Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

Once you start constraining your low-quality distractions (with no feeling of lost value), and filling the newly freed time with high-quality alternatives (which generate significantly higher levels of satisfaction), you’ll soon begin to wonder how you ever tolerated spending so many of your leisure hours staring passively at glowing screens.

Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.

#2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.

for retweets of a clever quip. But as Crawford implies, these digital cries for attention are often a poor substitute for the recognition generated by handicraft, as they’re not backed by the hard-won skill required to tame the “infallible judgment” of physical reality, and come across instead as “the boasts of a boy.” Craft allows an escape from t

Handmade,

Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight?17 Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm

If you begin decluttering the low-value digital distractions from your life before you’ve convincingly filled in the void they were helping you ignore, the experience will be unnecessarily unpleasant at best and a massive failure at worse.

As Aristotle elaborates, a life filled with deep thinking is happy because contemplation is an “activity that is appreciated for its own sake … nothing is gained from it except the act of contemplation.”