The Burnout Society: How The Modern World Is Stealing Young Peoples’ Future

00:00:00.000 | So I recently went on Scott Galloway's podcast Prof G to promote my book, Slow Productivity.

00:00:07.100 | After that, I began doing more of a deep dive on Scott's work.

00:00:12.320 | One of the things I came across was a TED talk he just gave recently.

00:00:15.840 | I have it up on the screen for people who are watching instead of just listening.

00:00:19.900 | There's Scott Galloway on stage at TED.

00:00:22.760 | Here's the title of this TED talk, "How the U.S. is Destroying Young People's Future."

00:00:31.560 | So in this talk, he gives a list of reasons for why the way we have things set up right

00:00:38.640 | now in the U.S. is really bad for young people.

00:00:42.000 | A lot of it's economic.

00:00:43.400 | I'll put some of these charts up on the screen.

00:00:45.680 | All right, let's see here.

00:00:47.620 | You know, there's various charts on the screen.

00:00:49.380 | You can see it if you're watching.

00:00:51.600 | A lot of it's economic policy, economic policy that more benefits, let's say, like baby boomers

00:00:57.420 | than it does youth.

00:00:58.420 | But he did mention technology.

00:00:59.420 | So near the end of the talk, he said technology is also part of how we're sort of screwing

00:01:03.940 | young people.

00:01:04.940 | And in particular, he talked about social media and the way that it is hurting young

00:01:10.220 | people, especially their mental health, citing a lot of the work that John Haidt has in his

00:01:14.240 | new book, "The Anxious Generation."

00:01:15.700 | All right, so this got me thinking.

00:01:18.380 | I mean, I agree with Scott and John Haidt that, yes, social media is a problem for young

00:01:24.540 | people.

00:01:25.540 | It is going to affect their mental health.

00:01:27.140 | But I think the story of how technology might be destabilizing young people's future is

00:01:33.980 | larger and more interesting than just that.

00:01:37.660 | And in particular, what I want to argue in today's deep dive is that there are multiple

00:01:42.920 | realities about our current technological future that are going to sort of screw the

00:01:47.660 | current young generation in terms of their economic professional future in the decades

00:01:51.900 | ahead.

00:01:52.900 | So I have three things I want to mention that weren't mentioned in Scott's talk where technology

00:01:56.820 | is setting up young people for professional failure in their 20s and into their 30s.

00:02:03.640 | And then I'll talk about for each of those at the end, a couple of things that you might

00:02:06.940 | be able to do to help counteract some of these forces right now.

00:02:10.340 | All right, let's get started.

00:02:12.180 | What's the first issue here that hasn't been mentioned yet?

00:02:16.300 | The idea of treating our phones like a constant companion has an economic ramification for

00:02:24.900 | young people.

00:02:25.900 | All right.

00:02:26.900 | Let me tell you what I mean here.

00:02:27.900 | First, let me quantify what I mean by this.

00:02:28.900 | I'm going to bring up on the screen here a 2023 report from Common Sense Media.

00:02:33.540 | It's about young people and phones.

00:02:36.720 | The report is called Constant Companion, a week in the life of a young person's smartphone

00:02:41.720 | use.

00:02:42.720 | I'm going to take some credit.

00:02:44.320 | This idea of constant companion as a term to describe our relationship with phones is

00:02:48.680 | something I introduced in the pages of the New York Times back in 2019.

00:02:53.200 | I wrote an op-ed about the problem with the constant companion model of smartphones and

00:02:56.880 | also in my book, Digital Minimalism.

00:02:58.200 | So I'll take credit for that.

00:03:00.560 | There's a chart in here I want to pull up in particular.

00:03:02.640 | Let's quantify what we mean by using a phone like a constant companion.

00:03:07.240 | So what's on the right here on this chart is a figure that's labeled average daily smartphone

00:03:12.320 | pickups by participant age, the number of times you pick up your phone during a day.

00:03:20.280 | There's three bands for each of these frequencies for different ages.

00:03:23.200 | Let's look at the dark green band.

00:03:25.720 | That's going to be 16 and 17-year-olds, so sort of the teenagers in this study.

00:03:30.920 | What we'll see is for the top two groups here, which are the smallest number of pickups,

00:03:35.960 | zero to 25 pickups a day, 26 to 50 pickups a day.

00:03:40.720 | These have the smallest shares of 16 and 17-year-olds.

00:03:44.360 | So they're least likely, the least likely number of times you're going to see one of

00:03:48.640 | these teenagers in this study pick up a phone are the smaller numbers.

00:03:51.160 | What's the most common number of pickups you're going to see with teenagers in this study?

00:03:57.720 | 51 to 100 times, followed very closely by 101 to 150 times, followed closely behind

00:04:04.440 | that with 151 to 200 times.

00:04:07.680 | So somewhere between 50 to 200 times is where the bulk of the survey responses fell.

00:04:15.440 | When they did the math over all the age groups, it averaged out to about 100 times a day you're

00:04:19.280 | picking up your phone.

00:04:20.440 | That's the constant companion model of using your smartphone.

00:04:23.640 | And it's different than, of course, the ways the smartphone was originally introduced,

00:04:28.280 | the tool it was originally introduced as.

00:04:31.520 | It was not introduced as a tool to be your constant companion, but something you use

00:04:35.260 | to make calls and listen to audio content integrated into a really nice unified package.

00:04:44.040 | As I've written before, Steve Jobs never meant for the smartphone to be something we looked

00:04:47.200 | at 100 times a day, but that's what it became.

00:04:51.300 | This was driven mainly by mobile, the mobile social media revolution.

