Author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and other tech-adjacent books, Cal Newport, talks about the perks of living without social media in this video.
He comes up with 4 points:
- You will be bored more often but that boredom will lead to good things.
- Your anxiety will be lower, because the world constructed by your mind is constructed by what you pay attention to. If you are paying attention to social media, that will be a grim and unsettling world.
- You’ll have more privacy. Human beings are not wired to have amorphous large crowds of strangers watching their reaction to news and have heated interactions back and forth with strangers.
- It will lower your sense of self-importance and will lead you seek importance in real and tangible ways.
Having taken time off from social media recently, I can validate that what Newport outlines is accurate. However, you also have to be careful about what else you consume. If you switch social media for online news from your most trusted sources — because they share your beliefs about who the “bad people” are — you won’t eliminate numbers 1 and 2. That will mean you don’t end up much better off. Your substitutions have to make sense.
🔗 via Pratik
