically concludes. These types of articles are common in the world of technology journalism. The author discovers that his relationship with his digital tools has become dysfunctional. Alarmed, he deploys a clever life hack, then reports enthusiastically that things seem much better. I’m always skeptical about these quick-ﬁx tales. In my experience covering these topics, it’s hard to permanently reform your digital life through the use of tips and tricks alone. The problem is that small changes are not enough to solve our big issues with new technologies. The underlying behaviors we hope to ﬁx are ingrained in our culture, and, as I argued in the previous chapter, they’re backed by powerful psychological forces that empower our base instincts. To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation. The New York Post columnist cited above, in other words, should look beyond the notiﬁcation settings on his 112 apps and ask the more important question of why he uses so many apps in the ﬁrst place. What he needs—what all of us who struggle with these issues need—is a philosophy of technology use, something that covers from the ground up which digital tools we allow into our life, for what reasons, and under what constraints. In the absence of this introspection, we’ll be left struggling in a whirlwind of addictive and appealing cyber-trinkets, vainly hoping that the right mix of ad hoc hacks will save us. As I mentioned in the introduction, I have one such philosophy to propose: Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else. The so-called digital minimalists who follow this philosophy constantly perform implicit cost-beneﬁt analyses. If a new technology oﬀers little more than a minor diversion or trivial convenience, the minimalist will ignore it. Even when a new technology promises to support something the minimalist values, it must still pass a stricter test: Is this the best way to use technology to support this value? If the answer is no, the minimalist will set to work trying to optimize the tech, or search out a better option. By working backward from their deep values to their technology choices, digital minimalists transform these innovations from a source of distraction into tools to support a life well lived. By doing so, they break the spell that has made so many people feel like they’re losing control to their screens. Notice, this minimalist philosophy contrasts starkly with the maximalist philosophy that most people deploy by default—a mind-set in which any potential for beneﬁt is enough to start using a technology that catches your attention. A maximalist is very uncomfortable with the idea that anyone might miss out on something that’s the least bit interesting or valuable. Indeed, when I ﬁrst started writing publicly about the fact that I’ve never used Facebook, people in my professional circles were aghast for exactly this reason. “Why do I need to use Facebook?” I would ask. “I can’t tell you exactly,” they would respond, “but what if there’s something useful to you in there that you’re missing?” This argument sounds absurd to digital minimalists, because they believe that the best digital life is formed by carefully curating their tools to deliver massive and unambiguous beneﬁts. They tend to be incredibly wary of low-value activities that can clutter up their time and attention and end up hurting more than they help. Put another way: minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good. To make these abstract ideas more concrete, let’s consider some real-world examples of digital minimalists I uncovered in my research on this emerging philosophy. For some of these minimalists, the requirement that a new technology strongly supports deep values led to the rejection of services and tools that our culture commonly believes to be mandatory. Tyler, for example, originally joined the standard social media services for the standard reasons: to help his career, to keep him connected, and to provide entertainment. Once Tyler embraced digital minimalism, however, he realized that although he valued all three of these goals, his compulsive use of social networks oﬀered at best minor beneﬁts, and did not qualify as the best way to use technology for these purposes. So he quit all social media to pursue more direct and eﬀective ways to help his career, connect with other people, and be entertained. I met Tyler roughly a year after his minimalist decision to leave social media. He was clearly excited by how his life had changed during this period. He started volunteering near his home, he exercises regularly, he’s reading three to four books a month, he began to learn to play the ukulele, and he told me that now that his phone is no longer glued to his hand, he’s closer than he has ever been with his wife and kids. On the professional side, the increased focus he achieved after leaving these services earned him a promotion. “Some of my work clients have noticed a change in me and they will ask what I am doing diﬀerently,” he told me. “When I tell them I quit social media, their response is ‘I wish I could do that, but I just can’t.’ The reality, however, is that they literally have no good reason to be on social media!” As Tyler is quick to admit, he can’t completely attribute all of these good things to his speciﬁc decision to quit social media. In theory, he could have still learned the ukulele or spent more time with his wife and kids while maintaining a Facebook account. His decision to leave these services, however, was about more than a tweak to his digital habits; it was a symbolic gesture that reinforced his new commitment to the minimalist philosophy of working backward from your deeply held values when deciding how to live your life. Adam provides another good example of this philosophy leading to the rejection of a technology that we’ve been told is fundamental. Adam runs a small business, and the ability to remain connected to his employees is important for his livelihood. Recently, however, he became worried about the example he was setting for his nine- and thirteen- year-old kids. He could talk to them about the importance of experiencing life beyond a glowing screen, he realized, but the message wouldn’t stick until they saw him demonstrating this behavior in his own life. So he did something radical: he got rid of his smartphone and replaced it with a basic ﬂip phone. “I have never had a better teachable moment in my life,” he told me about his decision. “My kids know my business depends on a smart device and saw how much I used it, and here I was giving it up?! I was able to clearly explain why, and they got it!” As Adam admits, the loss of his smartphone made certain things in his work life more annoying. In particular, he relies heavily on text messages to coordinate with his staﬀ, and he soon relearned how hard it is to type on the little plastic buttons of an old-fashioned cell phone. But Adam is a digital minimalist, which means maximizing convenience is prioritized much lower than using technology to support his values. As a father, teaching his kids an important lesson about embracing life beyond the screen was far more important than faster typing. Not all digital minimalists end up completely rejecting common tools. For many, the core question of “is this the best way to use technology to support this value?” leads them to carefully optimize services that most people ﬁddle with mindlessly. Michal, for example, decided her obsession with online media was causing more harm than good. In response, she restricted her digital information intake to a pair of email newsletter subscriptions and a handful of blogs that she checks “less than once a week.” She told me that these carefully selected feeds still satisfy her craving for stimulating ideas and information without dominating her time and toying with her mood. Another digital minimalist named Charles told me a similar story. He had been a Twitter addict before adopting this philosophy. He has since quit that service and instead receives his news through a curated collection of online magazines that he checks once a day in the afternoon. He told me that he’s better informed than he was during his Twitter days while also now thankfully freed of the addictive checking and refreshing that Twitter encourages in its users. Digital minimalists are also adept at stripping away superﬂuous features of new technologies to allow them to access functions that matter while avoiding unnecessary distraction. Carina, for example, is on the executive council of a student organization that uses a Facebook group to coordinate its activities. To prevent this service from exploiting her attention every time she logs on for council business, she reduced her set of friends down to only the fourteen other people on the executive council and then unfollowed them. This preserves her ability to coordinate on the Facebook group while at the same time keeping her newsfeed empty. Emma found a diﬀerent approach to a similar end when she discovered that she could bookmark the Facebook notiﬁcations screen, allowing her to jump straight to the page that shows posts from a graduate student group she follows—bypassing the service’s most distracting features. Blair did something similar: bookmarking the Facebook events page so she could check on upcoming community events while bypassing “[all the] junk that Facebook is made up of.” Blair told me that keeping up with local events through this bookmarked page takes about ﬁve minutes, once or twice a week. Carina and Emma report similarly miniscule times spent using the service. The average Facebook user, by contrast, uses the company’s products a little over ﬁfty minutes per day. These optimizations might seem small, but they yield a major diﬀerence in these digital minimalists’ daily lives. A particularly heartwarming example of digital minimalism unlocking new value is the story of Dave, a creative director and father of three. After embracing minimalism, Dave reduced his persistent social media use down to only a single service, Instagram, which he felt oﬀered signiﬁcant beneﬁts to his deep interest in art. In true minimalist fashion, however, Dave didn’t settle for simply deciding to “use” Instagram; he instead thought hard about how best to integrate this tool into his life. In the end, he settled on posting one picture every week of whatever personal art project he happens to be working on. “It’s a great way for me to have a visual archive of my projects,” he explained. He also follows only a small number of accounts, all of which belong to artists whose work inspires him—making the experience of checking his feed both fast and meaningful. The reason I like Dave’s story, however, is what was enabled by his decision to signiﬁcantly cut back on how much he uses these services. As Dave explained to me, his own father wrote him a handwritten note every week during his freshman year of college. Still touched by this gesture, Dave began a habit of drawing a new picture every night to place in his oldest daughter’s lunchbox. His two youngest children watched this ritual with interest. When they became old enough for