00:04:55.160 | It's once the social media companies turned their goals as they were heading towards IPO

00:05:01.160 | to getting engagement minutes up as opposed to just getting subscriber numbers up.

00:05:06.000 | That's when they began engineering mobile versions of their experience that were meant

00:05:09.280 | to pull you back to your phone.

00:05:10.960 | This retrained us in general to look at our phones all the time.

00:05:15.520 | So why is this a problem for the professional future of the young people who are growing

00:05:19.960 | up right now with the constant companion model?

00:05:23.040 | There's two impacts that are relevant.

00:05:25.280 | One is that it prevents the robust development of your ability to focus.

00:05:32.220 | If you're looking at a phone on average 100 times a day, you are going to have very few

00:05:37.200 | moments in which you are actually sustaining concentration on something difficult for an

00:05:41.400 | expanded period of time without some sort of cognitive relief by looking at distraction.

00:05:47.440 | Now as I write about in my book, Deep Work, this is a problem because it's actually in

00:05:51.520 | that sustained concentration that important things happen, especially in the knowledge

00:05:55.760 | economy.

00:05:56.760 | Important things such as learning hard new skills quickly and producing really high quality

00:06:00.940 | results in reasonable amounts of time.

00:06:03.420 | If you do not develop that focus muscle because you have no experience with just keeping your

00:06:08.980 | focus on one thing without cognitive relief, this is a real hindrance to your professional

00:06:15.960 | development.

00:06:18.080 | So for someone like me or who's older than me, we went through a childhood, we went through

00:06:22.320 | college years, we went through our early young adult years without a constant companion phones.

00:06:28.080 | I graduated college in 2004.

00:06:30.680 | The constant companion model didn't really take off until the 2010s.

00:06:35.640 | So I was able to develop and practice an ability to focus.

00:06:38.640 | I didn't have this handicap in the way that the current young generation does.

00:06:43.320 | That's going to give my generation or above a real cognitive advantage over our younger

00:06:48.720 | peers because we're more comfortable locking in, learning something hard, producing something

00:06:53.480 | difficult.

00:06:55.880 | The other, this is subtle, but the other problem of the constant companion model on the professional

00:07:01.040 | future of current young people is that it creates what I called in my book Digital Minimalism

00:07:07.320 | Solitude Deprivation.

00:07:08.680 | We have to be really careful about how we define this term.

00:07:12.660 | In my book, I use a definition of solitude that is common and I think is important, which

00:07:19.240 | means time free from inputs from other minds.

00:07:24.880 | So in this definition of solitude, it's not about physical isolation.

00:07:29.240 | It's about being alone with your own thoughts.

00:07:32.360 | You're observing the world around you and you're thinking about stuff in your own head.

00:07:36.360 | You're not listening or reading someone else's thoughts.

00:07:39.200 | The constant companion model of the smartphone made it possible for the first time in human

00:07:44.200 | history to essentially banish all solitude.

00:07:47.760 | All of the moments where historically, by historically, Jesse, I'm talking about, you

00:07:52.280 | know, when we were in college.

00:07:54.440 | I'm kind of upset that that's now historic, but in this context, it kind of is.

00:07:58.280 | Historically, when Jesse and I were in college, you know, we had to take the wagon to pick

00:08:04.080 | up our togas or get our horses from the horseshoe place.

00:08:09.180 | You had solitude all the time because you would just be in line somewhere.

00:08:13.840 | You would be walking across campus.

00:08:15.720 | You would be waiting for a lecture to begin.

00:08:17.760 | You got there a little bit early.

00:08:19.540 | And what would you do in this time?

00:08:21.120 | It's you and your own thoughts.

00:08:22.120 | You're looking around.

00:08:23.120 | You're thinking about things.

00:08:24.120 | All right.

00:08:25.120 | As I argued in Digital Minimalism, solitude is very important, especially for young people,

00:08:28.880 | because it's where you make sense of your life.

00:08:32.880 | Solitude is thinking.

00:08:33.880 | Being alone with your own thoughts is where you integrate your experiences and feelings

00:08:37.280 | with your growing schema for understanding your life, your position in the world, and

00:08:41.320 | the trajectory that you're going on.

00:08:43.120 | You literally, maybe not literally, I guess you psychologically, I should say, you psychologically

00:08:49.120 | develop your adult identity through reflection and time spent alone with your own thoughts,

00:08:54.920 | especially when you're young and so much is changing and so much input is new.

00:08:59.120 | You got to sit there and make sense of it.

00:09:02.580 | This is really important for your professional future.

00:09:05.680 | This is how you put on, triumphorize, polish off, and convince yourself this is right,

00:09:11.800 | your sense of adult identity, which you need to succeed professionally.

00:09:15.620 | You have to come out of this social psychological cocoon to grow into a professional butterfly.

00:09:25.080 | You have to do a lot of work inside.

00:09:27.960 | This is who I am.

00:09:28.960 | This is different than how I was before.

00:09:30.180 | This is kind of scary, but this is OK.

00:09:32.240 | Here's how I fit into this world.

00:09:33.360 | Here's what's important to me.

00:09:34.480 | You need time alone with your own thoughts to do that.

00:09:36.800 | When you don't get that, what you're going to experience is more of a sense of an arrested

00:09:41.600 | development, especially with people in their 20s going to their 30s.

00:09:46.180 | You get terminology like adulting becomes more common.

00:09:49.840 | That's a direct reflection.

00:10:20.240 | It gives you more of a comfort and confidence with navigating the professional world, taking

00:10:30.480 | on responsibilities, stretching yourself, dealing with difficulties and hardships that

00:10:35.160 | occur in work and how you're going to navigate that.

00:10:37.680 | It's how you gather the respect of other people.

