Peter Doran – Every Little Thing
Dear readers,
Have you realized lately, that you hardly have time to do anything meaningful?
Anything, that really brings true joy in your life?
Anything, that’d help itch the lasting sense of satisfaction and fulfillment in your long-term memory?
Between obligatory work-overload and irritating noise slash distractions.
Between constant meeting schedules slash meaningless catchups.
Between superficial forced-chats with fake friends, and a persistent craving for dopamine shots — as a result of the strong efficacies of slot machine effect duly experimented around social media apps, in the name of maximizing user engagement (you remember, those scroll-down refresh feature in the apps we see).
Sure enough, our eyeballs; our most priceless attention-span and most importantly our precious time, certainly, has become somebody else’s money.
It’s appalling!
At the best of times, when science and technology, in-spite of empowering us and be at our service, has predominantly cheated and stolen from us.
At the best of times, when we deserve to live life freely and live it well; we are undoubtedly slaves of our phones and all the ephemeral pleasures we get from consuming largely bullshit information(in the name of ads and promotion and creative artifacts, et cetera).
At the best of times, when technology should be bringing us together has instead done just quite the opposite.
We definitely need a way out.
And, that my friend is Digital Minimalism or Digital Declutter.
Contextually speaking:
Author of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari quotes,
“In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.”
Cal Newport, a computer science professor and the author of Deep work says,
“Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”
And, in a book The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday, he writes,
“Endless pleasure becomes its own form of punishment.”
In the same token, Young Seneca, on his essay The Shortness of Time, explains,
It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing.So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it.
[…]
And last but not the least; from one of my favorite maxims shared by the minimalists, where-in they’ve stated:
“Glowing screen is the new smoking.”
This lead us to derive one straight, simple fact; And that is — it is our individual responsibility to be clear, concise and truly intentional regarding the consumption of technology per se, and better late than never reclaim our mortal time in the process!
p.s., It’s been a month I’ve deleted an instagram app on my phone (excluding, every Thursdays'). This way, I drive and balance my use of social media and not the other way around.
p.p.s. Put off your phone now! And, Carpe diem!
Yours,
Digital Minimalist