lunchboxes, they were excited to start receiving their daily drawings as well. “Fast- forward a couple of years, and I’m spending a decent chunk of time every night doing three drawings!” Dave told me with obvious pride. “This wouldn’t have been possible if I didn’t protect how I spend my time.” THE PRINCIPLES OF DIGITAL MINIMALISM So far in this chapter, I’ve argued that the best way to ﬁght the tyranny of the digital in your life is to embrace a philosophy of technology use based in your deeply held values. I then proposed digital minimalism as one such philosophy, and provided examples of it in action. Before I can ask you to experiment with digital minimalism in your own life, however, I must ﬁrst provide you with a more thorough explanation for why it works. My argument for this philosophy’s eﬀectiveness rests on the following three core principles: Principle #1: Clutter is costly. Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small beneﬁts that each individual item provides in isolation. Principle #2: Optimization is important. Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the ﬁrst step. To truly extract its full potential beneﬁt, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology. Principle #3: Intentionality is satisfying. Digital minimalists derive signiﬁcant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. This source of satisfaction is independent of the speciﬁc decisions they make and is one of the biggest reasons that minimalism tends to be immensely meaningful to its practitioners. The validity of digital minimalism is self-evident once you accept these three principles. With this in mind, the remainder of this chapter is dedicated to proving them true. AN ARGUMENT FOR PRINCIPLE #1: THOREAU’S NEW ECONOMICS Near the end of March in 1845, Henry David Thoreau borrowed an ax and walked into the woods near Walden Pond. He felled young white pine trees, which he hewed into studs and rafters and ﬂoorboards. Using more borrowed tools, he notched mortise and tenon joints and assembled these pieces into the frame of a modest cabin. Thoreau was not hurried in these eﬀorts. Each day he brought with him a lunch of bread and butter wrapped in newspaper, and after eating his meal he would read the wrapping. He found time during this leisurely construction process to take detailed notes on the nature that surrounded him. He observed the properties of the late season ice on the pond and the fragrance of the pine pitch. One morning while soaking a hickory wedge in the cold pond water, he saw a striped snake slide into the pond and lay still on the bottom. He watched it for over a quarter of an hour. In July, Thoreau moved into the cabin where he then lived for the next two years. In the book Walden, he wrote about this experience, famously describing his motivation as follows: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Over the ensuing decades, as Thoreau’s ideas diﬀused through pop culture and people became less likely to confront his actual text, his experiment at Walden Pond has taken on a poetic tinge. (Indeed, the passion-seeking boarding school students in 1989’s Dead Poets Society open their secret poetry reading meetings by reciting the “deliberate living” quote from Walden.) Thoreau, we imagine, was seeking to be transformed by the subjective experience of living deliberately—planning to walk out of the woods changed by transcendence. There’s truth to this interpretation, but it misses a whole other side to Thoreau’s experiment. He had also been working out a new theory of economics that attempted to push back against the worst dehumanizing eﬀects of industrialization. To help validate his theory, he needed more data, and his time spent by the pond was designed in large part to become a source of this needed information. It’s important for our purposes to understand this more pragmatic side to Walden, as Thoreau’s often overlooked economic theory provides a powerful justiﬁcation for our ﬁrst principle of minimalism: that more can be less. The ﬁrst and longest chapter of Walden is titled “Economy.” It contains many of Thoreau’s signature poetic ﬂourishes about nature and the human condition. It also, however, contains a surprising number of bland expense tables, recording costs down to a fraction of a cent, such as the following: House $28.12 ½ Farm one year 14.72 ½ Food eight months 8.74 Clothing, etc., eight months 8.40 ¾ Oil, etc., eight months 2.00 In all $61.99 ¾ Thoreau’s purpose in these tables is to capture precisely (not poetically or philosophically) how much it cost to support his life at Walden Pond—a lifestyle that, as he argues at length in this ﬁrst chapter, satisﬁes all the basic human needs: food, shelter, warmth, and so on. Thoreau then contrasts these costs with the hourly wages he could earn with his labor to arrive at the ﬁnal value he cared most about: How much of his time must be sacriﬁced to support his minimalist lifestyle? After plugging in the numbers gathered during his experiment, he determined that hiring out his labor only one day per week would be suﬀicient. This magician’s trick of shifting the units of measure from money to time is the core novelty of what the philosopher Frédéric Gros calls Thoreau’s “new economics,” a theory that builds on the following axiom, which Thoreau establishes early in Walden: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” This new economics oﬀers a radical rethinking of the consumerist culture that began to emerge in Thoreau’s time. Standard economic theory focuses on monetary outcomes. If working one acre of land as