00:10:40.320 | It is how traditionally we become leaders as opposed to being in our childhood phase

00:10:46.880 | followers.

00:10:47.880 | So a lot of this gets impeded if we don't have time alone with our own thoughts.

00:10:51.920 | I know it's a subtle thing, but its ramifications aren't.

00:10:57.560 | The constant companion model of the phone, which didn't affect us or anyone older during

00:11:02.160 | our developmental years, is going to have a professional impact on young people.

00:11:07.480 | Issue number two, I think of this as the influencer culture tax, by which I mean there's a tax

00:11:17.040 | that is levied on individuals who grew up in this age of social media and social media

00:11:23.400 | influence.

00:11:24.400 | And I don't mean by influencer culture just this idea of there being very professional

00:11:29.400 | social media users who are influencers.

00:11:31.760 | I mean the whole culture that this engenders, which is a culture that says you have to see

00:11:37.000 | yourself as a mini influencer.

00:11:40.800 | Even if this is not your job, you need to cultivate a following online.

00:11:45.680 | It could be small, but it could be your friends and some random people, but you got to think

00:11:49.440 | a lot about this online persona, what you stand for, what you don't stand for, being

00:11:56.360 | interesting, producing content, tending to your followers, carefully monitoring to make

00:12:01.480 | sure that you haven't transgressed some sort of implicit Overton boundary that's specific

00:12:07.240 | to your particular online tribal cohesion.

00:12:10.240 | This uses a lot of time, attention, and energy.

00:12:13.240 | Here's the problem.

00:12:14.880 | It's exactly the flavor of time, attention, and energy that you would have otherwise been

00:12:18.800 | putting into developing your status within your real world professional context.

00:12:25.640 | So it's subverting this influencer culture is subverting the instinct we have as humans

00:12:30.960 | to monitor like the communities in which we exist in to try to emerge as a trusted authority

00:12:37.720 | or leader in those communities to help manage our social standing in the communities.

00:12:42.720 | This is exactly the energy you have to expend to begin to develop professionally.

00:12:48.680 | This is traditionally the energy we would expend to think about my actual communities

00:12:53.420 | that I'm involved in, including my professional communities.

00:12:57.080 | What's going on here?

00:12:58.080 | I want to read the room.

00:12:59.080 | I want to understand the different points of view.

00:13:00.160 | I want to emerge as a leader in here.

00:13:02.680 | This is a really important thing we do, a really important drive that humans have.

00:13:08.020 | It's a really important drive for getting ahead in business, in your job.

00:13:14.440 | And the social media influence culture is subverting that energy over there.

00:13:18.340 | It's a fake online world where what everyone is really doing is just clocking in into their

00:13:23.300 | data factory on behalf of Mark Zuckerberg so that his stock price can go up.

00:13:27.100 | So when you put all of your energy about how do I become a trusted member of the community

00:13:30.300 | and leader to these sort of fake online worlds, it doesn't get expended in the real worlds

00:13:36.620 | where you actually have a job and where you're really dealing with these people.

00:13:40.780 | And we're putting in an intense amount of energy to become a leader in that community

00:13:43.560 | would have really big economic benefits for you.

00:13:47.940 | So we don't talk about this one as much, but I think it matters.

00:13:52.140 | I think it matters.

00:13:53.140 | We're subverting a drive that we really should be.

00:13:55.060 | If you're young in your 20s, you should be putting a lot of that energy to how do I get

00:13:58.820 | a lot of followers at the nonprofit where I work?

00:14:03.280 | How do I get a lot of likes in the department I work for this large company?

00:14:08.740 | So that energy is being subverted for the benefit of a small number of people who own

00:14:12.500 | shares in these companies and away from your economic future.

00:14:15.340 | All right.

00:14:16.660 | The final issue that I think is disproportionately technology driven, that's disproportionately

00:14:22.060 | impacting the economic and professional future of young people is this rise of pseudo productivity.

00:14:28.540 | So of course, it's one of the big ideas of my new book, Slow Productivity, that knowledge

00:14:32.380 | work is built on this idea of pseudo productivity, which says visible activity is going to be

00:14:38.500 | our proxy for useful effort.

00:14:41.220 | And as I argue in the book, when that combined with the front office IT revolution, email,

00:14:47.540 | Slack, personal computers, mobile computing, it's supercharged this idea of performative

00:14:52.580 | busyness.

00:14:53.700 | It's supercharged the experience of knowledge work as this sort of frantic, fine granularity

00:14:59.220 | demonstration that you're constantly doing things, lots of emails back and forth saying

00:15:02.260 | yes to a lot more projects, constantly having all this administrative overhead.

00:15:06.300 | It's productivity as activity, making those two things synonymous.

00:15:11.980 | Pseudo productivity had been around for a long time, but it was in the 2000s, especially

00:15:15.380 | the 2010s that it really took off as technology tools really amplified it.

00:15:21.660 | This disproportionately hits young people, right?

00:15:25.520 | Because what does pseudo productivity do?

00:15:27.500 | Well, by forcing you just to be busy all the time, showing activity all the time, you're

00:15:32.380 | not able to do the slow development of new skills that are going to be valuable.

00:15:36.140 | What I call in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, career capital development.

00:15:40.580 | Now, if you're in your 40s like I am, you've already built up a lot of skills.

00:15:47.340 | That's what we're doing in our 20s and we were getting better at things, et cetera.

00:15:51.740 | Pseudo productivity is not so bad because it gives me a little bit more flexibility.

00:15:56.260 | I can step off of the cognitive difficulties of building new skills and being held accountable

00:16:00.940 | for what I produce and just, "Hey, if I want to spend the next five or six years just jumping

00:16:05.780 | on a lot of calls and being in meetings and whatever, that's fine."

