The Perks of Living Without Social Media | Cal Newport

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 [Music]