Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

I’ve also seen people deploy daily walks for this purpose. Steve Jobs was famous for his long strolls around the tree-lined Silicon Valley neighborhood where he lived. If you were in his inner circle, you could expect invitations to join him for what was sure to be an intense conversation.

they confront the following questions: “Is this going to be helpful or is it going to be detrimental?20 Is it going to bolster our life together, as a community, or is it going to somehow tear it down?”

removed the web browser from her phone—a nontrivial hack. “I figured I didn’t need to know the answer to everything instantly,” she told me. She then bought an old-fashioned notebook to jot down ideas when she’s bored on the tube.

“Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly.27 It teaches patience. We attend to tone and nuance.” On the other hand: “When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits.” As a true digital minimalist, Turkle approaches these issues from a standpoint of smarter use of digital communication tools, not blanket abstention. “My argumen

It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy.

the attention resistance—a loosely organized movement of individuals who use high-tech tools and strict operating procedures to extract value from the products of the digital attention economy, while avoiding falling victim to compulsive use.

We must instead take steps to extract the good from these technologies while sidestepping what’s bad. We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that

The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.

AllSides.com once a day—a news site that covers the top stories, but for each story it neutrally links to three articles: one from a source associated with the political left, one from the right, and one from the center.

when you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you: the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, and to strengthen relationships. If you suffer from chronic solitude deprivation, therefore, the quality of your life degrades.