00:16:08.380 | It gives me a little bit of breathing room, but it stings for the young people because

00:16:11.180 | they're never actually building the skills that are going to give them security.

00:16:14.980 | You put a 23-year-old in a technology hypercharged pseudo productivity environment, they can

00:16:20.660 | play that game well because they don't have other obligations.

00:16:23.220 | They have a lot of energy.

00:16:24.220 | They can stay up late just doing emails and responding to things, but they're not building

00:16:28.260 | up the career capital, the hardware and valuable skills on which ultimately you need to take

00:16:32.980 | leverage over your career.

00:16:35.500 | Pseudo productivity frustrates people of my age because we're like, "This is not real

00:16:40.740 | work and it's frustrating," but it can be a major obstacle, more than just frustrating,

00:16:45.420 | but a major obstacle to professional development for young people because they're not getting

00:16:49.700 | the chance that other generations had to do the hard, deliberate practice of building

00:16:54.500 | up new skills.

00:16:57.020 | All three of these things, we have the constant companion model of smartphones, we have the

00:17:02.380 | influencer culture subverting our instinct towards leadership, and we have pseudo productivity

00:17:07.860 | blocking us from actually building up skills that we can use as leverage.

00:17:11.060 | All three of these things, I think, they're all related to technology.

00:17:14.180 | They're all three presenting obstacles to young people's professional future, especially

00:17:19.820 | when we're talking about knowledge work.

00:17:22.700 | There's stuff we can do about this.

00:17:24.700 | I'll give a couple of quick examples.

00:17:25.860 | Maybe I'll give an example or two for each of these three things.

00:17:28.380 | All right, so the constant companion model.

00:17:31.020 | If you're young and you want to push back about that, begin to think about concentration

00:17:34.860 | like a muscle that you have to develop and you need to put in the time to develop it.

00:17:38.860 | I get into a lot of this in my book, Deep Work, but you need to be practicing focusing.

00:17:45.860 | You need to be very careful when you're working to block time that's non-distracted working

00:17:50.780 | versus time where you're doing more distracting things.

00:17:52.820 | In the non-distracting time, I'm working on one thing and it feels uncomfortable, but

00:17:56.660 | that's okay.

00:17:57.660 | I keep going because, you know what, the bench press feels uncomfortable, but if you do it

00:18:01.500 | long enough, your muscles get bigger.

00:18:03.900 | You have to adopt the mindset of focus is something I have to train and we live in a

00:18:08.620 | world of cognitive junk food, so I have to be pretty intentional about doing that training

00:18:14.140 | because otherwise the default is I'm going to fall out of proverbial shape here.

00:18:18.980 | You also need to prioritize solitude.

00:18:21.700 | That is time alone with your own thoughts, which is going to mean do things without your

00:18:25.980 | phone on a semi-regular basis.

00:18:27.220 | You just get comfortable with like, I went for a hike, I went for a walk, I went on some

00:18:31.060 | errands without my phones.

00:18:32.380 | I'm not not having my phone all the time, but on a regular basis, I'm alone with my

00:18:37.220 | own thoughts.

00:18:38.220 | So you get used to solitude.

00:18:40.740 | Journaling can help with this as well because journaling helps jumpstart this idea of self-reflection

00:18:45.660 | with your own thoughts.

00:18:46.660 | Okay.

00:18:47.660 | Let me try to make sense of these thoughts.

00:18:48.660 | If you journal enough, you get pretty good at this.

00:18:50.740 | And even when you're just waiting on the train or you're going on an errand, you're able

00:18:54.540 | to more with more facility, think about things that happened to you and make better sense

00:18:58.460 | of your life.

00:18:59.460 | So time alone with your own thoughts plus journaling is just trying to claw back in

00:19:04.980 | this sort of self-reflective solitude into your life.

00:19:08.500 | The pushback on the influencer tax.

00:19:10.940 | If you don't get paid to be saying things online, stop posting things online.

00:19:17.620 | We won't get into like consuming social media right now and some of the questions we'll

00:19:20.780 | get into that fine.

00:19:21.780 | You want to consume social media for this professional, this question of professional

00:19:25.100 | development.

00:19:26.100 | Let's not put, let's put that aside, but don't post things.

00:19:30.660 | That's a simple change, but when you're not posting things, you're not commenting, you're

00:19:34.100 | not putting things up.

00:19:35.500 | It removes this, this idea that you have this important audience that you have to tend to

00:19:40.820 | and that cares what you're doing and it needs a lot of your attention.

00:19:43.220 | And when you remove that idea, you're still going to have that impulse because you're

00:19:47.460 | young and you're becoming an adult and we're a social species, you'll still have that impulse.

00:19:51.420 | And when it does not have managing this sort of simulacrum of a community that the online

00:19:56.300 | world gives you, you will seek other places for this impulse to be fulfilled and that's

00:20:00.540 | going to become potentially your working world.

00:20:04.060 | So just don't post things.

00:20:06.460 | You're not an influencer.

00:20:07.900 | Don't think about your audience.

00:20:09.120 | Your audience is the people that actually you work with day to day.

00:20:12.620 | Your audience is the people that write paychecks for you.

00:20:14.700 | Your audience is the clients that actually forward you money because of the services

00:20:18.300 | you're giving them.

00:20:19.340 | Put that energy into making that audience happy, not this fake audience that was been

00:20:24.260 | constructed by these social media companies to play exactly on those instincts just to

00:20:27.940 | get you to look at a glowing piece of glass longer each day.

00:20:31.940 | And finally, when it comes to pseudo productivity, well, you have to resist it.

00:20:35.700 | And look, I just wrote a whole book about this.

