The Perks of Living Without Social Media | Cal Newport
Summary
TLDRIn this thought-provoking video, Cal Newport, an author known for abstaining from social media, highlights four compelling benefits of avoiding these platforms. He argues that being boredom-free robs us of valuable solitude for self-reflection and higher-quality leisure pursuits. Social media breeds anxiety by constructing a distorted, combative world view. It compromises privacy by encouraging oversharing personal details to an amorphous audience. Finally, it inflates our sense of self-importance through artificial metrics, deviating from genuine importance derived from real-world relationships and accomplishments. Newport's insightful perspective invites viewers to reevaluate their social media usage and consider the potential rewards of stepping away.
Takeaways
- 🚫 The speaker, Cal Newport, has never had any social media accounts, which he believes gives him a clear perspective on the impact of these tools on culture and people's lives.
- 😴 Not using social media allows for more boredom, which can lead to productive leisure activities, self-reflection, and personal growth.
- 😨 Social media can create a perception of a world filled with conflict, outrage, and anxiety, which is not conducive to thriving.
- 🔒 Being constantly active on social media can reveal too much personal information and compromise privacy.
- 🧘♂️ Social media can inflate one's sense of self-importance through metrics like likes and shares, which can lead to unhealthy behaviors and mindsets.
- 💆♀️ Stepping away from social media can lower anxiety levels and provide a more realistic and grounded view of the world.
- 🧠 Boredom can be a positive force, pushing people to engage in more productive and meaningful activities.
- 👥 Social media can create an illusion of influence and importance that is not based on real-world relationships and achievements.
- 🔐 Privacy is better preserved when personal information and reactions are not constantly shared on social media platforms.
- 🌱 Seeking a sense of importance through tangible actions and relationships in the real world is ultimately more fulfilling and sustainable.
Q & A
What is Cal Newport's stance on social media?
-Cal Newport has never had any social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, etc.) because as someone who writes about technology's impact on culture, this allows him to observe the effects of these tools on our lives with clarity and distance.
What is the first perk of not using social media according to Cal Newport?
-The first perk is experiencing more boredom. Without the constant distraction of social media apps, one is left to be alone with their thoughts during moments of boredom. This promotes solitude and self-reflection, which are crucial for personal growth and development.
How does boredom benefit leisure activities according to Cal Newport?
-Cal Newport argues that boredom can push people towards higher quality leisure activities like reading, exercising, taking up new hobbies, or joining clubs/organizations, rather than defaulting to mindless scrolling on social media.
What is the second perk of not using social media?
-The second perk is lower anxiety. Cal Newport suggests that social media platforms often present a distorted and negative view of the world, filled with conflict, outrage, and carefully curated portrayals of others' lives, which can increase anxiety and unhappiness.
Why does Cal Newport value privacy as a perk of not using social media?
-Cal Newport values privacy because being active on social media requires constantly generating content, which can inadvertently reveal more personal information than one might want to share with a large, amorphous audience of strangers.
What is the fourth perk of not using social media according to Cal Newport?
-The fourth perk is a lower sense of self-importance. Cal Newport argues that social media metrics and engagement can create an inflated and unrealistic sense of one's influence and importance, which is better calibrated by real-world interactions and tangible accomplishments.
How does Cal Newport suggest testing the illusion of influence created by social media?
-Cal Newport suggests taking a 30-day break from social media without telling anyone, and seeing if anyone notices or cares about the absence of posts/updates. This exercise can reveal the disparity between the perceived influence and the actual impact.
What advice does Cal Newport give to those considering stepping away from social media?
-Cal Newport advises those who are unhappy with the influence of social media on their lives to consider stepping away, as the benefits of leaving might be much bigger than they initially expect.
How does Cal Newport's stance on social media influence his work as an author?
-Cal Newport's decision to avoid social media allows him to have a controlled and curated public presence through his writing, videos, and interviews, without revealing too much personal information or being overwhelmed by the constant need to generate content and react to everything.
What is Cal Newport's overall message regarding the perks of not using social media?
-Cal Newport's overall message is that stepping away from social media or significantly reducing one's footprint on these platforms can lead to several benefits, including increased solitude, lower anxiety, better privacy, and a more grounded sense of self-importance, ultimately promoting a deeper and more sustainable life.
Outlines
🚫 The Advantages of Not Using Social Media
This paragraph discusses the benefits of not having social media accounts, particularly for someone who writes about technology and its cultural impact. The author, Cal Newport, explains how avoiding social media gives him a clear perspective on observing the effects of these tools on people's lives without being overwhelmed by them himself. He introduces the topic of exploring the perks that everyone can enjoy by not using social media.
