On Digital Minimalsim (2016)
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
I'm not sure that we really need to know all the worlds problems at our finger tips and avoiding the most disingenuous of these interactions is healthy, although I'm thinking about deleting reddit for this reason and leaving HN as my only bastion left.
That being said I use to have a lot of engagement on my twitter account and I got to the point that posting would give me anxiety because of the possibility of negative replies despite whatever I said being mundane. Also watching others get "exposed" for certain behaviors gave me anxiety as a somewhat popular person in my social network. I wanted the engagement, but after I got it I found out it wasn't what I was expecting/wanted and stopped.
I guess I didn't really have a secret as much as just learned the hard way.
edit: couple hours per week*
Replace broadcasting with a duplex channel.
In retrospect, my urge to post and share something on social media is just an urge to satiate my ego and be noticed. I think the reality is that most people don't really care about the majority of what someone else has to say, so making something personal and intentional is your best bet (and a great litmus test for whether or not future communication on a given topic will be worthwhile).
Edit: typo.
This way people who like to hear from him are able to. he always invites replies and often times I just write my thoughts on one or two things he wrote.
1. First, sleep on it and let the urge fade away.
2. For the remaining urges,
2.a if the urge actually turns out to be an urge about writing and not so much about communicating, write a blog. Perhaps one that you don't even tell your friends & family about, if it is really about setting things down on 'paper'. Or one you tell them about and they will or won't read.
2.b as others have said, e-mail, if that's more about communication. Communication which will happen or won't; in my experience people rarely answer when there is no explicit question in a message (and even then, hem...), but that depends on people I guess.
Perhaps write the tings you want to share down and send them out as a quarterly update? That would have the effect that you are not imposing too much, and that you have some time to reflect on what you want to share (so you are less likely to share pieces that make you angry or that only have temporary impact).
I am not on a social media with my mum, but when I see something that might interest her I send her the link in an Email.
I don't give a damn about smartphones, so there's no temptation there, and simply organizing around a handful of computer-oriented reddit groups (as opposed to the crazies at /politics), science news sites, the local newspaper, and oddly enough, RT (mostly international news) pretty much does the trick.
Add in the forays to email/banking plus archive.org, libgen, Sci-Hub for books/papers and Amazon for stuff and the internet is pretty much handled except for the occasional technical question.
For some reason, the discipline of RSS is good for calming down any need for outrage porn.
As an aside, my latest experiment in social media consists of sending vintage postcards.
A curious choice of word as "bastion" usually indicates that the person who says it is allied with what the bastion stands for, and you seem to indicate quite the opposite.
But perhaps your wording also indicates how conflicted we users of social media are with our feelings toward it, much like how other addictions work.
If you are worried that HN will become your last bastion, perhaps you could find other online communities where you have passions/interests.
NB What's also a breeze of fresh air (or rather, a lack of a thunderstorm) is the thing doesn't have a fan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_(email_client)
(It can be configured to use the lynx terminal web browser to render html content nicely as text)
> Optimizing your use of the tools that really matter, can significantly improve your life.
> Focus on the much smaller number of activities that return the most value for your life. This is a basic 80/20 analysis: doing less, but focusing on higher quality, can generate more total value.
> Will this add significant value to something I find to be significantly important to my life?
-
In other words: Stop obsessing about social media! Start obsessing about self-optimization!
> don't waste too much time and attention on things you don't really enjoy
all the way to
> delete every social media account, never listen to a podcast or an audiobook, don't watch any videos, throw out your phone, and if you ever even glance at a screen for reasons other than work, your precious brain will be damaged
The first position seems reasonable to me. The second one is only mildly exaggerated from an opinion a lot of people actually seem to have, it's pseudoscientific at best and it's just a reason for people to feel smug about themselves while achieving absolutely nothing (or to feel bad about themselves when they fall short).
In some ways it's similar to the "nofap" community where a very small group of people with porn addictions or sexual health problems snowballed into a large cult full of people who all think that any form of masturbation is always wrong. The similarities are in all the talk about your brain "resetting", the fact that they take some reasonable idea and distort it to an extreme, and of course the lack of evidence and all the broscience that's used to justify all of this.
It's easy to use gadgets, technologies, apps, subscriptions, whatever, just out of habit, without actually being conscious of the tradeoffs they involve.
I used to have social media accounts, but I deleted them after I realized they weren't valuable to me.
My phone is now a dumbphone, because I thought the additional mental energy one devotes to apps, notifications etc. wasn't really worth much to me.
Of course everyone needs to draw their own conclusions, I'm not claiming my decisions have universal validity, but the general principle "use all the tech you need, but not more" is a good one.
The phrase almost works. People spend half their lives feeding the beast of social media by documenting their movements, having their divisive arguments and giving them eyeballs and attention.
At the same time, the god they serve has plenty of the themes of 1984 - constant surveillance, total control of the message, incredible degree of power over your business/personal life and ability to deplatform you.
Big Brother had to use a network of Telescreens. Now we just give it all up for free in glorious technicolour.
This feels especially stark having been at the “skeptic” end of the covid debate this year.
The limitations of mbasic are perfectly acceptable to me.
(I don't have IG or WhatsApp accounts.)
Suggestions like this seem to come from people who are ignorant of or indifferent to the privacy labels on Facebook apps.
Notifications aren't the problem, Facebook is. You won't ever get rid of Facebook if you keep using their services.
That said, I've never had even a hint of needing to install WhatsApp; I'm given to understand that's a regional thing.
It's one thing if they offered an alternative using SMS for example, but saying "if you need support, contact us through WhatsApp" is an instant app deletion or service migration for me.
I don't use my IG account. I did use it as a 30 day challenge (find something interesting and post it every single day) some years ago and later to post some long exposure photos.
I am doing fine, and not noticing any issues.
Minimalism could also mean the lack of stuff, and their style of "turning it into a religion", the high excitement, the EVERYTHING IS SO SUPER AMAZING style American interpretation is quite the opposite of what minimalism eventually became to me.