00:20:37.700 | My book Slow Productivity is in detail how you systematically rebuild the notion of productivity

00:20:44.380 | in your job so that you don't get trapped with pseudo productivity and yet you also

00:20:48.340 | are able to succeed with these changes without annoying everyone in your orbit.

00:20:52.240 | It's a complicated thing.

00:20:53.240 | We talk about it a lot on the show, but let's just set the intention.

00:20:57.660 | Busyness is not usefulness.

00:21:00.100 | Productivity is not synonymous with activity.

00:21:02.580 | It's what did I produce that matters and probably the simplest mindset shift you can make is

00:21:06.900 | starting to ask your question, what did I produce this year and what did I produce during

00:21:11.140 | this last quarter that I'm proud of?

00:21:15.200 | Write those things down.

00:21:17.140 | That's the list you want to grow.

00:21:19.000 | Everything else will come from there.

00:21:20.000 | You say, I want at the end of the year, point back to things I did I'm proud of.

00:21:23.220 | And then you ask yourself in the moment, what am I doing today so that that list I'm going

00:21:26.980 | to be more impressed by?

00:21:29.100 | Suddenly the, I got through my inbox quickly and squeezed in seven zoom meetings is going

00:21:34.900 | to seem as sort of nihilistically absurd as it really is because none of that is directly

00:21:39.900 | connected to producing the stuff you're proud of.

00:21:41.580 | Again, there's a lot, we talk all the time on the show about specifically how to escape

00:21:44.740 | pseudoproductivity, but you got to start by just recognizing pseudoproductivity is not

00:21:49.500 | the game you're playing.

00:21:51.020 | If you're playing the pseudoproductivity game in your twenties, you'll do well at it in

00:21:54.500 | your twenties because you have energy and you're on your phone all the time anyways,

00:21:57.920 | but then you'll get to your thirties and forties and realize all of these points I was racking

00:22:02.260 | up in these games aren't actually worth much.

00:22:05.820 | Now that I'm want leverage and control over my career, I want stability.

00:22:09.340 | I want to do something new or bold.

00:22:10.860 | You say, Oh, the game I should have been playing is building up skills that matter.

00:22:14.940 | And that's a different game.

00:22:15.940 | So just recognize that's not the game.

00:22:18.620 | And so starting to look at metrics that aren't just busyness in the moment is a one thing

00:22:23.060 | you can do to make that change.

00:22:24.980 | All right.

00:22:26.260 | So that's my addendum to Scott Galloway's talk.

00:22:28.960 | Technology has all sorts of subtle ways that it's undermining young people's professional

00:22:32.860 | future.

00:22:33.860 | Those are three, not exhaustive, but three particular ways and some advice in there that

00:22:38.100 | hopefully will help you think better about that.

00:22:41.020 | All right.

00:22:42.020 | I think about it, Jesse, if the people that get caught up in managing their social media

00:22:47.460 | audience that aren't like professional influencers, that same energy put into your day job would

00:22:53.300 | make a huge difference.

00:22:54.300 | I like that advice that not do it if you don't get paid.

00:22:56.900 | Yeah.

00:22:57.900 | Don't post if you're not getting paid.

00:22:58.900 | I mean, look, we can get the same effect and save you some money.

00:23:03.660 | Just send a check to Mark Zuckerberg once a month.

00:23:06.700 | Same idea.

00:23:07.700 | But then it's quicker.

00:23:09.060 | It's more efficient.

00:23:10.060 | Just send them a check, right?

00:23:12.780 | And get an applause machine.

00:23:15.100 | Send Mark Zuckerberg a check and then just like a few times throughout the day, just

00:23:18.740 | look out in the space and say a clever quip and press the applause machine button.

00:23:23.660 | People love me.

00:23:24.660 | You really love me.

00:23:25.660 | And then send your check to Mark Zuckerberg.

00:23:26.660 | It gets you the same effect, but saves that energy now for actually getting a better paycheck.

00:23:32.100 | All right.

00:23:33.100 | Let's do some ads.

00:23:34.100 | So I want to talk about our longtime friends at Element, L-M-N-T.

00:23:40.340 | You've heard me talk about Element for a long time.

00:23:42.400 | When I talk about their electrolyte drink mix that has the right amount of electrolytes

00:23:48.260 | you need to rehydrate after you've been out there exercising or doing a long day of book

00:23:53.420 | touring or lecturing or being at a conference all day, but it has none of the junk in it.

00:23:57.940 | It doesn't have sugar.

00:23:58.940 | It doesn't have weird ingredients.

00:24:01.380 | I do use Element all the time.

00:24:03.100 | After I work out, I use it.

00:24:04.380 | If I'm really dehydrated in the morning, I use it, especially after a long day of teaching

00:24:08.660 | or podcasting.

00:24:09.660 | It's how I rehydrate.

00:24:12.020 | So I am a big Element fan, have been for a long time.

00:24:14.860 | I wanted to mention though, they have this interesting new product, Element Sparkling,

00:24:19.660 | a 16 ounce can of sparkling water that includes their zero sugar electrolyte formulation that

00:24:27.560 | you already know from their drink mix packs.

00:24:29.980 | I'm very excited about this.

00:24:31.540 | Now here's the thing, Element Sparkling is not yet available just to the general public,

00:24:37.700 | but it is available to Element Insiders.

00:24:41.740 | So if you're an Element Insider, meaning you've bought an Element Insider bundle in the last

00:24:46.460 | nine months, you're eligible to get sort of early access to Element Sparkling.

00:24:52.180 | You can just go to the Element Sparkling product page at drinkelement.com and they'll help

00:24:56.260 | you figure out if you're an insider or not, but I just wanted to mention that.

