What are the common misconceptions in regards to Digital Minimalism?ĬN: Minimalism is a philosophy that has been around since antiquity. They imagine spotless white rooms with a stick or two of furniture. RC: Often people mistake traditional/analog Minimalism as a form of deprivation. When you allow twenty-year-olds in a Silicon Valley incubator to begin messing around with something as fundamental as human sociality, we shouldn't be surprised when some negative consequences arise. When you began messing with human sociality by introducing factors such as social media apps that deliver a constant stream of social approval indicators, or email inboxes full of messages waiting for replies, it presents this carefully calibrated brain software with artificial social situations it's not evolved to recognize, leading to all sorts of unexpected problems, from compulsive use to exaggerated social anxiety. Because our ability to navigate social dynamics is key to our species's success, a non-trivial portion of our cognitive capacity is dedicated to this subtle task. How is technology messing with our neurological software?ĬN: Humans are fundamentally social creatures. RC: You state that our brains are sophisticated social computers, central to our success as a species.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Cal on his thoughts. This is the topic of author - and computer science professor at Georgetown University - Cal Newport’s new book Digital Minimalism. So what are we supposed to do? It seems the thing that we’re missing is a framework, a philosophy that allows us to leverage technology in the way that it was intended: to serve us. Barring any cataclysmic event, the blazing pace of technological advancement will continue. Technology isn't inherently good or bad, but our relationship with technology has become unsustainable. Our time and our energy however, are very limited, and we’re investing ever more online. Maybe it's the other way around: we live in a time where information has unlimited access to us. It’s said the we live in a time where we have unlimited access to information.

It made the experience of going online from anywhere, at anytime, seamless. It wasn’t the first, but it was the most elegant, the most “user friendly”. It unshackled the internet from our desks, and put it in our pockets. The iPhone, and its app store, are arguably the most influential inventions in terms of sculpting our social landscape. That said, when he unveiled the iPhone, even he couldn’t see the future he was creating. It was his ability to foresee what people didn’t even know they wanted, that turned Apple from a garage operation into one of the most successful companies of all time. For all his alleged faults, Steve Jobs didn’t lack vision.

Cal newport's digital minimalism