Note: This article is the third in a multi-part series that covers Cal Newport’s new book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. The first two articles can be found here and here, covering in greater detail the four key areas of focus according to Newport: 1) Spend Time Alone, 2) Don’t Click Like, 3) Reclaim Leisure and 4) Join the Attention Resistance. Today I’ll be focusing on the concept of reclaiming leisure.

Newport’s thesis on digital minimalism:

Our current relationship with the technologies of our hyper-connected world is unsustainable and is leading us closer to the quiet desperation that Thoreau observed so many years ago. But as Thoreau reminds us, ‘the sun rose clear’ and we still have the ability to change this state of affairs. To do so, however, we cannot passively allow the wild tangle of tools, entertainments, and distractions provided by the internet age to dictate how we spend our time or how we feel. We must indeed 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 accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction. A philosophy, in other words, like digital minimalism.

The idea of “don’t click like” is a byproduct of how the technology has been engineered to not only grab our attention, but also tailor the content in a way that is supposed to benefit us, but in reality is designed to create addictive patterns that keep us checking the various social media apps over and over. A prime example of how social media is engineered to cause addictive patterns is the ‘like’ button.