⌾Curio #28 - Cal Newport, Beautiful News & Pinback
I hope you and your family are staying safe during this difficult and unprecedented time.
Of course I would say this, but it’s obvious to me that the mission of Curio — to be an escape from the noise of the news cycle — has never been more relevant. I know I haven’t been alone in feeling overwhelmed, anxious and exhausted by these current events.
Those who’ve read Curio #11 will remember that I’m an enormous fan of Edward Hopper’s paintings. However, I never imagined only a few months later that instead of going on a planned family holiday to Spain, my life would actually transform into an Edward Hopper painting.
Substitute the man in the above Hopper painting for someone slightly more disheveled but no less existential, put him in a navy dressing gown, add a laptop, a large cup of ginger and turmeric tea and drastically reduce the size of the windows, and that’s me right now.
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The most encouraging pieces I’ve read in the past week have focused on two giants, Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare, both of whom thrived during long periods of forced isolation due to the bubonic plague. In 1606, Shakespeare’s theatre was shut for the year, so he used his free time to write Antony & Cleopatra, King Lear and Macbeth. Likewise, Newton produced some of his best work during his long stint in quarantine from 1665-1666. During this time, he wrote the papers that would become early calculus, developed his theories on optics while playing with prisms in his bedroom and started theorizing about the concept of gravity. He later referred to this phase in his life as the “year of wonders.”
The lesson to be learned is that constraint breeds creativity. There has arguably never been more competition for our attention than right now. How we choose to use it is one of the biggest choices we all currently face.
Yours in health,
Oli
Cal Newport & Digital Minimalism
“The key to living well in a high tech world is to spend much less time using technology”
Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University and the author of six books, as well as a frequent public speaker and podcast guest. I’ve been familiar with his work for a while, particularly his ideas on humanity’s relationship with technology. He’s no Luddite — he’s a computer scientist, after all — but he believes that most people use technology in a way that undermines their well being, productivity and ability to focus. I recently read his latest book, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, and have excerpted some keys passages below.
Newport is a proponent of a 30 day digital detox, where you quit all optional digital technologies in your personal life for a month. These include any apps, services, or websites that aren’t necessary for your work or play a vital role in your daily routine. For most people, these optional technologies include social media, online news and entertainment sites, games and streaming videos. Once you’ve gone a month, then you’ll have a better idea of which pieces of technology you need and which you don’t.
The Problem
“Earlier in 2016, I published a book titled Deep Work…As my book found an audience, I began to hear from more and more of my readers…
Almost everyone I spoke to believed in the power of the internet, and recognized that it can and should be a force that improves their lives. They didn’t necessarily want to give up Google Maps, or abandon Instagram, but they also felt as though their current relationship with technology was unsustainable — to the point that if something didn’t change soon, they’d break, too.
A common term I heard in these conversations about modern digital life was exhausation. 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. Their problem with this frenzied activity is less about its details than the fact that it’s increasingly beyond their control. Few want to spend so much time online, but these tools have a way of cultivating behavioral addictions. The urge to check Twitter or [Instagram] becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted times into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.
As I discovered in my subsequent research…some of these addictive properties are accidental (few predicted the extent to which text messaging could command your attention), while many are quite purposeful (compulsive use is the foundation for many social media business plans). But whatever its source, this irresistible attraction to screens is leading 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. They downloaded the apps and set up accounts for good reasons, only to discover, which grim irony, that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that made them appealing in the first place: they joined Facebook to stay in touch with friends across the country, and then ended up unable to maintain an uninterrupted conversation with the friend sitting across the table.”
We Didn’t Sign Up For This
“It’s widely accepted that new technologies such as social media and smartphones massively changed how we live in the twenty-first century. There are many ways to portray this change. I think the social critic Laurence Scott does so quite effectively when he describes the modern hyper-connected existence as one in which ‘a moment can feel strangely flat if it exists solely in itself.’
The point of the above observations, however, is to emphasize what many also forget, which is that these changes, in addition to being massive and transformational, were also unexpected and unplanned. A college senior who set up an account on thefacebook.com in 2004 to look up classmates probably didn’t predict that the average modern user would spend around two hours per day on social media and related messaging services, with close to half that time dedicated to Facebook’s products alone. Similarly, a first adopter who picked up an iPhone in 2007 for the music features would be less enthusiastic if told that within a decade he could expect to compulsively check the device eighty-five times a day — a ‘feature’ we now know Steve Jobs never considered as he prepared his famous keynote.
These changes crept up on us and happened fast, before we had a chance to step back and ask what we really wanted out of the rapid advances of the past decade. We added new technologies to the periphery of our existence for minor reasons, and then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life. We didn’t, in other words, sign up for the digital world in which we’re currently entrenched; we seem to have stumbled backward into it.”