😐 Increased Boredom and Its Benefits
The paragraph highlights how not using addictive social media apps can lead to more boredom, which is beneficial. Without the constant distraction of scrolling through social media, individuals are left with moments of solitude to reflect on their thoughts, experiences, and identity. This solitude is crucial for personal growth and self-understanding. Additionally, boredom can encourage people to engage in more productive leisure activities, such as reading, exercising, or pursuing hobbies, rather than defaulting to the quick fix of social media.
😨 Reduced Anxiety and a Calmer World View
This paragraph discusses how social media platforms often present a distorted and anxiety-inducing view of the world. Platforms like Twitter can create an image of constant conflict and outrage, while Instagram portrays curated and idealized versions of people's lives, leading to feelings of inferiority. By avoiding social media, individuals can experience a more grounded and calmer worldview based on their immediate surroundings and real-life interactions, reducing anxiety and promoting a more sustainable and balanced perspective.
🔒 Increased Privacy and Control Over Self-Disclosure
The paragraph highlights the benefits of increased privacy when not using social media. Being active on these platforms often requires constant content generation, which can lead to unintentionally revealing more personal information than desired. The author emphasizes the value of maintaining privacy and control over how much of oneself is disclosed to the public. Social media creates an unnatural dynamic of having an amorphous audience privy to personal details, which can be unsettling and goes against the tight-knit communities humans are wired for.
🪞 A Balanced Sense of Self-Importance
The final paragraph discusses how social media can inflate one's sense of self-importance through metrics like likes, shares, and retweets, creating an illusion of influence and a vast audience eagerly awaiting one's thoughts. However, this inflated sense of importance is often a manipulation by the platforms and can lead individuals down unhealthy paths. By avoiding social media, people can develop a more grounded and balanced sense of self-importance based on tangible accomplishments and real-world relationships, which is ultimately better for personal growth and community connections.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Social Media
💡Boredom
💡Solitude
💡Anxiety
💡Privacy
💡Self-importance
💡Curated
💡Algorithms
💡Community
💡Metrics
Highlights
Cal Newport has never had a social media account, which gives him distance and clarity to observe the impact of these tools on our lives without being overwhelmed by them.
Not using social media allows for more boredom, which can lead to productive solitude, self-reflection, and higher-quality leisure activities.
The world constructed in your mind from social media exposure is often filled with strife, outrage, and anxiety, leading to an unsettling and unsustainable environment.
Being active on social media can lead to revealing too much about yourself to an amorphous crowd of strangers, which is unnatural and unsettling.
Social media creates an inflated sense of self-importance through metrics like likes and shares, which can push people to entrench in weird ideas or conspiratorial thinking.
A real sense of importance should come from doing tangible things on behalf of real people, which is more sustainable and deeper than the illusion of influence created by social media.
The four perks of not using social media are: 1) more boredom leading to productive activities, 2) lower anxiety, 3) more privacy, and 4) a lower sense of self-importance.
Social media platforms are designed to be highly addictive and compelling, engineered by some of the smartest people in the world to capture your attention.
On platforms like Instagram, users are exposed to highly curated portrayals of people's lives, which can lead to feelings of inferiority.
The constant need to generate content on social media reveals more about yourself than you may want to share.
Social media creates an unnatural environment where an amorphous crowd of strangers knows intimate details about your life, which humans are not wired for.
The metrics on social media, like likes and retweets, create an illusion of influence and importance that may not reflect reality.
Stepping away from social media for 30 days without telling anyone can reveal the lack of a vast audience waiting for your updates, contrary to the illusion created by the platforms.
A real sense of importance should come from being present for and sacrificing for your family and community, not from manipulated metrics on social media.
If you're unhappy with the influence of social media on your life, stepping away and experiencing the benefits of leaving can be worthwhile.