00:24:59.460 | So we've got the drink mix, which I love.

00:25:01.740 | And now coming soon is Element Sparkling, which Element Insiders can try right now before

00:25:08.140 | the main public release.

00:25:11.060 | So you can get a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase.

00:25:16.240 | If you go to drinkelement.com/deep, that's drinkelement.com/deep.

00:25:24.420 | And if you're an Element Insider, you will also have first access to Element Sparkling,

00:25:28.380 | a bold 16 ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water.

00:25:32.060 | That's drinkelement.com/deep.

00:25:37.180 | Also want to talk about our friends at Cozy Earth.

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00:25:59.560 | I also now have a Cozy Earth, I guess you call it like a sweatshirt made out of that

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00:26:09.300 | I love it.

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00:26:29.820 | Second, we went on a trip recently, just a weekend trip to beach rental.

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00:26:40.780 | This time we said, no, no, no.

00:26:42.340 | I would rather have the difficulty of having to bring our own sheets and undo the beds

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00:26:50.260 | Cozy Earth knows this.

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00:27:45.980 | Thanks and happy sleeping.

00:27:47.300 | All right, let's do some questions.

00:27:49.980 | Who do we have first?

00:27:53.180 | First question is from Nate.

00:27:54.500 | I've struggled with distraction seeking with technology since I was a preteen.

00:28:01.180 | Distraction seeking technology as I was a preteen.

00:28:03.700 | With a great deal of effort, I've made significant progress using your techniques, hat blocking,

00:28:08.220 | the phone foyer method, but I struggle when I'm sick or I have a poor night's sleep.

00:28:14.220 | Basically I relapse and waste a huge portion of the next day.

00:28:17.220 | How can I get back on track when this happens?

00:28:19.180 | Well, I sort of have a double barreled answer to this question that my two answers will

00:28:24.540 | seem different, but they can relate.

00:28:27.700 | So my first answer is like hard days are hard days.

00:28:32.340 | You know, you're sick, you're really tired.

00:28:35.800 | It's okay to say, yeah, I'm not going to get a lot done this day.

00:28:39.020 | Let's start with that, right?

00:28:42.520 | We want to adopt a slow productivity mindset, which is about over time producing stuff you're

00:28:47.620 | proud about, which is very different than a fast or pseudo productivity mindset, which

00:28:51.660 | says what matters is activity.

00:28:54.580 | If you've internalized the pseudo productivity mindset to be kind of sick and like, I didn't

00:29:00.780 | really get much done today.

00:29:01.780 | It seems like a problem.

00:29:02.780 | I was unproductive.

00:29:04.340 | I was less valuable to the world.

00:29:05.820 | This was a quote unquote bad day.

00:29:07.620 | If you have a slow productivity mindset, it doesn't matter.

00:29:10.260 | You're like, yeah, today's not a day I'm going to produce much since that's good.

00:29:13.060 | So I did it.

00:29:14.580 | What matters though is, hey, I'm still on track for at the end of this season to have

00:29:19.060 | like produce some stuff I'm proud of.

00:29:20.700 | I mean, I talk about it in my book, Slow Productivity, one of the examples I give, Mary Curie honing

00:29:27.180 | in on isolating radium so she could build a, have a first example and really understand

00:29:32.700 | radioactivity in a way that wasn't known before she was going to win a Nobel prize for this

00:29:36.580 | work, working in this, in Paris and this sort of drafty basement research lab honing in

00:29:42.220 | summer comes like now we're going on vacation for two months, we're going to France.

00:29:46.740 | The pseudo productivity mindset is like, oh my God, you're so unvaluable.

00:29:49.500 | Why would you do that?

00:29:51.060 | That's you're unproductive.

00:29:52.760 | The slow productivity mindset says, I am working on something cool.

00:29:55.900 | I'm going to produce something cool.

00:29:56.900 | And she did.

00:29:57.900 | And she came back and she kept working on it and she got the result and she got a Nobel

00:30:00.100 | prize, took some more vacations, got another Nobel prize.

00:30:05.100 | Things were fine.

00:30:06.100 | So let's get rid of the mindset of taking time or slowing down or having variation in

00:30:11.180 | your intensity is somehow a bad thing.

00:30:12.620 | It's not.

00:30:13.620 | Now here's my other answer, which could also be relevant.

00:30:18.460 | If what you're thinking is like, look, I, it's not that I'm feeling really bad and there's

00:30:22.220 | nothing I could do.

00:30:23.220 | It's just like, if anything goes off a little bit, I get stuck in a sort of rabbit hole

00:30:27.340 | of distracting behaviors when there's better things I could have been doing, not me more

00:30:31.020 | productive things, but like it, it takes away the quality of my day.

00:30:34.420 | Like if it's a relapse type situation, it's not what I wanted my day to be.

00:30:39.140 | It just, that was enough to hook me into that.

00:30:42.660 | There's a lot of ideas about this from the addiction literature.

00:30:45.740 | These are called habit triggers.

00:30:47.780 | Smokers have this big problem after they quit, that there's very certain things that happen

00:30:53.140 | that they just associate with a cigarette.

00:30:54.700 | And when those things happen it's very difficult not to smoke.

00:30:58.260 | The addiction literature, they say, yeah, you have to practice and cultivate alternative

00:31:03.140 | habits.

00:31:04.140 | All right.

00:31:05.140 | In this situation, it's like, I'm a little bit tired and I'm not really on my schedule.

00:31:09.180 | Like what do I do?

00:31:10.620 | What's like the habit I fall back onto to sort of like rewind or recharge that's not

00:31:14.340 | just going down a YouTube rabbit hole for eight hours.

