Digital Minimalism

Trying to Beat the Addiction

I have a problem.

The problem is that I am addicted to social media/technology, and it is having an impact on my life, much of it bad. It consumes too much of my time, it has diminished my ability to focus deeply for long periods of time, and it distracts my attention from the truly important people in my life.

I’ve known this for some time, and I’ve made faint-hearted attempts to deal with it. None of these last all that long, as I am an expert in rationalizing exceptions and affixing disproportionate value to the benefits I derive therefrom.

The plain truth of the matter is that I am something of a show-off (always have been), which should be obvious to anyone reading this essay, who follows me on social media, or who got to know me before 2012 or so. I derive pleasure from positive validation, and I also like to mix it up with those who disagree with me. As smart and clever as I think I am, smarter and more clever people knew of my existence (or people like me), and they designed devices and applications designed to feed my desires and keep my eyes fixed to various screens. They designed marketing strategies to ensnare me, and they succeeded.

My habits were bad before the 2016 election runup, but they reached a crescendo then. I was besotted with the notion that whatever it was that I was about to write/tweet was VITAL and IMPORTANT, and that if only enough people would read it, THINGS WOULD BE DIFFERENT. And so I contributed mightily to the echo chamber with snarky tweets and retweets. Additionally, I came to believe that my work/viability as a Defense Consultant was dependent on my being “in the game”, posting and tweeting about the things that were important to me, and to my clients.

I have tried lots of things to put social media in a box. I’ve removed Twitter and Facebook from my phone in the past, and they seem to find their way back. I’ve instituted eShabbot (and just did so again as a New Year’s resolution) in which I stay away from social media/internet from 6PM Friday to 6PM Saturday. I have a rule not to bring my phone into the bedroom, which I routinely break.

The trouble really is the phone. The ability to instantaneously “connect” (more on this later) with the rest of the world no matter where I am, and the chance that said connection will deliver a dose of validation courtesy of dopamine and other chemicals that bathe my brain, delivers every time. The more I Tweet, the more people comment, the more I am contended with/validated, the more charge I get from it, the more I Tweet. This is Psych 101 stuff, but I fell for it.

Late last week, I hopped on a plane to join my family in Key West, where they had been for ten days already, my work schedule not being supportive of joining them. I knew that I wanted to check out for a few days, and given that one of those days would be eShabbot, it was a very doable thing to consider.

When I arrived, my daughter Hannah began to tell me about a book she had nearly finished called “Digital Minimalism” by Cal Newport. Hannah is 20, and she is an extraordinarily self-aware young woman. Concerned with her own phone use, she was aware of my love/hate relationship with social media, and she suggested that I read the book when she finished. I did, picking it up Friday morning and finishing it Sunday morning.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough, as it is a solid mix of identifying the reasons we become addicted and offering some suggestions as to how we might have a healthier relationship with technology. Newport’s prescription is pretty hard core, including a 30-day blackout from your phone, but there are enough other suggestions here worth implementing that I found the advice valuable (Note: Newport would likely look at how I am proceeding and believe that it is unlikely to work for the long-haul, and he spends time talking about why and how baby-steps and half-measures don’t cut it. I hear you, Cal. But I at least have to try it this way).

I’ve read other books about the chemical and psychological components of this addiction, and Newport covers that stuff with skill. The case that social media/technology companies acted not unlike Big Tobacco in manipulating product to amp up addiction seems open and shut, and as bad as it is for me, I think about a whole generation of Americans who have known nothing other than this world and who are utterly trapped in its clutches.

Before I was half-way through the book, I removed Twitter and Facebook from my phone. My Twitter use is far greater than Facebook. In fact, I’ve cut back significantly on Facebook over the years, although I’ve applied that energy (and more) to Twitter use. Facebook is where I do low-impact (and low value) connecting, and while I wouldn’t say that I am addicted to it, I am going to minimize it.

Next, I decided that I needed physical breaks/distance from my phone. My friend lives in Key West, and he is hobbled, waiting for space to open up for knee surgery. His place was a half mile from where we were, and I walked there on Friday and Saturday and spent a couple of hours each day with him. On Saturday, I purposely left my phone behind, telling my ladies that if they needed me they should call Chris (said friend). And so, for about three hours, I was without the phone. This may not seem notable to those of you not in the boat with me, but making an affirmative decision to walk away from it was kind of a big deal.

One of the parts of Newport’s book that had the greatest impact on me was his discussion of solitude, and its importance in a healthy life. We are so “connected” in this world, that we are seldom alone with our own thoughts for very long, if at all. And being alone with one’s thoughts is crucial to processing, thinking, day-dreaming, and focusing—all of which have declined as skills I possess with my increasing addiction.