a farmer earns you $1 a year in proﬁt, and working sixty acres earns you $60, then you should, if it’s at all possible, work the sixty acres—it produces strictly more money. Thoreau’s new economics considers such math woefully incomplete, as it leaves out the cost in life required to achieve that extra $59 in monetary proﬁt. As he notes in Walden, working a large farm, as many of his Concord neighbors did, required large, stressful mortgages, the need to maintain numerous pieces of equipment, and endless, demanding labor. He describes these farmer neighbors as “crushed and smothered under [their] load” and famously lumps them into the “mass of men lead[ing] lives of quiet desperation.” Thoreau then asks what beneﬁts these worn-down farmers receive from the extra proﬁt they eke out. As he proved in his Walden experiment, this extra work is not enabling the farmers to escape savage conditions: Thoreau was able to satisfy all of his basic needs quite comfortably with the equivalent of one day of work per week. What these farmers are actually gaining from all the life they sacriﬁce is slightly nicer stuﬀ: venetian blinds, a better quality copper pot, perhaps a fancy wagon for traveling back and forth to town more eﬀiciently. When analyzed through Thoreau’s new economics, this exchange can come across as ill conceived. Who could justify trading a lifetime of stress and backbreaking labor for better blinds? Is a nicer-looking window treatment really worth so much of your life? Similarly, why would you add hours of extra labor in the ﬁelds to obtain a wagon? It’s true that it takes more time to walk to town than to ride in a wagon, Thoreau notes, but these walks still likely require less time than the extra work hours needed to aﬀord the wagon. It’s exactly these types of calculations that lead Thoreau to observe sardonically: “I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, house, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.” Thoreau’s new economics was developed in an industrial age, but his basic insights apply just as well to our current digital context. The ﬁrst principle of digital minimalism presented earlier in this chapter states that clutter is costly. Thoreau’s new economics helps explain why. When people consider speciﬁc tools or behaviors in their digital lives, they tend to focus only on the value each produces. Maintaining an active presence on Twitter, for example, might occasionally open up an interesting new connection or expose you to an idea you hadn’t heard before. Standard economic thinking says that such proﬁts are good, and the more you receive the better. It therefore makes sense to clutter your digital life with as many of these small sources of value as you can ﬁnd, much as it made sense for the Concord farmer to cultivate as many acres of land as he could aﬀord to mortgage. Thoreau’s new economics, however, demands that you balance this proﬁt against the costs measured in terms of “your life.” How much of your time and attention, he would ask, must be sacriﬁced to earn the small proﬁt of occasional connections and new ideas that is earned by cultivating a signiﬁcant presence on Twitter? Assume, for example, that your Twitter habit eﬀectively consumes ten hours per week. Thoreau would note that this cost is almost certainly way too high for the limited beneﬁts it returns. If you value new connections and exposure to interesting ideas, he might argue, why not adopt a habit of attending an interesting talk or event every month, and forcing yourself to chat with at least three people while there? This would produce similar types of value but consume only a few hours of your life per month, leaving you with an extra thirty-seven hours to dedicate to other meaningful pursuits. These costs, of course, also tend to compound. When you combine an active Twitter presence with a dozen other attention-demanding online behaviors, the cost in life becomes extreme. Like Thoreau’s farmers, you end up “crushed and smothered” under the demands on your time and attention, and in the end, all you receive in return for sacriﬁcing so much of your life is a few nicer trinkets—the digital equivalent of the farmer’s venetian blinds or fancier pot—many of which, as shown in the Twitter example above, could probably be approximated at a much lower cost, or eliminated without any major negative impact. This is why clutter is dangerous. It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of proﬁt oﬀered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life. This is also what makes Thoreau’s new economics so relevant to our current moment. As Frédéric Gros argues: The striking thing with Thoreau is not the actual content of the argument. After all, sages in earliest Antiquity had already proclaimed their contempt for possessions.... What impresses is the form of the argument. For Thoreau’s obsession with calculation runs deep.... He says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose? Thoreau’s obsession with calculation helps us move past the vague subjective sense that there are trade-oﬀs inherent in digital clutter, and forces us instead to confront it more precisely. He asks us to treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance—arguably the most valuable substance we possess—and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade for the various activities we allow to claim our time. When we confront our habits through this perspective, we will reach the same conclusion now that Thoreau did in his era: more often than not, the cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small