Have you ever meet with your friends whom you have never seen for years, even decades, and then when you meet with them at that cafe, all you do just … looking up to your phone, barely saying anything with each other? Or, have you ever planned to do something, like cleaning your house, or walk your dog, and then find yourself scrolling through TikTok for hours? Well, maybe these examples sounds extreme and maybe you are not that addicted with your phone, but let’s be honest, our phone can be distracting. For me personally, the later example often happens to me. Like, almost every day. I would plan to do something I know I’ve been wanting to but then I have to postpone that plan because I am mindlessly scrolling through Instagram Reels. Or YouTube Shorts.
I personally am really concerned with my behavior on social media, or digital life in general. I care a lot with the amount of screen time my phone reports every week. This concerns emerged back then in 2020, when the pandemic occurred across the globe, when I was scrolling through YouTube video and find Marissa Anita’s video about Digital Minimalism. This book becomes one of my wishlist ever since.
Three years later, in March 2023, I finished the book with some new perspective. And in this post, I will share some of my insights about the book.
A New Kind of Addiction
We all have heard stories and narration that social media, or phones in general, is not good for us, it damages our physical health and is one of the major cause of mental disease like depression in younger generation. And with that, social media seems to be the villain in this world.
Cal Newport, through this book, reminds us that social media at first is created because of the passion of their creator. And it’s true. For example, Facebook was made initially to make the connection between people easier. Back then people would post a status or photos, other people would like it. Everything was fine until they came up with the comment feature. So, every time you post something, people could comment on your post.
This where the problem comes in. The comment feature gives us the feel of unpredictableness. You don’t know what would happen if you post something. What would people comment on my post?, for example. This gives us anxiety, but also thrill … which makes us check again and again our social media, just to see what happens.
Alter goes on to describe users as “gambling” every time they post something on a social media platform: Will you get likes (or hearts or retweets), or will it languish with no feedback? The former creates what one Facebook engineer calls “bright dings of pseudo- pleasure,” while the latter feels bad. 14 Either way, the outcome is hard to predict, which, as the psychology of addiction teaches us, makes the whole activity of posting and checking maddeningly appealing.
Social media works like gambling machine; it uses the unpredictability to lure us to keep checking on social media, just to see if we get another hearts, like, comment, or retweet. This is also good for their business, since these apps are free, they gain money from our time, and even our data.
The Problem With Like Button
The core of the addictive effect caused by social media lies on the likes button. Although there are other causes, like Instagram’s feature Reels or TikTok which provides us infinite amount of content, I personally am really impacted with this particular cause: the like button. Why is that, why this button can cause so much damage to people, including myself?
It’s because the like button acts like fake communication. When somebody likes our post, we tend to think that they are communicating with us. We like to think as if they say in front of us, “Hey, I like your photos, they’re cool!” But in fact, that’s not always the case. There are (huge) possibility that by coincidence our photo appears in other people’s dashboard and they, like us, mindlessly like every post that appears in their dashboard.
The like button also makes us feel that other people recognize us. Remember that human is a social creature, we’re designed to crave social interaction. Evolution taught our ancestors that humans need other humans in order to survive, and our brain has never changed drastically throughout millenniums. Therefore, we crave to belong, to be loved, to be recognized. And this button does nothing but to provide fake interactions.
Our brains evolved to crave rich social interaction, and then explore the serious issues caused when we displace this interaction with highly appealing, but much less substantial, electronic pings … human brain has evolved to process the flood of information generated by face- to- face interactions.
I think this works the same with the “view” number in some social media, such as Instagram snapgram. Imagine a scenario like this, you post a snapgram and then you see the viewer section. And then you see that cool person has viewed your snapgram. Or your crush. Or your enemy. Or people you don’t like. And then you think that “wow, that person sees my snapgram! They recognize me! What would they think about my snapgram, eh? About me?” And then you keep scrolling… and scrolling.. or even making more snapgrams in order to be recognized by that person.
Social Media to Connect, Not as A Tool for Communication
So, is social media bad? Not at all! it’s important to remember why social media was made in the first time: to connect people. But because of their more sophisticated features nowadays, these platforms seems to steer away from its original purpose to a seemingly perfect purpose: as a tool of communication.