At the same time that the phone has destroyed our solitude (I would have walked to Chris’ house on Saturday with a podcast in my ears—not a bad thing as I listen to great podcasts, but simply not solitude), it has substituted cheap, banal, superficial, and mediated “connection” for actual human contact, the kind that philosophers have been telling us for thousands of years is critical to human flourishing. Because we connect constantly and over and over and over again, we think that this counts as actual connection. It doesn’t. It is box checking.

All of this brings me to a set of measures I am adopting in order to exert some more influence and control in my own life. Some I’ve tried before. Others are new. Taken as a package, this represents a pretty serious attempt at getting my act together. In addition to eShabbot, here it is:

1. Remove Twitter/Facebook from phone. I can still use these programs, but I have to be at my PC or have a laptop handy to do so.

2. No Twitter/Facebook after dinner. If I am at my computer (and not in enraptured conversation with my inamorata) I’d better be doing something other than social media.

3. No use of Twitter as an adjunct to other activities (watching sports, events, debates, etc.). This practice REALLY amps things up, primarily my ugly, negative, snarky side while watching UVA Basketball beclown itself.

4. Minimize/eliminate “likes” and “retweets” when I am on social media. This is a hard one, because it is so easy to do that I don’t even think about it. I’ve got to be more conscious of this.

5. Serious culling of Facebook friends/liberal use of unfollow feature. No offense to those caught up in my self-improvement. The bottom line is that the less there is on my Facebook feed, the less I’ll look at it.

6. No radio or podcasts in the car for journeys of less than an hour. This is all about exploiting solitude, using the time to think and to be with my thoughts.

7. No more than 1 episode a day of any single streamed series. This is really gonna be hard, because I can binge me some TV.

8. Think REALLY hard about every tweet or Facebook post. Ask myself, “why do I want to do this?” Does the world REALLY need to hear this opinion from me? Is what I’m about to write particularly insightful, intelligent, or funny? Is this just showing off?

I have no idea how successful this approach is going to be, but I need to try. I know that I want to be far less connected with the unimportant and far more connected to the important.

Biden Is In Trouble. But So Is Trump

There is no question but that President Biden is in trouble. Elected to preserve what was good about the country and to expel that which was abhorrent, he has profoundly mis-read the moment. He was selected from a group of more liberal Democrats specifically because he was not one of them and because he made enough voters believe he had no interest in their agenda. In office, he has become captive to the progressive left at a time where the country seems hostile to much of its agenda. He failed utterly on the Build Back Better initiative (which nearly killed a relatively popular infrastructure measure), and now he has failed on a radical overhaul/nationalization of the way America holds elections. Of interest, the failure on the elections bill was not on the merits/demerits, as with the VP he has 51 votes in the Senate. What he does NOT have is the 60 vote requirement to get past a filibuster, and so that which he supported consistently throughout his 96 years in the Senate and which was used scores of times by Senate Democrats during the Trump Tragedy is all of a sudden a gigantic relic of Jim Crow and the death knell of democracy in America. Americans are seeing through it and Biden’s numbers in the polls are cratering.

Given his age and the demands of the job, it is reasonable to wonder about not only his fitness for its rigors, but his suitability to stand for re-election. Waiting in the wings, Vice President Harris—who was a wildly unimpressive Presidential candidate (like her boss was in several attempts)—would appear to be the natural choice to stand were he to decide not to run. For the longest time, I have given the VP the benefit of the doubt. After all, she won a statewide election in California which is no easy feat, and for whatever reason, Biden deemed her worthy of being his running mate. There were plenty of stories of her political/policy mediocrity, along with her reportedly tough conduct toward staffers, none of which made much of a difference to me, as I wanted to evaluate her on my own. After a year, I can conclude that she is indeed a mediocrity, and the GOP would be getting a gift if she were the Democratic standard bearer in 2024.

Speaking of 2024, the GOP isn’t in much better shape, as the Troll of Mar-a-Lago continues to run the party in his image as the spineless sycophants in charge pay his legal bills and keep alive the lies of 2020. But it appears that Trump’s Florida understudy Governor Ron DeSantis has been insufficiently loyal to the Orange Duce, and Trump is now making noise about DeSantis not having “bent the knee” yet--in other words, unlike some other potential 2024 GOP hopefuls, DeSantis has not said that he would not run if Trump ran. You see, that’s where we are, folks. A once great party is run by a gangster who insists on total fealty. But — I think Trump is scared of DeSantis, which is why he’s started this line of attack.

Trump also had some discordant words from South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds (R), who last week made some particularly direct statements about the lies and the need to dispute them.

More of this, please.

For Your Reading Pleasure

My friend Russell Smith has a Substack called “Solvitur Ambulando” that I think you should check out. Of note, his latest essay “Bodies, Spirits and Minds of the Hero” features a book by Cal Newport (referenced in part I of this essay) called “Deep Work”. I have not read “Deep Work” yet, but I remember reading reviews of it (and maybe an essay adapted from it) when it came out and thinking about how my ability to focus had so dramatically diminished — and that it wasn’t just age that did it. Phones and social media, again!