But to do so, we need a more serious strategy, something custom built to swat aside the forces manipulating us toward behavioral addictions and that offers a concrete plan about how to put new technologies to use for our best aspirations and not against them. When seen from this perspective, it becomes clear that this is a battle we must fight. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.
We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan. These technologies are in many cases specifically designed to trigger this addictive behavior. Social media is now carefully tuned to offer you a rich stream of information about how much (or how little) your friends are thinking about you at the moment. Rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern. Two forces that repeatedly came up in my own research on how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval. There’s a whole playbook of techniques that get used by technology companies to get you using the product for as long as possible.Īddiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences. People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable. We must instead take steps to extract the good from these technologies while sidestepping what’s bad. We cannot passively allow the wild tangle of tools, entertainments, and distractions provided by the internet age to dictate how we spend our time or how we feel. The goal of this book is to make the case for digital minimalism, including a more detailed exploration of what it asks and why it works, and then to teach you how to adopt this philosophy if you decide it’s right for you.
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