beneﬁts each individual piece of clutter promises. AN ARGUMENT FOR PRINCIPLE #2: THE RETURN CURVE The law of diminishing returns is familiar to anyone who studies economics. It applies to the improvement of production processes and says, at a high level, that investing more resources into a process cannot indeﬁnitely improve its output—eventually you’ll approach a natural limit and start experiencing less and less extra beneﬁt from continued investment. A classic example from economics textbooks concerns workers on a hypothetical automobile assembly line. At ﬁrst, as you increase the number of workers, you generate large increases in the rate at which ﬁnished cars come oﬀ the line. If you continue to assign more workers to the line, however, these improvements will get smaller. This might happen for many reasons. Perhaps, for example, you begin to run out of space to add the new workers, or other limiting factors, like the maximum speed of the conveyer belt, come into play. If you plot this law for a given process and resource, with value produced on the y-axis and amount of resource invested on the x-axis, you’ll encounter a familiar curve. At ﬁrst, as additional increases in resources cause rapid improvements in output, the curve rises quickly, but over time, as the returns diminish, the curve ﬂattens out. The exact parameters of this return curve vary between diﬀerent processes and resources, but its general shape is shared by many scenarios—a reality that has made this law a fundamental component of modern economic theory. The reason I’m introducing this idea from economics in this chapter on digital minimalism is the following: if you’re willing to accept some ﬂexibility in your deﬁnition of “production process,” the law of diminishing returns can apply to the various ways in which we use new technologies to produce value in our personal lives. Once we view these personal technology processes through the perspective of diminishing returns, we’ll gain the precise vocabulary we need to understand the validity of the second principle of minimalism, which states that optimizing how we use technology is just as important as how we choose what technologies to use in the ﬁrst place. When considering personal technology processes, let’s focus in particular on the energy invested in trying to improve the value these processes return in your life, for example, through better selection of tools or the adoption of smarter strategies for using the tools. If you increase the amount of energy you invest into this optimization, you’ll increase the amount of value the process returns. At ﬁrst, these increases will be large. As the law of diminishing returns tells us, however, eventually these increases will diminish as you approach a natural limit. To make this more concrete, let’s work through a brief hypothetical example. Assume that you ﬁnd it important to remain informed about current events. New technologies can certainly help you support this goal. Perhaps, at ﬁrst, the process you deploy is just keeping an eye on the links that pop up in your social media feeds. This process produces some value, as it keeps you more informed than if you weren’t using the internet at all for this purpose, but it leaves a lot of room for improvement. With this in mind, assume you invest some energy to identify a more carefully curated set of online news sites to follow, and to ﬁnd an app, like Instapaper, that allows you to clip articles from these sites and read them all together in a nice interface that culls distracting ads. This improved personal technology process for keeping informed is now producing even more value in your personal life. Perhaps, as the ﬁnal step in this optimization, you discover through trial and error that you’re best able to absorb complex articles when you clip them throughout the week and then sit down to read through them all on Saturday morning on a tablet over coﬀee at a local café. At this point, your optimization eﬀorts have massively increased the value you receive from this personal technology process for staying informed. You can now stay up to date in a pleasing manner that has a limited impact on your time and attention during the week. As the law of diminishing returns tells us, however, you’re probably nearing the natural limit, after which improving this process further will become increasingly diﬀicult. Put more technically: you’ve reached the later part of the return curve. The reason the second principle of minimalism is so important is that most people invest very little energy into these types of optimizations. To use the appropriate economic terminology, most people’s personal technology processes currently exist on the early part of the return curve—the location where additional attempts to optimize will yield massive improvements. It’s this reality that leads digital minimalists to embrace the second principle, and focus not just on what technologies they adopt, but also on how they use them. The example I gave above was hypothetical, but you ﬁnd similar instances of optimization producing big returns when you study the stories of real-world digital minimalists. Gabriella, for example, signed up for Netﬂix as a better (and cheaper) source of entertainment than cable. She became prone, however, to binge-watching, which hurt her professional productivity and left her feeling unfulﬁlled. After some further experimentation, Gabriella adopted an optimization to this process: she’s not allowed to watch Netﬂix alone.