- You wanted to study but decided to have a quick check on your phone and ended up scrolling your Twitter account for almost an hour?
- You wanted to reply text messages / Whatsapp message, and suddenly you already spend most of your time scrolling your Facebook timeline or Instagram?
- You are tired but you thought checking your social media is a good thing to do before went to bed is a good idea, and tadaaaa, it’s past your bedtime and you ended up waking up late to work?
- You have nothing to do / you have some free time, and you are scrolling your phone even though there’s actually nothing for you in it?
Does this situation seems familiar? Too many on hold task because we have been inserting “some time for scrolling our phone”.
A few months ago, I read a book by Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. I want to share some trivia/interesting points/quotes Newport wrote in the book.
- “These apps and slick sites were not gifts from ‘nerd gods building a better world’ “. We might think the tech company invent those devices and apps to make our life better and easier, but actually, they are not. “They were instead designed to put a slot machine in our pockets”. They build the apps to make money. Yes, this does remind me of the apps I bought because it’s premium (insert self laugh) or I bought it because it has a special discount!
I remember presenting this book in my book circle, and one of the members who work in the IT industry was admitting this fact. She said that they monitored every site we clicked, and they studied the way to make us stay as long as we can on their apps/sites.
Another quote from the book, Sean Parker, the founding President of Facebook said in developing the apps, they asked a question “How do we consume as much as of your time and conscious attention as possible?“
So, how much time have we consumed for our social media? - Newport introduced the idea of “30 Days Digital Declutter“, where you delete all unnecessary apps (which do not affect your life/work) and re-introduce the apps after the declutter finish.
To be honest, before reading this book, I did my own version of digital declutter back in 2019 where I deleted Facebook, Instagram and Twitter from my phone and never try to open it in my web browser at all. Surprisingly, I can finish reading five books that month instead of normally only two books.
There is a woman, an influencer who participate in the declutter experiment, sharing about her experience during the declutter. She became bored after the second day because she has “nothing” to do.
There are so many things we can do every day, but because of social media is the things we do every day, when it’s gone, we suddenly have “nothing” to do?
Think again. - Addiction doesn’t only apply to substances (alcohol & drugs), but also behavioural. Social media is also an addiction. How do tech company encourages behavioural addiction? By giving something to people so that they:
a. Crave for intermittent positive reinforcement.
b. Drive for social approval.
As an adult, I may not have that behaviour anymore, but I still remember when I was younger, how good I felt when people commented and liked my status. I might not be getting any positive reinforcement physically, but hey, I get it a lot online. - Spend time alone. Or solitude. Newport suggested that people need to allocate their time to be alone. “Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences-wherever you happen to be.” We hardly spend our time for solitude nowadays due to “busy” filling out our time scrolling our newsfeed, which actually does not require our attention.
Solitude deprivation, on the other hand, is the state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds. Existence of the smartphone and social media seems encouraging the solitude deprivation and increase in teen mental health issues because teenagers have lost their abilities to process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power their critical social circuits, which are not meant to be used constantly, and to redirect that energy to other important cognitive housekeeping tasks. - Reclaim Leisure. I love the idea Cal emphasizes that “doing nothing is overrated”. While he categorized spending time with social media as low-quality leisure (remember, what we did was scrolling, there’s nothing difficult about that), he proposed to do high-quality leisure during our free time, be it a bit difficult but it will benefit us later.
All in all, we must reject the mindset that we must always have a smartphone with us. We are the one who controls our phone, not controlled by our phone. Social media was first invented to make us connected to people, but make sure to not disconnect with people around us.
This may not represent totally content from the book, but I hope that this entry helps you to start your early journey of digital minimalism.