Book Review | Digital Minimalism: ❝ Unplug and Choose Life ❞

Book: Digital Minimalism

Author: Cal Newport

Genre: Self-help

Publication date: February 5th, 2019

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It’s the key to living a focused life in an increasingly noisy world.

In this timely and enlightening book, the bestselling author of Deep Work introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives.

Digital minimalists are all around us. They’re the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones. They can get lost in a good book, a woodworking project, or a leisurely morning run. They can have fun with friends and family without the obsessive urge to document the experience. They stay informed about the news of the day, but don’t feel overwhelmed by it. They don’t experience “fear of missing out” because they already know which activities provide them meaning and satisfaction.

Now, Newport gives us a name for this quiet movement, and makes a persuasive case for its urgency in our tech-saturated world. Common sense tips, like turning off notifications, or occasional rituals like observing a digital sabbath, don’t go far enough in helping us take back control of our technological lives, and attempts to unplug completely are complicated by the demands of family, friends and work. What we need instead is a thoughtful method to decide what tools to use, for what purposes, and under what conditions.

Drawing on a diverse array of real-life examples, from Amish farmers to harried parents to Silicon Valley programmers, Newport identifies the common practices of digital minimalists and the ideas that underpin them. He shows how digital minimalists are rethinking their relationship to social media, rediscovering the pleasures of the offline world, and reconnecting with their inner selves through regular periods of solitude. He then shares strategies for integrating these practices into your life, starting with a thirty-day “digital declutter” process that has already helped thousands feel less overwhelmed and more in control.

Technology is intrinsically neither good nor bad. The key is using it to support your goals and values, rather than letting it use you. This book shows the way.

✱ A/N: The synopsis alone was enough to make me read this book. ✱

How many times do you check your phone everyday?

Twenty, thirty, forty? Wrong. The average smartphone user checks his/her phone about 80 times a day, which is literally every twelve minutes if you subtract eight hours (480 minutes) of sleep from the 24 hours (1440 minutes) that make up a day; and studies have shown that some people check their phones up to a whopping 300 times per day when they’re not on vacation. If we take 100 as a ballpark figure for the amount of times the average person checks their phone, and assume that they use their phone for just 2 minutes during every check, that still adds up to 3.3 hours of mindless phone usage per day.

Imagine that, you spend three hours doing nothing but logging in and out of different accounts to see if you’ve gotten any notifications, checking if someone has texted you, swiping up and down and tapping whenever you sense the slightest feeling of boredom. Little do you know, these seemingly harmless activities often lead to the constant feeling of not having enough time for anything, social anxiety, cripplingly low self-confidence, and difficulties communicating with people in real life due to a) not having enough time to meet up with anyone and b) when you actually do meet up once in a blue moon, not having the ability to maintain a conversation.

The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit that 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.

– Bill Maher

When I think of the word ‘addiction’, instead of picturing people who are addicted to drugs and cigarettes, I think about technology; more specifically, social media. Because these diseases are in fact mind-blowingly similar. If you take away a drug addict’s stash, he/she will face withdrawal symptoms; so will a social media addict. While the drug addict will crave his/her daily dose of drugs, the social media addict will crave his/her daily dose of acceptance and/or “happiness”. The same chemical, dopamine, is released while using both drugs and social media. It’s this chemical that contributes to feelings of pleasure and satisfaction and inevitably causes addiction.

Philip Morris just wanted your lungs, “Maher concludes. “The App wants your soul.”

Digital Minimalism discusses one of the main reasons why people are so addicted to their screens: social media. It has literally caused people to lose the ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience. Not only that, another problem with social media is that most of its users are teenagers and they’re constantly bombarded with pictures of celebrities which create unrealistic standards of beauty and that has a very negative impact on their self esteem. They also see the highlights of everyone else’s lives and that causes them to compare the mundane parts of their own life with the seemingly “happy” parts of their friends’and family’s. Ergo, they feel depressed and helpless.

