Digital Minimalism

In my experience covering these topics, it’s hard to permanently reform your digital life through the use of tips and tricks alone.

Here’s my suggestion: schedule in advance the time you spend on low-quality leisure.

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.

People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable.

“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?”

Is this the best way to use technology to support this value?

The problem is that small changes are not enough to solve our big issues with new technologies.

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.

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.