* This restriction still allows her to enjoy the value Netﬂix oﬀers, but to do so in a more controlled manner that limits its potential for abuse and strengthens something else she values: her social life. “Now [streaming shows is] a social activity instead of an isolating activity,” she told me. Another optimization that was common among the digital minimalists I studied was to remove social media apps from their phones. Because they can still access these sites through their computer browsers, they don’t lose any of the high-value beneﬁts that keep them signed up for these services. By removing the apps from their phones, however, they eliminated their ability to browse their accounts as a knee-jerk response to boredom. The result is that these minimalists dramatically reduced the amount of time they spend engaging with these services each week, while barely diminishing the value they provide to their lives—a much better personal technology process than thoughtlessly tapping and swiping these apps throughout the day as the whim strikes. There are two major reasons why so few people have bothered to adopt the bias toward optimization exhibited by Gabriella or the minimalists who streamlined their social media experience. The ﬁrst is that most of these technologies are still relatively new. Because of this reality, their role in your life can still seem novel and fun, obscuring more serious questions about the speciﬁc value they’re providing. This freshness, of course, is starting to fade as the smartphone and social media era advances beyond its heady early years, which will lead people to become increasingly impatient with the shortcomings of their unpolished processes. As the author Max Brooks quipped in a 2017 TV appearance, “We need to reevaluate [our current relationship with] online information sort of the way we reevaluated free love in the 80s.” The second reason so few think about optimizing their technology use is more cynical: The large attention economy conglomerates that introduced many of these new technologies don’t want us thinking about optimization. These corporations make more money the more time you spend engaged with their products. They want you, therefore, to think of their oﬀerings as a sort of fun ecosystem where you mess around and interesting things happen. This mind-set of general use makes it easier for them to exploit your psychological vulnerabilities. By contrast, if you think of these services as oﬀering a collection of features that you can carefully put to use to serve speciﬁc values, then almost certainly you’ll spend much less time using them. This is why social media companies are purposely vague in describing their products. The Facebook mission statement, for example, describes their goal as “giv[ing] people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” This goal is generically positive, but how exactly you use Facebook to accomplish it is left underspeciﬁed. They hint that you just need to plug into their ecosystem and start sharing and connecting, and eventually good things will happen. Once you break free from this mind-set, however, and begin seeing new technologies simply as tools that you can deploy selectively, you’re able to fully embrace the second principle of minimalism and start furiously optimizing— enabling you to reap the advantages of vaulting up the return curve. Finding useful new technologies is just the ﬁrst step to improving your life. The real beneﬁts come once you start experimenting with how best to use them. AN ARGUMENT FOR PRINCIPLE #3: THE LESSONS OF THE AMISH HACKER The Amish complicate any serious discussion of modern technology’s impact on our culture. The popular understanding of this group is that they’re frozen in time— reluctant to adopt any tools introduced after the mid- eighteenth-century period when they ﬁrst began settling in America. From this perspective, these communities are mainly interesting as a living museum of an older age, a quaint curiosity. But then you start talking to scholars and writers who study the Amish seriously, and you begin to hear confusing statements that muddy these waters. John Hostetler, for example, who literally wrote the book on their society, claims the following: “Amish communities are not relics of a bygone era. Rather, they are demonstrations of a diﬀerent form of modernity.” The technologist Kevin Kelly, who spent a signiﬁcant amount of time among the Lancaster County Amish, goes even further, writing: “Amish lives are anything but antitechnological. In fact, on my several visits with them, I have found them to be ingenious hackers and tinkers, the ultimate makers and do-it-yourselvers. They are often, surprisingly, pro-technology.” As Kelly elaborates in his 2010 book, What Technology Wants, the simple notion of the Amish as Luddites vanishes as soon as you approach a standard Amish farm, where “cruising down the road you may see an Amish kid in a straw hat and suspenders zipping by on Rollerblades.” Some Amish communities use tractors, but only with metal wheels so they cannot drive on roads like cars. Some allow a gas-powered wheat thresher but require horses to pull the “smoking, noisy contraption.” Personal phones (cellular or household) are almost always prohibited, but many communities maintain a community phone booth. Almost no Amish communities allow automobile ownership, but it’s typical for Amish to travel in cars driven by others. Kelly reports that the use of electricity is common, but it’s usually forbidden to connect to the larger municipal power grid. Disposable diapers are popular, as are chemical fertilizers. In one memorable passage, Kelly talks