Transcripts
hi i'm cal newport of the things i am
known for perhaps the most prominent is
the fact that i have never had
a social media account
no facebook no twitter no instagram no
tick tock no snapchat
now as someone who
writes about technology and impact for
culture this has been a really big
advantage for me it gives me distance
from the culture i'm writing about i can
observe with some clarity the impact of
these tools
on our lives without actually having to
be completely overwhelmed by these tools
myself i have become convinced over the
years however that there are perks
to not using social media that are
applicable to everyone
not just to people like me who write
about technology for a living so that's
what i want to talk about in this video
four
perks
to not using social media
number one
more
boredom
now this might be surprising at first
but follow with me here one of the
things that happens when you have these
highly
addictive
applications on your phone is that your
phone becomes a default mode of
distraction at the slightest hint of
boredom you whip this thing out and
start scrolling through those social
media apps i can't blame you for doing
that they have been engineered by some
of the smartest people in the world to
be incredibly compelling so why sit
there in line and just be bored when you
can have tens of billions of dollars
worth of attention engineering
at your service to give you that perfect
moment of distraction
there is however a cost to having this
perfect always accessible distraction
there in your pocket that means there is
no more boredom in your life
the slightest hint of boredom you're
looking at that phone
this can be
a problem
so what happens when you're alone with
your own thoughts because you don't use
social media so there is nothing on that
phone that's all that interesting to
look at it's a situation i find myself
in all the time you're now left to just
think about the world around you what's
going on in your head that might sound
scary at first but it's actually
critical to your development as a human
it is when you are alone with your own
thoughts
in the state that is known as solitude
that you can actually take those
experiences you're having in your life
and fit them into a framework a common
framework by which you understand your
experience it's where you can reflect on
yourself what's going well what's not
going well what's resonating with you
what you're worried about in your life
and make progress in your identity in
your self-definition it is in this time
alone with our mind that we evolve as
humans and if you rob yourself of that
solitude by always looking at that shiny
highly distracting treat sitting there
in your pocket represented by the apps
on that phone you miss out on that
solitude
the other advantage of the boredom
you'll encounter
not having these apps on your phone is
that it will push you to do higher
quality leisure activities
you're sitting there it's the afternoon
you don't have anything to look at you
don't have anything to watch this might
drive you to read
the exercise to pick up that new hobby
to go for the walk to go join some sort
of organization and club boredom is a
very useful instinct
typically when it comes to human nature
whenever there's a very strong or
disagreeable feeling that is pushing us
to do something that is important to us
we feel hunger it feels terrible why
because it's important that we eat so
what is boredom which feels very bad
pushing us to do productive activity
the phone interrupts that push the
productive activity it short-circuits
that instinct and gets it just looking
at that glowing piece of glass but
without the phone there you can actually
feel through that board of instinct to
go do things that are actually
productive stuff that's good for you for
your soul for your family for your
community your leisure will get better
when you can't default to the quick fix
of tapping on social media
so more productive boredom that is one
of the perks of not using social media
another one
lower
anxiety
your world is what you pay attention to
there's way more information out there
possible to consume than you can ever
possibly actually take in so your mind
looks at what you have consumes and
tries to construct
an understanding of the world around you
not just a physical or visual
understanding but also an emotional
understanding of the world as well
if you are living in the world of social
media especially on a
highly combative platform like twitter
the image of the world that your mind
will construct is one of
terrifying almost unbearable strife it
is a world in which villains ride freely
through the virtual town square and the
town's people fire at them with their
revolvers people dropping dead from this
metaphorical virtual saloon window it is
a scary world is it an upsetting world
is a world of outrage it is a world in
which people are castigated at a
moment's notice and criminals must be
rooted out it is not a happy world
have you ever met for example a frequent
twitter user who was happy
no why
because the world that exposes your mind
to is not a nice one so if you spend a
lot of time on social media
you're going to be living in a world of
your own construction that is not going
to be an environment to thrive now you
might say why don't i avoid twitter
i'll go i'm over on instagram i don't
want to see the political stuff i don't
want to see the fighting well what are
you going to get on instagram highly
curated portrayals of people's lives
everyone's happy everyone's in great
shape everyone is doing more interesting
things to you that's a world where you
feel inferior
the world's created again when you're
marinating yourself in these social
media worlds are not good ones
so you're gonna be more anxious you're
gonna be less happy
when you don't have social media on your
phone when you don't have it on your
computer when you do not expose yourself
to that weird unnatural highly curated
algorithmically optimized type of
information the world you see is
actually much more the world around you
your friends the people in town what
you're reading in books what you hear on
the radio what you saw on your walk home
it is a world that is calibrated to the
human mind it's the experience that we
actually
are expecting it's a calmer world it's a
less anxiety producing world it's a
slower world
and all of that is much better all that
is much more sustainable
that's the second perk
third perk
privacy
if you're on these platforms all the
time you have to be generating content
all the time this content is going to
reveal over time more than you probably
want to actually reveal
