📚 The Book in 3 Bullets

• 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.

• Social media makes more money the more time you spend using their product and do it by exploiting our innate vulnerabilities from our hominid ancestors.

• We spend more time using social media than we think. Any time you have a spare second, leave the phone in your pocket and start doing meaningful things instead of mindless scrolling.

👤 Who Should Read It?

• Anyone who has used or is currently using social media.

🌎 How the Book Changed Me

• This book opened me up to my own social media addiction. It taught me that I’m really not getting any value or happiness from these apps and that my time would be better spent on developing myself and connecting with the people I truly care about.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• 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.

• Get active in the community, and join a club or a league.

📖 Summary & Notes

• The tycoons of social media need to stop pretending to be harmless nerds starting up in garages. They’re trying to sell our attention and captivate it for as long as possible to make money.

• Unpredictability releases hits of dopamine. Social media apps thrive on unpredictability as you’ll never know what will pop up on your feed as you scroll.

• Receiving likes on a post gives an illusion of acceptance of the tribe, but we are no longer hunters and gatherers and this is a false pleasure we seek to crave.

• Regulating social approval is what social media thrives to accomplish and it shows in people wanting to maintain snap streaks to confirm that the relationship is strong.

• Clutter is costly—cluttering time and attention with apps takes away time and eliminates the small benefits that technology may improve.

• More often than not, the cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with far outweighs the small benefits these clutters provide.

• Try only watching movies and TV when you’re with others to improve your social life which is something of real value.

• Put aside a thirty-day period of not using optional technologies. Fill this new time with activities or hobbies you want to do. And slowly reintroduce these technologies and ask what value they provide you.

• Replace low-value activities like optional technologies with high-value activities you enjoy.

• Try checking social media once a week on the weekend and delete all the apps off your phone to prevent habitual scrolling in any moment of free time.

• You need time alone with your thoughts away from technology which is trying to attack this precious time.

• Regular doses of solitude mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish as a human.

• We need boredom occasionally, we are not wired to be constantly wired.

• Practice leaving your phone at home. Go for a walk outside and leave your electronics at home.

• Life without a phone may be annoying, but it may be less debilitating than you may expect.

• Replacing real-world relationships with social media use is detrimental to well-being.

• Conversation is the good stuff. Connection is overrated. Stop going on your phone and start paying attention to the person in front of you.

• Stop using social media to keep alive low-quality relationships. Put more effort into high-quality ones.

• Put aside set times like office hours for people to contact you so they don’t feel like a burden when calling. This could be telling friends and family you’re free to call anytime on Tuesdays or Thursdays from 5-7 PM after work.

• Young financially independent people do strenuous activity because it doesn’t cost much money, provides physical activity, and is good for mental health.

• The most successful social leisure activities share two traits. They require you to spend time with people in person. And that the activity provides some sort of structure for social interaction, including rules, and often a shared goal. This is why games are such a great activity to do with others.

• Learn new skills for high-quality leisure. Start becoming handy. It’s satisfying and saves money.

• Cultivating high-quality leisure will make it easier to minimize low-quality digital diversions.

• Strategize and plan your free time. Like, read at 8 pm every night instead of watch TV.