about visiting a family that uses a $400,000 computer- controlled precision milling machine to produce pneumatic parts needed by the community. The machine is run by the family’s bonnet-wearing, ten-year-old daughter. It’s housed behind their horse stable. Kelly, of course, is not the only person to notice the Amish’s complicated relationship with modern technologies. Donald Kraybill, a professor at Elizabethtown College who co-authored a book on the Amish, emphasizes the changes that have occurred as more members of these communities embrace entrepreneurship over farming. He talks about an Amish woodshop with nineteen employees who use drills, saws, and nail guns, but instead of receiving power from the electric grid, they use solar panels and diesel generators. Another Amish entrepreneur has a website for his business, but it’s maintained by an outside ﬁrm. Kraybill has a term for the nuanced and sometimes contrived ways that these start-ups use technology: “Amish hacking.” These observations dismiss the popular belief that the Amish reject all new technologies. So what’s really going on here? The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values. As Kraybill elaborates, they confront the following questions: “Is this going to be helpful or is it going to be detrimental? Is it going to bolster our life together, as a community, or is it going to somehow tear it down?” When a new technology rolls around, there’s typically an “alpha geek” (to use Kelly’s term) in any given Amish community that will ask the parish bishop permission to try it out. Usually the bishop will agree. The whole community will then observe this ﬁrst adopter “intently,” trying to discern the ultimate impact of the technology on the things the community values most. If this impact is deemed more negative than helpful, the technology is prohibited. Otherwise it’s allowed, but usually with caveats on its use that optimize its positives and minimize its negatives. The reason most Amish are prohibited from owning cars, for example, but are allowed to drive in motor vehicles driven by other people, has to do with the impact of owning an automobile on the social fabric of the community. As Kelly explains: “When cars ﬁrst appeared at the turn of the last century, the Amish noticed that drivers would leave the community to go picnicking or sightseeing in other towns, instead of visiting family or the sick on Sundays, or patronizing local shops on Saturday.” As a member of an Amish community explained to Kraybill during his research: “When people leave the Amish, the ﬁrst thing they do is buy a car.” So owning a car is banned in most parishes. This type of thinking also explains why an Amish farmer can own a solar panel or run power tools on a generator but cannot connect to the power grid. The problem is not electricity; it’s the fact that the grid connects them too strongly to the world outside of their local community, violating the Amish commitment to the biblical tenet to “be in the world, but not of it.” Once you encounter this more nuanced approach to technology, you can no longer dismiss the Amish lifestyle as a quaint curiosity. As John Hostetler explained, their philosophy is not a rejection of modernity, but a “diﬀerent form” of it. Kevin Kelly goes a step further and claims that it’s a form of modernity that we cannot ignore given our current struggles. “In any discussion about the merits of avoiding the addictive grasp of technology,” he writes, “the Amish stand out as oﬀering an honorable alternative.” It’s important to understand what exactly makes this alternative honorable, as it’s in these advantages that we’ll uncover a strong argument for the third principle of minimalism, which claims that approaching decisions with intention can be more important than the impact of the actual decisions themselves. At the core of the Amish philosophy regarding technology is the following trade-oﬀ: The Amish prioritize the beneﬁts generated by acting intentionally about technology over the beneﬁts lost from the technologies they decide not to use. Their gamble is that intention trumps convenience—and this is a bet that seems to be paying oﬀ. The Amish have remained a relatively stable presence in America for over two hundred years of rapid modernity and cultural upheavals. Unlike some religious sects that attempt to entrap members through threats and denial of connection to the outside world, the Amish still practice Rumspringa. During this ritual period, which begins at the age of sixteen, Amish youth are allowed to leave home and experience the outside world beyond the restrictions of their community. It is then their decision, after having seen what they will be giving up, whether or not they accept baptism into the Amish church. By one sociologist’s calculations, the percentage of Amish youth that decide to stay after Rumspringa is in the range of 80 to 90 percent. We should be careful, however, not to push the Amish example too far as a case study for meaningful living. The restrictions that guide each community, called the Ordnung, are typically decided and enforced by a group of four men—a bishop, two ministers, and a deacon—who serve for life. There’s a communion ceremony performed twice a year in which complaints about the Ordnung can be aired and consensus pursued, but many in these communities, including, notably, women, can remain largely disenfranchised. From this perspective, the Amish underscore the principle that acting intentionally with respect to technology can be a standalone source of value, but their example leaves open the