Throughout this whole book I came across sayings that had me nodding my head like a metronome. Just to make my point clear: “Where we want to be cautious… is when the sound of a voice or a cup of coffee with a friend is replaced with ‘likes’ on a post.” “It won’t take many walks with a friend, or pleasantly meandering phone calls, before you begin to wonder why you previously felt it was so important to turn away from the person sitting right in front of you to leave a comment on your cousin’s friend’s post.””Finally, it’s worth noting that refusing to use social media icons and comments to interact means that some people will inevitably fall out of your social orbits-in particular, those whose relationship with you exists only over social media. Here’s my tough love reassurance: let them go.”

This book covers a different way of approaching technology, Newport defines it as a philosophy 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.”

And that brings us to the billion dollar question: how in the world do we stay away from our phones if we’re so smitten to them in the first place? Glad you asked. To answer the question, “Clear it all out. Step away for 30 days,” he says. “Get back in touch with what you really care about, what you want to spend your time on, and when you’re done with the 30 days, rebuild that digital life from scratch — but do it this time with real intention.” During this 30 day declutter you only avoid optional technologies; so yes, you can you answer your boss’s email, and yes, you respond to your kid’s text asking you to pick her up from soccer. The rest will go.

To make the 30 days more tolerable, Cal Newport suggests reintroducing leisure activities that you used to enjoy before compulsively checking your devices – reading, cooking, practicing new skills in a sport you like, playing a musical instrument, writing, exercising, exploring your neighborhood with friends, or simply going out for a cup of coffee with someone you haven’t talked to in a while. The last step is evaluating how much time has been wasted skimming and tapping through your phone. Being a successful digital minimalist, he says, is weighing cost over benefit. “What is the cost in terms of your life energy, your life force, [and] time you could be spending on something more important?” he says.

One thing that really got me hooked was the fact that instead of just scolding his readers for using their phones and/or digital devices way too much, he also tells them what to do with all the analog time they’ll have once they start the 30 day digital declutter. For instance, he talked about visiting a new mom instead of just commenting “awww” on her newborn’s picture on Instagram. It makes life more meaningful! I think this the best way to approach this problem; fill your life with the good stuff and the other stuff consumes less time.

Cal wades through the mess, and concludes that the value of any given tool depends entirely upon how we use it. You might as well ask if a hammer is good or bad. It’s good if we use it for building tree houses; less good if we use it for bashing in the skulls of our enemies.

Something’s in the air. I think people are finally getting fed up with how much of their humanity they’re losing to always staring at these screens. And so my more optimistic prediction is that we have become so tired of how enslaved we’ve become, that we are going to revolt. And so if we came back two years from now, my hope is what we would be saying is, ‘Can you believe that we ever used to live that way?’

– Cal Newport

It’s insane how much Newport has managed to pack into this 300 page book, and I can’t possibly include all of it in this review, but I’d hate to miss the most important thing that he talked about, one that was also emphasized in his book Deep Work; solitude. The reason why it’s so important to be a digital minimalist is because screen addiction has robbed us of the time used to reflect and be alone with our thoughts. This loss is “one of the biggest undetected consequences of what we’ve engineered in this digital age.” Almost everyone in our generation is deprived from good old quality time with their own selves.

To conclude, he stated:

I opened this book with Andrew Sullivan’s concern about losing his humanity to the electronic world wrought by Samuel Morse. “I used to be human,” he wrote. My hope is that digital minimalism can help reverse this state of affairs by providing constructive way to engage and leverage the latest innovations to your advantage, not that of a faceless attention economy conglomerates, to create a culture where the technologically savvy can upend Sullivan’s lament and instead say with confidence, “Because of technology, I’m a better human being than I ever was before.”

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R A T I N G :

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˗ˏˋ F I V E S T A R S ˎˊ˗

Just. Read. It. If you have enough time to spend hours upon hours on your phone, you most certainly have time to read this book. “I don’t have time” is the lamest excuse ever; you have at least five hours of free time every day. In fact, if you think you don’t have the time to read this book, you’re in dire need of what this book has in store for you.

Have you read the book? Do you plan on reading it? What do you think? Let me know in the comments!