I skimmed through deep work and bought digital minimalism, mostly because I had already subscribed to the idea mostly due to the vitriol that has developed on social media, and the constant dopamine hits that come with constant notifications.
I've deleted IG, Twitter, and FB with Hacker News and Reddit being my only vices left. I would say that I'm a lot happier.
I'm not sure that we really need to know all the worlds problems at our finger tips and avoiding the most disingenuous of these interactions is healthy, although I'm thinking about deleting reddit for this reason and leaving HN as my only bastion left.
I totally agree and understand what you've said but sometimes I have this urge to let other friends and family members know which books I've been reading or places I am traveling to etc. I used to do this on FB and IG before I did digital cleansing. Have you figured it out how to suppress this urge to post things like that?
Substitute it with a less impersonal medium. Send them emails or given them a call to chat about latest stuff. For friends you can have WhatsApp/Signal/Whatever.
In retrospect, my urge to post and share something on social media is just an urge to satiate my ego and be noticed. I think the reality is that most people don't really care about the majority of what someone else has to say, so making something personal and intentional is your best bet (and a great litmus test for whether or not future communication on a given topic will be worthwhile).
I don't have much self-discipline, but if I did I would disable notifications and time box a couple hours for sharing things/ replying. I think a lot of the issues are from consumption more than sharing.
That being said I use to have a lot of engagement on my twitter account and I got to the point that posting would give me anxiety because of the possibility of negative replies despite whatever I said being mundane. Also watching others get "exposed" for certain behaviors gave me anxiety as a somewhat popular person in my social network. I wanted the engagement, but after I got it I found out it wasn't what I was expecting/wanted and stopped.
I guess I didn't really have a secret as much as just learned the hard way.
I do not have this urge so take it with a grain of salt. Perhaps:
1. First, sleep on it and let the urge fade away.
2. For the remaining urges,
2.a if the urge actually turns out to be an urge about writing and not so much about communicating, write a blog. Perhaps one that you don't even tell your friends & family about, if it is really about setting things down on 'paper'. Or one you tell them about and they will or won't read.
2.b as others have said, e-mail, if that's more about communication. Communication which will happen or won't; in my experience people rarely answer when there is no explicit question in a message (and even then, hem...), but that depends on people I guess.
I just realized they probably don’t care and the urge disappeared completely. Not because they are callous but because no one cares, it is all digital narcissism.
An acquaintance of mine has a personal newsletter that he puts out twice a year.
This way people who like to hear from him are able to. he always invites replies and often times I just write my thoughts on one or two things he wrote.
I found Polarsteps as an alternative for a digital travel log for my friends and family. No affiliation. It also has maps integrated, and you can even order a print copy of your pictures and stories.
You can share on mastodon. Or even better, write a blog about it. Another alternative is to write in a journal, but that defeats your purpose of wanting to share.
Years ago there was a tradition of an annual Christmas letter that contained an update on the status of the family for those far flung members of the family that you didn't keep that much in touch with.
Perhaps write the tings you want to share down and send them out as a quarterly update? That would have the effect that you are not imposing too much, and that you have some time to reflect on what you want to share (so you are less likely to share pieces that make you angry or that only have temporary impact).
I am not on a social media with my mum, but when I see something that might interest her I send her the link in an Email.
I started writing all the "really want to share this" items down in a diary. It was difficult at first, then got easier, then the urge grew less and less. (YMMV)
A curious choice of word as "bastion" usually indicates that the person who says it is allied with what the bastion stands for, and you seem to indicate quite the opposite.
But perhaps your wording also indicates how conflicted we users of social media are with our feelings toward it, much like how other addictions work.
I'm already there, it's nicer to also have a custom curation of media content too - RSS Feeds are dead, but a home page (circa 1996 Internet with hotlinks to where you want to go / bookmark bar) is nice too.
RSS is not dead. RSS is the main way I keep up with the websites that I follow. If you maintain a website but don’t have an RSS feed, you’re doing it wrong. (RSS = {RSS, Atom}.)
I've made exactly the same calculation. No Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, keeping Reddit and Hacker News. Reddit is kept pruned to rather few subreddits: godot, filmmakers, stuff like that.
I'm on FB for Groups/Pages. I use a fake name, and picked friends at random. FB groups is great. (I didn't pick my friends well though. Everyone who liked my watchmaking page I added as a friend. Some are terrorits. I'm deleting the terrorists. I hope I didn't make a mistake.)
