Digital Serenity

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Lessons

• Relentless pursuit of pleasure (and avoidance of pain) leads to pain.

• Abstinence reset the brain's reward pathway.

• Self-binding creates space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity in our dopamine-overloaded world.

• Pressing on the pain side resets our balance to the side of pleasure.

• Instead of running away from the world, we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it.

Digital Minimalism

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.

1. Clutter is costly
2. Optimization is important
3. Intentionality is satisfying

Technology isn't bad. we are living in a society dealing with the unintended consequences of technology.

Digital Declutter

1. 30 day period to set aside optional technology in your life.
2. During the 30 days explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you fine satisfying and meaningful.
3. At the end of 30 days, reintroduce optional technology into your life starting from a blank slate. For each, determine what value it serves in your life and how specifically you will use it so to maximize this value.

Optional Technology

New technology delivered through screens, including video games and streaming.

Anything not critical to your personal or professional life.

Technology Screen

1. Serve something you deeply value (offering "some" benefit is not enough.)
2. Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if not replace it.)
3. Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

Practices

• Solitude
  • When your mind is free from the inputs of other minds.
• Conversations are necessary
  • Only method of maintaining relationships
• Reclaim leisure
  • Fill the void that digital distractions filled and confront the things they were helping you avoid
  • Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption
  • Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world
  • Seek activities that require real-world structured social interactions

My Take Aways

• Being alone with my thoughts is good for me.
• Social media isn't worth it.
• My smart phone is better dumb.
• "Computers are general purpose in the long run, but are single purpose at any moment."
• Writing helps "when encountering complicated decisions, hard emotions, or surges of inspiration."
• Being intentional with what I watch is rewarding.
• Video games are still the tough one.

Be ruthless with your environment.

Be gentle with yourself.