Too busy to read?

publishers considered their readers to be their customers, and saw their goal as providing a product good enough to convince people to pay to read it. Day's innovation was to realize that his readers could become his product and the advertisers his customers. His goal became to sell as many minutes of his readers' attention as possible to the advertisers. To do so, he lowered the price of the Sun to a penny and pushed more mass interest stories. "He was the first person to really appreciate the idea--you gather a crowd, and you're not interested in that crowd for its money," Wu explained in a speech, "but because you can resell them to someone else who wants their attention."

we can call the Bennett Principle, provides a plausible foundation for the active leisure lives we've encountered so far in this section. Pete Adeney, Liz Thames, and Theodore Roosevelt all provide specific arguments for their embrace of strenuous leisure, but these arguments all build on the same general principle that the value you receive from a pursuit is often proportional to the energy invested.

The Amish, it turns out, do something that's both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.

When the iPhone first shipped in 2007, there was no App Store, no social media notifications, no quick snapping of photos to Instagram, no reason to surreptitiously glance down a dozen times during a dinner--and this was absolutely fine with Steve Jobs, and the millions who bought their first smartphone during this period.

I've become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.

The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.

The most successful social leisure activities share two traits. First, they require you to spend time with other people in person. As emphasized, there's a sensory and social richness to real-world encounters that's largely lost in virtual connections, so spending time with your World of Warcraft clan doesn't qualify. The second trait is that the activity provides some sort of structure for the social interaction, including rules you have to follow, insider terminology or rituals, and often a shared goal. As argued, these constraints paradoxically enable more freedom of expression. Your CrossFit buddies will holler and whoop, and give you emphatic high fives and sweaty hugs with a joyous enthusiasm that would seem insane in most other contexts.

minimalists don't mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.

no matter what immediate benefits these services might provide the users, the net impact on their productivity and life satisfaction must be profoundly negative if all these users do is engage the service. You can't, in other words, build a billion-dollar empire like Facebook if you're wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook.

to escape the drain of low-value digital habits, it's important to first put in place high-quality leisure activities. These quality activities fill the void your screens were previously tasked to help you ignore.

Breaking news, for example, is almost always much lower quality than the reporting that's possible once an event has occurred and journalists have had time to process it. A well-known journalist recently told me that following a breaking story on Twitter gives him the sense that he's receiving lots of information, but that in his experience, waiting until the next morning to read the article about the story in the Washington Post almost always leaves him more informed. Unless you're a breaking news reporter, it's usually counterproductive to expose yourself to the fire hose of incomplete, redundant, and often contradictory information that spews through the internet in response to noteworthy events. Vetted reporting appearing in established newspapers and online magazines tends to provide more quality than social media chatter and breaking-news sites.

Figuring out how to turn smartphones into ubiquitous billboards was not simple.

It's important to know that the "attention economy" describes the business sector that makes money gathering consumers' attention and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers.

Marcus Aurelius asked: "You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?"

By October, 14 percent of the company's ad revenue came from mobile ads, making it into a small but nicely profitable piece of Mark Zuckerberg's growing empire."12 Then it took off. By the spring of 2014, Facebook reported that 62 percent of its revenue came from mobile, leading the technology website The Verge to declare: "Facebook is a mobile company now.13 This statement has continued to prove accurate: by 2017, mobile ad revenue rose to 88 percent of their earnings, and is still climbing.

Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.

reject the mind-set that says you must always have your smartphone with you. The hope was to create more occasions for solitude--which we as humans need to thrive.

FI stands for financial independence, which refers to the pecuniary state in which your assets produce enough income to cover your living expenses.

The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they're friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they're just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children.

My first indication that this hyper-connected generation was suffering came a few years before I started writing this book. I was chatting with the head of mental health services at a well-known university where I had been invited to speak. This administrator told me that she had begun seeing major shifts in student mental health. Until recently, the mental health center on campus had seen the same mix of teenage issues that have been common for decades: homesickness, eating disorders, some depression, and the occasional case of OCD. Then everything changed. Seemingly overnight the number of students seeking mental health counseling massively expanded, and the standard mix of teenage issues was dominated by something that used to be relatively rare: anxiety. She told me that everyone seemed to suddenly be suffering from anxiety or anxiety-related disorders. When I asked her what she thought caused the change, she answered without hesitation that it probably had something to do with smartphones. The sudden rise in anxiety-related problems coincided with the first incoming classes of students that were raised on smartphones and social media. She noticed that these new students were constantly and frantically processing and sending messages. It seemed clear that the persistent communication was somehow messing with the students' brain chemistry.

Principle #1: Clutter is costly. Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.

when individuals in the FI community are provided large amounts of leisure time, they often voluntarily fill these hours with strenuous activity. This bias toward action over more traditional ideas of relaxation might strike some as needlessly exhausting,

[The executive was] just raving about these people spending twelve hours a day on Facebook ... so I asked a question to the guy who was raving: "The guy who's spending twelve hours a day on Facebook, do you think he'll be able to do what you've done?"

Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

"Your Time = Their Money." You should feel empowered to instead invest this value in things that matter more to you.

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."