Digital Minimalism
Newport has labeled his philosophy of technology use as ‘digital minimalism’. He defines it as follows:
“A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”
…
“The so-called digital minimalists who follow this philosophy constantly perform implicit cost-benefit analyses. If a new technology offers little more than a minor diversion or trivial convenience, the minimalist will ignore it. Even when a new technology promises to support something the minimalist values, it must still pass a stricter test: Is this the best way to use technology to support this value? If the answer is no, the minimalist will set to work trying to optimize the tech, or search out a better option.
By working backward from their deep values to their technology choices, digital minimalists transform these innovations from a source of distraction into tools to support a life well lived. By doing so, they break the spell that has made so many people feel like they’re losing control to their screens.”
…
“[Digital minimalists] believe that the best digital life is formed by carefully curating their tools to deliver massive and unambiguous benefits. They tend to be incredibly wary of low-value activities that can clutter up their time and attention and end up hurting more than they help. Put another way: minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.”
On Pandemics
While you can’t find Newport on Twitter or Instagram, he does have a blog and accompanying newsletter that’s aimed at anyone interested in our struggles to deploy technology in ways that support — instead of subvert — the things we care about. Last week on his blog he provided some nuggets of advice on how best to use technology during a pandemic.
“One of the more profound representations of the soul in the Western Canon is the Chariot Allegory from Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue:
“[T]he charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character.”
As elaborated by the character of Socrates in the dialogue, the charioteer represents our soul’s reasoned pursuit to cultivate a worthy life. This task requires the charioteer to allow the noble steed, representing our moral intuitions, to lead the way, while preventing its ignoble partner, representing our base instincts, from drawing the soul off course.
In Digital Minimalism, I use this allegory to help understand how to navigate both the promises and perils of modern technology. The minimalist, I argue, deploys technology in specific, intentional ways with the goal of empowering the noble steed. The maximalist, by contrast, deploys technology casually, allowing it to immeasurably boost the strength of the other horse.
I’m bringing this up now because it occurred to me that these ideas have probably never been more relevant than amidst the anxiety caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
In this current situation, for most people, the constant monitoring of online news about the virus is providing pure fuel to the ignoble steed, dragging the allegorical chariot away from what’s good and awe-inspiring about life — even during turmoil — and toward bottom-less anxiety and pseudo-paralysis. The ignoble steed always craves more of this attention-catching information. What if something extra terrible just happened? What if I find a link that makes me feel better? But in this feverish pursuit, the charioteer loses control.
There is, I propose, a simple two-part solution to this state of affairs.
First, check one national and one local news source each morning. Then — and this is the important part — don’t check any other news for the rest of the day. Presumably, time sensitive updates that affect you directly will arrive by email, or phone, or text. This will be really hard, especially given the way we’ve been trained by social media companies over the past decade to view our phone as a psychological pacifier.
Which brings me to the second part of the solution: distract yourself with value-driven action; lots of action. Serve your community, serve your kids, serve yourself (both body and mind), produce good work. Try to fit in a few moments of forced gratitude, just to keep those particular circuits active.
This doesn’t mean abandon technology. This current moment reveals many ways to deploy tech to strategically boost the noble steed. Our modern tools enable you to video conference more often with friends and family, or to dive into deep topics that have nothing to do with flu viruses, or to coordinate with your community and find out how you can be useful.
This, then, is what digital minimalism has to say about pandemics. You cannot take your technology lightly. You’re the charioteer facing two horses: it’s up to you which one you want to empower.”
The Beautiful News
One of the problems of being constantly sucked into the vortex of the news cycle is that it can distort your sense of perspective about the world. With all the doom and gloom fed to us everyday, it’s easy to forget the enormous progress that humanity has made and is continuing to make each year. According to almost all significant and measurable metrics — whether it’s literacy rates, life expectancy, child mortality or access to safe drinking water — the data has never been better.
That’s why one of my favorite websites is The Beautiful News (also has a great Instagram). It focuses only on good news stories that are worth knowing and couples them with an appealing graphic to provide a sense of historical perspective.
I hope you find it a much needed dose of optimism 🙂
Pinback
I still remember the moment I was introduced to the San Diego-based indie rock group, Pinback. It was my last year of high school and I was sitting in the backseat of a friend’s car looking out the window. The friend in the front passenger seat was someone who’s musical taste I greatly respected. He plugged in his iPod and played this track. I was instantly hooked.
Loro was released in 1999 as part of Pinback’s self-titled debut album.
“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up.”
- Steven Hawking
Curio is a newsletter for curious minds seeking a break from the noise of the news cycle