We’ve been used to rich communication. When people talking face-to-face with each other, they don’t just communicate through verbally, but there are other communication: facial expression, body language, tone intonation, and etc. Our brain is so used to receiving rich communication that social media has never fully provide through text-based communication. The amount of likes, viewers, comment, or even emoji can never replace the amount of face-to-face communication we get. Therefore, when using social media, our brain that feels lack of communication craves more and more, making these platform so addicting.
conversation is the good stuff; it’s what we crave as humans and what provides us with the sense of community and belonging necessary to thrive. Connection, on the other hand, though appealing in the moment, provides very little of what we need.
Digital Minimalism
As horrific as it sounds, addiction caused by social media is categorized as moderate addiction. It’s not the same with drug addiction that can paralyze our everyday life.
But, like drug addiction, we can’t fight the social media addiction just by using our free will, since it’s a limited resource we have. I’d like to think that free will is like a fuel, can run out any time. And when we loose our strength to avoid social media, we only find ourselves fall deeper and deeper into this hole we’re previously trying to avoid.
Therefore, we need a new strategy to combat this. A strategy that is rooted inside our mindset, that will alter our knowledge, understanding, and behavior towards social media: we need a new philosophy for this. And this is where digital minimalism comes in.
Digital Minimalism is 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.
There are some major principles of digital minimalism:
- Clutter is costly
- Don’t just think about the profit of the technology products but also think about the cost
- Ex: keeping online on social media makes me connected and updated with our friends’s condition
- Cost: How much time and attention do I need to sacrifice to gain the profit? Is it worth it?
This is why clutter is dangerous. It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life.
- Optimization is important
- Focus not only to what technologies to adopt, but how to use them
- e.g.: removing social media apps from the phone. We could still use social media, but only via browser
- This technique increases the friction between us and social media so we won’t be too disctracted
- Web-app social media in general are worse then the actual app, this could make us less interested to open them
- Intentionality is satisfying
- Ask ourselves, “Is this going to be helpful or is it going to be detrimental?”
Tangible Steps on Digital Declutter
- Take a 30 days without certain technologies
- Assess whether we can live without those apps or not
- Don’t confuse “convenient” with “critical”. We have to know if without this app our life will be very impacted or not.
- Find new activities that have higher qualities. It can be doing hobbies, chores, etc
- At the end of the break, slowly introduce the app in our life with our customized optimization
- It must serve our deeply value. Offering some benefits is not enough
- It must be the best way to serve the value. If it’s not, better not to use it and use something better
- Use it with custom optimization (example: using social media only on browser, etc)
Remember that not to use this digital declutter as merely detox. The goal is not just giving a break from the technologies but rather make a permanent transformation about how we use those technology. The detox is just a first step
My Journey with Digital Minimalism
Reading Digital Minimalism gives me broader and more firm understanding of how digital life is. It shouldn’t be seen as an enemy to our productivity, rather it’s like a double-edge sword. It can bring us good only if we know how to wisely use it.
I personally have been practicing the digital minimalism over the past few years, until now. Though I’m not saying that I’m expert at this, nor that I’m a fully digital minimalist who can live without social media … forever 😅.
Among the social media I’m using until now, Instagram is the most dangerous one. I know that I can’t live without it, especially in the era in which everybody seems to have Instagram account and this is generally used to connect with everyone. But I won’t lie that checking who likes and sees my stories happens A LOT to me, and it damages many aspects in my life.
Here’s what I’ve been doing with social media and maybe, these might help you as well:
- Try to deactivate your social media for a while. For me, I deactivate my Instagram account in 2021 and 2022, for 6 months. This year, this takes 3 months and will be going on.
- Uninstall the app from your phone. But, you can still open your social media. Only through website. I find this tip is really efficient because this increases the friction between you and social media, meaning that it’s gonna take more effort for you to open the social media. Moreover, most of the social media in web platform is way worse than in the actual app, in terms of user experience. Making social media less attractive to you.
- Use your leisure time to do your hobbies (or try a new one) to make it’s easier for you to live without social media.
Overall, this book is really amazing, I really get a lot from this book. I can’t write all of them in just one article. Maybe I will write some other point in another article, but this will need research and determination 😅. Therefore I do not hesitate to give this book a 5/5 🌟 !