My tactic (which I'm violating right now in order to post this, mea culpa) was to move the few things that strike me as valuable to a newsreader and quickly grind through them with coffee in the morning.
I don't give a damn about smartphones, so there's no temptation there, and simply organizing around a handful of computer-oriented reddit groups (as opposed to the crazies at /politics), science news sites, the local newspaper, and oddly enough, RT (mostly international news) pretty much does the trick.
Add in the forays to email/banking plus archive.org, libgen, Sci-Hub for books/papers and Amazon for stuff and the internet is pretty much handled except for the occasional technical question.
For some reason, the discipline of RSS is good for calming down any need for outrage porn.
As an aside, my latest experiment in social media consists of sending vintage postcards.
Since my RPi4 is my workstation for a couple of weeks now, I find myself treating this little machine more gently, as in I close programs more often when I don't need them. I noticed I do this also with Thunderbird and not constantly having my email program open is a breeze of fresh air. You should try it.
NB What's also a breeze of fresh air (or rather, a lack of a thunderstorm) is the thing doesn't have a fan.
Thanks for the tip! I really don't have a problem with Thunderbird in itself, more so with the fact I have a program open that I'm compelled to look into way too often, simply because I have it opened. Just leaving it closed on default and only opening it when I need it does the job for me.
For email, I have found that just turning off automatic message fetching helps. For some reason the small amount of friction of having to manually trigger it and then wait a few seconds keeps me from doing it compulsively.
I have thought about that too, but I have several email addresses to check. So when I decide it's "email time", the auto-fetching is exactly what I need at that moment.
I used to follow Joshua and Ryan but eventually they became "too much" for me.
Minimalism could also mean the lack of stuff, and their style of "turning it into a religion", the high excitement, the EVERYTHING IS SO SUPER AMAZING style American interpretation is quite the opposite of what minimalism eventually became to me.
Somehow the idea of digital minimalism spans a spectrum from
> don't waste too much time and attention on things you don't really enjoy
all the way to
> delete every social media account, never listen to a podcast or an audiobook, don't watch any videos, throw out your phone, and if you ever even glance at a screen for reasons other than work, your precious brain will be damaged
The first position seems reasonable to me. The second one is only mildly exaggerated from an opinion a lot of people actually seem to have, it's pseudoscientific at best and it's just a reason for people to feel smug about themselves while achieving absolutely nothing (or to feel bad about themselves when they fall short).
In some ways it's similar to the "nofap" community where a very small group of people with porn addictions or sexual health problems snowballed into a large cult full of people who all think that any form of masturbation is always wrong. The similarities are in all the talk about your brain "resetting", the fact that they take some reasonable idea and distort it to an extreme, and of course the lack of evidence and all the broscience that's used to justify all of this.
I agree that 'digital minimalism' is an extremely vague and, what's worse, generally paired with unscientific new-age Zen broscience bullshit, but I do think there's a legitimate point: we should question our tools.
It's easy to use gadgets, technologies, apps, subscriptions, whatever, just out of habit, without actually being conscious of the tradeoffs they involve.
I used to have social media accounts, but I deleted them after I realized they weren't valuable to me.
My phone is now a dumbphone, because I thought the additional mental energy one devotes to apps, notifications etc. wasn't really worth much to me.
Of course everyone needs to draw their own conclusions, I'm not claiming my decisions have universal validity, but the general principle "use all the tech you need, but not more" is a good one.
Always been that way, always will be I guess. Someone happens on a set of very specific behaviours they use to fix some aspect of their behaviour/health/etc. Sometimes delusional, sometimes not, sometimes fake, sometimes not. Normally taps into something that seems "common sense". They or someone else sells it as a more general fix. Rinse and repeat. Just taps into a human need to find simple solutions? Diets, self-help, temperance, etc etc etc. Sometimes descends into cult-like behaviour, sometimes goes other way -- origins get lost, edges get sanded off, become folk wisdom
I don't use my IG account. I did use it as a 30 day challenge (find something interesting and post it every single day) some years ago and later to post some long exposure photos.
You won't be told when Facebook gives your entire contact graph, client IP location history, and contents of your uploaded mobile address book to the government without a warrant, as they do tens of thousands of times per year.
The trick is to disable all notifications. Always use the phone as a “pull” device. A reply can wait until the next day, and if it’s important they will call you (more than once).
