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That's $87 in free gifts for first-time subscribers. See all details at drinkAG1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bitesize, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 50 of the podcast with professor of computer science and author of the book Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport.
In this clip, Cal explains how our digital interactions are pulling us away from real-world connections and activities and the effects this is having on our attention, our health, and our relationships. He gives some brilliant tips on how to declutter your digital world and pursue more meaningful connections. I'm just getting that sense more and more that people are aware now that actually digital media, for all its perceived benefits, there have been some unintended consequences. I'm meeting more and more people now who are choosing to go offline for a significant part of their recreational time, their personal time, their downtime.
Yeah, I've been writing about these issues for many, many years. It was really right around that 2016 that I really began to notice the shift where people were going from telling self-deprecating jokes about how much they look at their phone to actually starting to get concerned about the impact of those phones on their ability to thrive as human beings. It became clear the next frontier to tackle when it comes to the intersection of technology culture was going to be what's happening in our personal lives and our quest to live meaningful and satisfying existences. How our new digital and online tools played in this particular arena.
We're sort of filling every bit of downtime with noise and so therefore solitude and the ability to just self-reflect and you know daydream. These things are sort of being removed from society slowly and insidiously. And you think this is having a negative impact, don't you? Never before in the history of the human species have we really had the capability of banishing every moment of solitude from our day.
I mean this required technological miracles to basically be possible. We had to cover the entire world with high-speed, ubiquitous, wireless internet access. Design these sort of semi-magical devices that could fit in your pocket and connect to this at any moment. Give you any number of distractions or connections of thoughts from other minds.
I mean it took really technological miracles to even try this experiment of can we banish every moment of solitude from our lives. If you strip away from people any time where they're free from input from other minds. If you strip that out of your life, it's not good. You're not able to process what's going on.
You're not able to self-reflect and your brain begins to burn out. And there's also the really big impact that digital interactions do not play the same role in our mind that actual real-world conversation does. So people who spend more time doing digital interactions, spend less time doing real-world conversations because they feel like, oh, I've already checked it. That box, I've been social.
Like I'm on Facebook all day. But our brain doesn't agree that those are the same things. And so people are becoming increasingly lonely and increasingly anxious and depressive as they use social media more. It's because it's replacing the stuff that was keeping them from being lonely.
So there's the big picture issue with autonomy and a bunch of small scale acute wounds that this behavior is causing. Well, the answer to talk about what you're talking about is try to get back to what existed in the world not that long ago. Yeah, we're not talking that far back in history. What we're doing today that feels so fundamental is so new and so arbitrary.
And it could be hard because, you know, it's like the fish that doesn't know what water is because it's always been all around it. This notion that you're constantly checking a screed that's delivering sort of algorithmically selected news and intermittently reinforced social approval indicators. This is like so arbitrary that to, you know, a time traveler for 50 years ago, it might even look dystopian. We just became used to it because it gradually slipped up on us.
And actually, most people, as you mentioned earlier, it's not like they signed up for this. I mean, if you bought an iPhone in 2007, you didn't buy it because you're like, I want to check this thing 85 times a day. I mean, you put it at the music player was beautiful, right? And you signed up for Facebook in 2004.
Like a lot of my friends did. They're like, this is a novelty. Mainly, I'm just kind of interested in what the relationship status is of various people at my school. Got 20 minutes of time a week.
This idea that you would check it on Facebook all day long. Like, no, it's like up for that. Right. I mean, this is stuff that emerged over time.
And so now we're in this weird state where to an observer from 50 years ago to Steve Jobs for 2007 is almost horrified. And I think we're just starting to realize that, like, oh, this isn't fundamental. This is actually a lot weirder than we thought. I'm just too used to it.
But this is weird. What we're doing right now, it has allowed us to actually avoid having to invest the time and resources necessary to develop more high quality leisure activities. But it turns out we really need higher quality leisure activities. This is an idea that goes all the way back to Aristotle writing the Nicomachean ethics, that we need activities done just for the activity's sake if we want to be able to find joy and beauty in a life that's often full of, you know, hardships and things that we can't control.
So we have this craving for quality and it creates a void if we don't have it in our life. But we have these constant distractions that distract us just enough that we could tolerate not having this quality in our life. And I think this is causing, you know, real issues of people's resilience and happiness. And then the second issue of all these sort of quick interactions is that we're unable to actually focus on a moment.
So a social interaction actually get all the benefit of that social interaction or beat outside with a beautiful sunset, actually fully extracting all the beauty that we've evolved to appreciate and enjoy. And so in multiple ways, it's impoverishing our daily experience of life. In some ways, this is really about purpose, isn't it? It's about what is the meaning and purpose in your life?
What do you want to achieve? What brings you happiness? What gives you your values? And therefore, how does technology support that?
This is the message of hope, isn't it? You're saying that actually we can do things about this and it maybe is not as tricky as we think it might be. When I read this experiment last January where I had 1600 people leave all of their optional technologies in their personal life for 30 days as part of doing the clutter to transform into a minimalist lifestyle. By the time they got to the end of the 30 days and they had done the self-work to get comfortable with their mind, they had put in the effort necessary to cultivate some high quality analog activities.
By the time they got to the end of just 30 days, they had largely lost their taste for a lot of that low quality digital mindless tapping and swiping. And so it seems like a very intractable problem, but the solution might actually be closer in the temporal sense that most people might actually guess. Okay, so people did this and did they find it difficult to, you know, to cut these things out of their life? People that reported it was hard for somewhere between 7 to 14 days.
And then it got less difficult. One young woman, for example, said she was so used to checking stuff on her phone that after she took out all these apps from her phone at the beginning of the clutter, what she found herself doing was compulsively checking the weather app because this was the last thing on her phone that actually had updated information, that it actually had information you could check. And she said for the first week, she could tell you like hourly updates on the weather in a dozen major cities around the country because she just had this compulsive need. I need to see information.
But the same young woman said by day 10, there's no problem. And then the important thing was, it wasn't just that you were detoxing. That's one of the beginning of the clutter is you detox from the compulsive need to use these technologies where the real value starts to come in is that you're also supposed to use this as a period of reflection to figure out what's important to me and also to rediscover alternative analog activities. And it was really this latter thing, the alternative analog activities that made a really big difference.
So this was a surprise for me. As people rediscovered the type of analog activities they used to love, they correspondently found that their taste for low quality digital distraction began to diminish. This sounds like a really Go back and listen to the full conversation with my guest, and if you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five, and each week I share things that I do not share on social media.
It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research that I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. It's the goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel-good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it at drchastity.com forward slash Friday Five.
I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.