00:31:17.100 | And you practice with something different until you associate those triggers with the

00:31:21.700 | new behavior.

00:31:22.700 | So you have to define the triggers that I'm tired.

00:31:24.540 | I'm a little bit sick.

00:31:25.540 | I mean, for you, I think it's the, like something is off and it knocks me off the ability to

00:31:29.220 | follow a more optimized or structured schedule.

00:31:33.020 | Have different fallbacks you do in those situations, which are recharging, but don't leave you

00:31:37.060 | with this feeling of, I really don't, not happy with how my day unfolded.

00:31:41.020 | So both of these answers can be true at the same time.

00:31:44.180 | Ease up on yourself.

00:31:45.180 | Productivity is not activity.

00:31:47.840 | It's outcome over time.

00:31:48.900 | And the second, if you're not happy with yourself when you fall into these, but you're like,

00:31:54.180 | I don't want to do this regardless.

00:31:55.820 | I don't care if I'm sick or not.

00:31:56.820 | I don't want to be on TikTok all day.

00:31:58.780 | It's a trigger.

00:31:59.780 | You have to have a specific other thing you associate with that trigger and it'll take

00:32:02.380 | a few cycles of finding what works well and doing it a few times until you change your

00:32:06.740 | association with that.

00:32:08.180 | So anyways, thank you, Nate, what do we got next?

00:32:12.340 | Next question from Zachary.

00:32:14.180 | My attention span seems to have diminished to a new low.

00:32:16.820 | I used to love movies, reading books and having long conversations with people.

00:32:21.260 | Now I can't do any of these things and all I do is scroll TikTok, Instagram or other

00:32:24.940 | iPads or apps on my iPad.

00:32:27.460 | Is there a way out of this without completely cutting out all these technologies?

00:32:32.340 | My first question is why not cut out all these technologies?

00:32:36.180 | The things you're mentioning that you're not able to do anymore seem like they're important

00:32:40.580 | to you.

00:32:41.860 | Movies, reading, having long conversations, those feel like things that you don't want

00:32:48.380 | to necessarily give up.

00:32:49.380 | Now, what are you giving them up for?

00:32:52.240 | Scrolling TikTok and Instagram and other apps on your iPad.

00:32:56.500 | So why don't you consider prioritizing that first group of things over the second group

00:33:00.940 | of things?

00:33:02.700 | Now if we want to structure this a little bit, abstention might sound scary.

00:33:06.420 | Do a digital clutter.

00:33:08.300 | Like I talk about on my book, Digital Minimalism, say I'm going to take a 30-day, I guess step

00:33:13.300 | away for 30 days from all these optional personal technology uses, 30 days.

00:33:20.260 | Then during those 30 days, I'm going to very aggressively explore alternative activities

00:33:24.800 | that are important to me.

00:33:25.800 | I'm going to build rituals around them.

00:33:27.020 | I'm going to put aside time for them.

00:33:28.300 | I'm going to go to the library.

00:33:29.300 | I'm going to read in the woods.

00:33:30.300 | I'm going to set up a lot of social events with friends.

00:33:31.780 | I'm going to go to the Revival House movie theaters three times a week to see all these

00:33:35.540 | different movies that are playing.

00:33:37.460 | You really aggressively start experimenting with and structuring your day around other

00:33:41.780 | sorts of valuable activities.

00:33:43.220 | Don't just sit there and white knuckle it.

00:33:44.580 | Do other things.

00:33:46.060 | And then at the end of the 30 days, say, "Okay, is there something really important that I'm

00:33:50.700 | missing from the technologies I temporarily put aside?"

00:33:56.180 | I think you're going to find for most of these things, you're going to say, "No, nothing

00:33:58.780 | really bad happened that I wasn't on TikTok."

00:34:02.460 | There may be a few uses that pop up where you're like, "Well, using Instagram to keep

00:34:07.260 | up whatever with my nieces and nephews and the photos that are posted of them, that is

00:34:11.740 | important to me because then when I'm on the text threads, I feel more connected to what's

00:34:15.740 | going on in my family."

00:34:16.740 | If you find these specific uses, then you can say, "Great.

00:34:20.700 | If that's what I need to really miss about this tool, how do I put that back into my

00:34:24.440 | life in a more focused way with fences around it?"

00:34:26.940 | And so in this example, if this is really the thing you missed about Instagram, you

00:34:31.740 | could say, "Well, it doesn't have to be on my phone.

00:34:35.500 | What I really should do is why don't I, on Fridays, log on to Instagram on my computer.

00:34:41.340 | It's kind of an ugly interface on there.

00:34:43.420 | Only follow my family members, see what's going on with my nephews or nieces, or maybe

00:34:48.760 | just move more of this to our family text thread, which doesn't have that same sort

00:34:52.580 | of addictive pull that the app has, and just sort of post more of my own photos on there

00:34:57.920 | so other people are posting photos, and now we can really keep up with each other without

00:35:01.380 | having to be in an addictive ecosystem."

00:35:03.660 | When you know what you're trying to do with the technology, you can put up good fences.

00:35:09.180 | This is very different than what most people do, which is saying, "I, by default, bring

00:35:13.620 | these technologies into my life if they could be cool, and I wait until I feel as if the

00:35:20.060 | negative pressures of this technology are so big that I feel like, okay, now I have

00:35:24.740 | to throw up my hands and get rid of it."

00:35:26.540 | That doesn't work very well because unless the technology is really destroying your life,

00:35:30.420 | it's a hard burden to pass.

00:35:31.740 | You'll think, "Yeah, it is bad, but a lot of times it's not bad."

00:35:34.820 | That's the issue with these tools, like Instagram or TikTok.