The focus of the article is more on notifications and attention-wasters, rather than privacy concerns regarding FB. The issues in the article would still exist with some idealized, privacy-protecting FOSSBook.
Ever since I deleted Whatsapp, I'm noticing the absurdity of businesses that operate using Whatsapp.
It's one thing if they offered an alternative using SMS for example, but saying "if you need support, contact us through WhatsApp" is an instant app deletion or service migration for me.
It also used to be easier to view at least some of a business page on FB without an account; last time I tried it demanded I log in immediately. Given the number of businesses who use FB as their sole online presence, as well as all the businesses that post important updates to hours and such there first, this is rather annoying.
That said, I've never had even a hint of needing to install WhatsApp; I'm given to understand that's a regional thing.
> It’s more sensical to instead measure the value gained by the activities you do embrace and then attempt to maximize this positive value.
> Optimizing your use of the tools that really matter, can significantly improve your life.
> Focus on the much smaller number of activities that return the most value for your life. This is a basic 80/20 analysis: doing less, but focusing on higher quality, can generate more total value.
> Will this add significant value to something I find to be significantly important to my life?
-
In other words: Stop obsessing about social media! Start obsessing about self-optimization!
I accidentally ran over my phone 5 weeks ago. Its been amazing. Get all my text on my computer. Need to plan ahead for things but sleeping better, feeling better. Next phone is going to be a feature phone, like something that runs KaiOs, phone, text, camera, maps.... nothing else.
I just happen to have read an article complaining about how “Orwelian” is almost always used in ways that seem to have little connection to Orwell’s writings; even more so with invocations of 1984. Early in this article we encounter “culture’s increasingly Orwellian allegiance to social media ”. I have no idea what this means. The word “allegiance” confuses me here. Is it what he really intends? Because I’ve never met anyone with allegiance to Twitter, etc. Even people I know who use them obsessively don’t have any allegiance to them. I guess some of their employees do, but I don’t think that’s what the author has in mind. And what is “Orwellian” doing there? This was even more puzzling.
Allegiance: “loyalty or commitment to a superior or to a group or cause.”
The phrase almost works. People spend half their lives feeding the beast of social media by documenting their movements, having their divisive arguments and giving them eyeballs and attention.
At the same time, the god they serve has plenty of the themes of 1984 - constant surveillance, total control of the message, incredible degree of power over your business/personal life and ability to deplatform you.
Big Brother had to use a network of Telescreens. Now we just give it all up for free in glorious technicolour.
This feels especially stark having been at the “skeptic” end of the covid debate this year.
I've found the web apps for IG and Facebook (mbasic.facebook.com) to be a good balance. I keep in touch with interests (cycling, travel, music) yet don't have the push notifications or apps tracking my every move.
The limitations of mbasic are perfectly acceptable to me.
54 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadI'm not sure that we really need to know all the worlds problems at our finger tips and avoiding the most disingenuous of these interactions is healthy, although I'm thinking about deleting reddit for this reason and leaving HN as my only bastion left.
Replace broadcasting with a duplex channel.
In retrospect, my urge to post and share something on social media is just an urge to satiate my ego and be noticed. I think the reality is that most people don't really care about the majority of what someone else has to say, so making something personal and intentional is your best bet (and a great litmus test for whether or not future communication on a given topic will be worthwhile).
Edit: typo.
That being said I use to have a lot of engagement on my twitter account and I got to the point that posting would give me anxiety because of the possibility of negative replies despite whatever I said being mundane. Also watching others get "exposed" for certain behaviors gave me anxiety as a somewhat popular person in my social network. I wanted the engagement, but after I got it I found out it wasn't what I was expecting/wanted and stopped.
I guess I didn't really have a secret as much as just learned the hard way.
edit: couple hours per week*
1. First, sleep on it and let the urge fade away.
2. For the remaining urges,
2.a if the urge actually turns out to be an urge about writing and not so much about communicating, write a blog. Perhaps one that you don't even tell your friends & family about, if it is really about setting things down on 'paper'. Or one you tell them about and they will or won't read.
2.b as others have said, e-mail, if that's more about communication. Communication which will happen or won't; in my experience people rarely answer when there is no explicit question in a message (and even then, hem...), but that depends on people I guess.
This way people who like to hear from him are able to. he always invites replies and often times I just write my thoughts on one or two things he wrote.
https://www.polarsteps.com/
Perhaps write the tings you want to share down and send them out as a quarterly update? That would have the effect that you are not imposing too much, and that you have some time to reflect on what you want to share (so you are less likely to share pieces that make you angry or that only have temporary impact).