question of whether this value persists even when we eliminate the more authoritarian impulses of these communities. Fortunately, we have good reasons to believe it does. A useful thought experiment along these lines is to consider the closely related Mennonite Church. Like the Amish, Mennonites embrace the biblical principle to be in the world, but not of it, which leads to a similar embrace of simplicity and a suspicion of cultural trends that threaten core values of maintaining strong communities and virtuous living. Unlike the Amish, however, the Mennonites include more liberal members who integrate with the broader society, taking on personal responsibility for making decisions in a way that’s consistent with their church’s principles. This creates an opportunity to see Amish-style values toward technology applied in the absence of an authoritarian Ordnung. Curious to encounter this philosophy in action, I set up a conversation with a liberal Mennonite named Laura, a schoolteacher who lives with her husband and daughter in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Laura attends a local Mennonite church and lives in a neighborhood with at least a dozen other Mennonite families, which keeps her connected to this community’s values. But decisions about her lifestyle are hers alone. This latter point hasn’t stopped her from acting with intention regarding her technology choices. This reality is best emphasized by what is arguably her most radical decision: she has never owned a smartphone and has no intention of buying one. “I don’t think I’d be a good smartphone user,” she explained to me. “I don’t trust myself to just let it be and not think about it. When I leave the house, I don’t think about all of these distractions. I’m free from it.” Most people, of course, would dismiss the possibility of ditching their phone by listing all the diﬀerent things its makes (slightly) easier—from looking up a restaurant review in a new city to using GPS directions. The loss of these small dollops of value doesn’t concern Laura. “Writing down directions before leaving home is not a big deal for me,” she said. What Laura does care about is the way her intentional decision supports things she ﬁnds massively valuable, such as her ability to connect with people she cares about and enjoy life in the moment. In our conversation, she emphasized the importance of being present with her daughter, even when bored, and the value she gets out of spending time with friends free from distraction. Laura also connects eﬀorts to be a “conscientious consumer” with issues relating to social justice, which also play a big role in the Mennonite Church. As with the Amish who ﬁnd contentment without modern conveniences, an important source of Laura’s satisfaction with her smartphone-free life comes from the choice itself. “My decision [to not use a smartphone] gives me a sense of autonomy,” she told me. “I’m controlling the role technology is allowed to play in my life.” After a moment of hesitation, she adds: “It makes me feel a little smug at times.” What Laura describes modestly as smugness is almost certainly something more fundamental to human ﬂourishing: the sense of meaning that comes from acting with intention. Pulling together these pieces, we arrive at a strong justiﬁcation for the third principle of minimalism. Part of what makes this philosophy so eﬀective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to avoid. I tackled this principle last because its lesson is arguably the most important. As demonstrated by the Old Order Amish farmer happily riding a horse-drawn buggy, or the urban Mennonite content with her old-fashioned cell phone, it’s the commitment to minimalism itself that yields the bulk of their satisfaction. The sugar high of convenience is ﬂeeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists. A NEW LOOK AT OLD ADVICE The central idea of minimalism, that less can be more, is not novel. As mentioned in the introduction, this concept dates back to antiquity and has been repeatedly espoused since. The fact, therefore, that this old idea might apply to the new technologies that deﬁne so much about our current age shouldn’t be surprising. That being said, the past couple of decades are also deﬁned by a resurgent narrative of techno-maximalism that contends more is better when it comes to technology— more connections, more information, more options. This philosophy cleverly dovetails with the general objective of the liberal humanism project to oﬀer individuals more freedom, making it seem vaguely illiberal to avoid a popular social media platform or decline to follow the latest online chatter. This connection, of course, is specious. Outsourcing your autonomy to an attention economy conglomerate—as you do when you mindlessly sign up for whatever new hot service emerges from the Silicon Valley venture capitalist class—is the opposite of freedom, and will likely degrade your individuality. But given the current strength of the maximalism argument, I felt it necessary to provide the full- throated defense of minimalism detailed in this chapter. Even old ideas require new investigation to underscore their continued relevance. When it comes to new technologies, less almost certainly is more. Hopefully the preceding pages made it clear why this is true. 3 The Digital Declutter ON (RAPIDLY) BECOMING MINIMALIST Assuming I’ve convinced you that digital minimalism is worthwhile, the next step is to discuss how best to adopt this lifestyle. In my experience, gradually

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