it is a very unsettling position to be
in as a human
to know that there is an amorphous large
crowd of people you mainly don't know
who know a lot about you and you don't
even know how much it is that they know
about you
it's very unsettling
if i was on social media as an author if
i had to be tweeting and doing instagram
and doing these type of things all the
time every day
post post post post post i would end up
revealing a lot more about myself than i
want people to know i'm actually a very
private person yes it sounds paradoxical
because i'm in the public eye a lot
you're watching me on a video you may
have seen me on tv you may have seen me
on other people's podcast or radio shows
but that is a very controlled
environment this is me sitting down and
maybe producing one video that i want
you to see
that i spent just today working on
that's much different than having to
throughout the day be what do i think
about this what do i think about that
giving takes on things reacting to
things having back and forth
conversations that reveals too much
happy to go on a radio show happy to
write an article and put it out there
happy to think through a video and have
notes on it and and record that fine but
if i have to go back and forth all day
get my reaction on everything i'm going
to reveal too much and i don't want to
give up that much of myself and you
shouldn't either it is not natural human
beings are wired to have relatively
tight-knit communities where people know
them well
through bounds of family
or other types of community connection
you trust each other they have your back
you have their back
they see your bad they see you're good
they see you at your best they see you
at your worst but everyone trusts each
other everyone's willing to sacrifice on
behalf of each other in these small
close-knit communities that is the
socialization we're wired for not
there's 10 000 amorphous people here
looking at my back and forth
conversations on twitter
trying to figure out when the pounds
so we do not need to be that open to
that many people it doesn't match our
wiring
it can make us pretty unsettled so you
don't use social media you don't have to
worry
about
that all right number four
the fourth perk of not using social
media
lower your sense of self
importance
this is one of the
insidious side effects of social media
is the degree to make sure it makes you
feel as if at all times there is this
vast audience that really cares what you
have to say and you get this because of
the little metrics you get the little
thumbs up you get the little hearts
there's little numbers on next to it
that begin to tabulate up this was
retweeted this was liked
this was shared
some of these platforms will even do
this in a
blatantly
manipulative manner tick tock is known
for example to take your videos
occasionally and show them to a much
larger audience than normal just so you
get that intermittently reinforcing
burst of a lot of people like this one
so that you're going to keep pulling
that slot machine lever again hopefully
you get that next burst before all of
this gives you a sense of
everyone cares what i have to say
it inflates your ego it leads you to
entrench
to glom on to weird ideas or
conspiratorial thinking to begin to
other the people who disagree with you
or in the other tribe
you feel like you are at the center of
some sort of apocalyptic life and death
battle all of this is the human
psyche being manipulated by these
services
is not good for us
to be given daily this sense this
inflated sense of self-importance you
know back when i wrote my book deep work
i had this advice
that i gave to people who were active on
social media i said step away for 30
days but here's the key caveat
don't tell anybody
step away from 30 days don't tell
anybody
and see if anyone notices
and a lot of people wrote back to me
after that book came out and said that
was
momentarily devastating because i
realized in my mind because i see all
these thumbs up i see all these numbers
all these likes all these retweets i
thought that there was this vast
audience that was waiting with baited
breath for my next missive when i
stopped posting for a month no one
noticed no one said anything no one
cared because the platforms create the
illusion of influence the illusion of
importance and we should not be
bathing in that context again it pushes
us to weird places
it's better for our sense of importance
to come from the actual things we're
doing in the real world with flesh and
blood other humans
i have the respect of this person
because over time i had been there when
they needed me
i have the respect of these people over
here because i've they've seen my work
they respect it they've read it i've
talked to them i know them well i have
the respect of my family because i've
been trying to be a a leader
a leader trying to be there for them
sacrifice on behalf of them you get a
calibrated sense of importance which
pushes you to actually do things of real
importance to live a more sustainable
deeper life
all of that again gets subverted and
short-circuited when you allow these
little manipulated metrics these little
numbers
next to icons on an app on your phone
tell you whether you're influential or
not tell you whether you're important or
not you don't want that inflatable sense
of importance you want a real
sense of importance made from doing real
things on behalf of real people that
really matters
all right so those are my four perks
that i think almost anyone will benefit
if they do not use social media or at
the very least
significantly reduce their footprint on
those platforms
so just to review what we have here 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
from what you pay attention to if you're
paying attention to social media that is
going to be a grim unsettling world you
will have more privacy human beings are
not wired
to have amorphous large crowds of
strangers watching you react to news and
have interactions back and forth with
other heated strangers and finally it
will lower your sense of self importance
it will push you to seek sense of
importance in real ways and tangible
ways and that's ultimately better for
you it's better for your family is
better for your community
so if like a lot of people you're not
super happy about what's happening on
social media if you're not super happy
about the influence that social media is
having on your life if you're thinking
about stepping away let me tell you as
someone who has done this
it's worth it
if you don't like what's going on there
go
the benefits of leaving
might be much bigger than you at first
guess
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