I am not on a social media with my mum, but when I see something that might interest her I send her the link in an Email.
A curious choice of word as "bastion" usually indicates that the person who says it is allied with what the bastion stands for, and you seem to indicate quite the opposite.
But perhaps your wording also indicates how conflicted we users of social media are with our feelings toward it, much like how other addictions work.
If you are worried that HN will become your last bastion, perhaps you could find other online communities where you have passions/interests.
I don't give a damn about smartphones, so there's no temptation there, and simply organizing around a handful of computer-oriented reddit groups (as opposed to the crazies at /politics), science news sites, the local newspaper, and oddly enough, RT (mostly international news) pretty much does the trick.
Add in the forays to email/banking plus archive.org, libgen, Sci-Hub for books/papers and Amazon for stuff and the internet is pretty much handled except for the occasional technical question.
For some reason, the discipline of RSS is good for calming down any need for outrage porn.
As an aside, my latest experiment in social media consists of sending vintage postcards.
NB What's also a breeze of fresh air (or rather, a lack of a thunderstorm) is the thing doesn't have a fan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_(email_client)
(It can be configured to use the lynx terminal web browser to render html content nicely as text)
Minimalism could also mean the lack of stuff, and their style of "turning it into a religion", the high excitement, the EVERYTHING IS SO SUPER AMAZING style American interpretation is quite the opposite of what minimalism eventually became to me.
> don't waste too much time and attention on things you don't really enjoy
all the way to
> delete every social media account, never listen to a podcast or an audiobook, don't watch any videos, throw out your phone, and if you ever even glance at a screen for reasons other than work, your precious brain will be damaged
The first position seems reasonable to me. The second one is only mildly exaggerated from an opinion a lot of people actually seem to have, it's pseudoscientific at best and it's just a reason for people to feel smug about themselves while achieving absolutely nothing (or to feel bad about themselves when they fall short).
In some ways it's similar to the "nofap" community where a very small group of people with porn addictions or sexual health problems snowballed into a large cult full of people who all think that any form of masturbation is always wrong. The similarities are in all the talk about your brain "resetting", the fact that they take some reasonable idea and distort it to an extreme, and of course the lack of evidence and all the broscience that's used to justify all of this.
It's easy to use gadgets, technologies, apps, subscriptions, whatever, just out of habit, without actually being conscious of the tradeoffs they involve.
I used to have social media accounts, but I deleted them after I realized they weren't valuable to me.
My phone is now a dumbphone, because I thought the additional mental energy one devotes to apps, notifications etc. wasn't really worth much to me.
Of course everyone needs to draw their own conclusions, I'm not claiming my decisions have universal validity, but the general principle "use all the tech you need, but not more" is a good one.
(I don't have IG or WhatsApp accounts.)
I don't use my IG account. I did use it as a 30 day challenge (find something interesting and post it every single day) some years ago and later to post some long exposure photos.
I am doing fine, and not noticing any issues.
Suggestions like this seem to come from people who are ignorant of or indifferent to the privacy labels on Facebook apps.
Notifications aren't the problem, Facebook is. You won't ever get rid of Facebook if you keep using their services.
It's one thing if they offered an alternative using SMS for example, but saying "if you need support, contact us through WhatsApp" is an instant app deletion or service migration for me.
That said, I've never had even a hint of needing to install WhatsApp; I'm given to understand that's a regional thing.
> Optimizing your use of the tools that really matter, can significantly improve your life.
> Focus on the much smaller number of activities that return the most value for your life. This is a basic 80/20 analysis: doing less, but focusing on higher quality, can generate more total value.
> Will this add significant value to something I find to be significantly important to my life?
-
In other words: Stop obsessing about social media! Start obsessing about self-optimization!
The phrase almost works. People spend half their lives feeding the beast of social media by documenting their movements, having their divisive arguments and giving them eyeballs and attention.
At the same time, the god they serve has plenty of the themes of 1984 - constant surveillance, total control of the message, incredible degree of power over your business/personal life and ability to deplatform you.
Big Brother had to use a network of Telescreens. Now we just give it all up for free in glorious technicolour.
This feels especially stark having been at the “skeptic” end of the covid debate this year.
The limitations of mbasic are perfectly acceptable to me.