00:35:39.220 | A lot of it is fine.

00:35:40.740 | It's the volume of what you do.

00:35:42.260 | It's how it makes you feel over time.

00:35:43.960 | It's specific content on the tools.

00:35:46.020 | So if you're just strictly trying to build a case against something, it's a very hard

00:35:50.580 | case to make when it comes to technology.

00:35:53.260 | If you're instead trying to build a case for using something, like what's the positive

00:35:57.700 | case for using this tool?

00:35:59.060 | What do I really need in my life that's very important in this tool?

00:36:02.840 | That becomes difficult as well.

00:36:03.980 | You're like, "Well, there's not much there really," or "This thing's important, but why

00:36:07.780 | not just put these fences around it?"

00:36:09.740 | So do the digital to clutter, Nate, and be willing to radically change your relationship

00:36:15.860 | with these tools.

00:36:16.860 | I want to be the one to tell you, if you're not watching movies and reading and talking

00:36:19.940 | with your friends and family, and this matters to you, and you're doing this because you

00:36:24.220 | need to scroll TikTok more, Instagram more, that's a problem and you should fix it.

00:36:28.460 | Those first things are more important than these second things.

00:36:30.400 | Those first things, especially as you get older, are going to bring more sort of sustainable

00:36:35.260 | goodness into your life than the second set of things.

00:36:38.680 | The second set of things is your factory shift.

00:36:40.860 | You're checking in at your factory at the ByteDance or MetaFactory to do your shift,

00:36:45.100 | giving data over so they can make money off of it.

00:36:47.360 | You don't have to keep that job if you find these other things to be more important.

00:36:51.860 | So I'll give you that strong message.

00:36:53.660 | Leaving those technologies is not a bad thing, but do the digital to clutter and find out

00:36:57.540 | a little bit more subtly what's important here and what's not.

00:37:00.300 | All right, who do we got?

00:37:03.860 | - Next question's from Elmarie, "I'm in a master's program and find it hard to schedule

00:37:08.100 | deep work sessions throughout the day as my core schedule is all over the place.

00:37:12.260 | Once I get in a groove, it's time to pack up and head to my next class.

00:37:15.980 | How can I schedule deep work with a scattered class schedule?"

00:37:20.100 | - Good question.

00:37:21.100 | Sort of like a classic early Cal academic advice question.

00:37:26.260 | Autopilot what you can.

00:37:28.580 | So any work that happens regularly each week, you just know this thing is due every Friday.

00:37:32.980 | We have to do reading response every Tuesday and Thursday.

00:37:36.340 | Find the right time and the right place to do that work, and then keep that constant

00:37:42.020 | week to week.

00:37:43.020 | And you got to be really realistic about this, like, how much time do I really need to do

00:37:46.980 | this problem set?

00:37:47.980 | Well, it might be you need three sessions, and one of them has to be three hours.

00:37:50.980 | Like, be realistic about how much time you need to successfully finish the recurring

00:37:55.560 | work at least 90% of the time, same day, same places.

00:37:59.940 | It's on your calendar recurring, so that you're taking out the decision-making, the energy

00:38:05.460 | expenditure of like, "What do I want to work on next?"

00:38:08.640 | And talking yourself into actually getting the energy to work on it.

00:38:11.600 | So autopilot as much work as you can.

00:38:14.460 | The other heuristic I tell students is don't waste first thing in the morning.

00:38:18.780 | If your first class is at 10, there might be a really nice block in there, right?

00:38:23.060 | That like 8.30 to 10 or something where you could get a big chunk of things done.

00:38:28.360 | So don't necessarily wait until you're well into the day before you start thinking about

00:38:31.660 | time as being fair game for getting things done.

00:38:34.700 | That time in between classes, a lot can get done there.

00:38:38.340 | If it's too scattered to finish big things, figure out consistently how to break up big

00:38:42.660 | things.

00:38:43.660 | So like, okay, here's what I do.

00:38:45.140 | I have this hour between these two classes, for example, it's not enough time to finish

00:38:49.240 | a problem set.

00:38:50.240 | But I know consistently, that's usually enough time to prepare a problem set that I'm working

00:38:55.160 | on.

00:38:56.160 | Go through the problems, answer the easy ones, figure out what the hard ones are and what

00:39:00.780 | I need to look that up for and like where that material is.

00:39:03.940 | And that's like problem set prepping.

00:39:06.220 | And then maybe the next day, I have like this two-hour block where if I tackle a prepped

00:39:10.180 | problem set, I can get a draft of like all of the answers typically.

00:39:14.020 | And then another day, I have another hour-long slot, which is a problem set polishing, where

00:39:18.780 | I go through and I rewrite all of my answers for my notes on to what I'm going to submit

00:39:22.100 | and I double check the math that takes about an hour.

00:39:24.100 | If I do these three blocks consistently, same time, same places every week, the problem

00:39:28.420 | set gets done and it looks good.

00:39:30.760 | So if these blocks are small and the things you need to do are big, have a consistent

00:39:35.320 | way of breaking up the work and then autopilot to a smaller schedule.

00:39:37.960 | So I'm a big fan of recurrent work in school should have a recurrent strategy for being

00:39:43.720 | handled.

00:39:44.720 | All right, rock and rolling, Jesse, who do we have next?

00:39:48.800 | - Next question is from Danny.

00:39:50.680 | I'm coming to the end of my month of digital decluttering.

00:39:53.920 | To say it's been helpful would be a massive understatement.

00:39:57.080 | Since getting off of Reddit and YouTube comment sections, my anxiety has disappeared.

00:40:01.240 | My question relates to letting things back in my life.

00:40:03.860 | I was most looking forward to returning to some video games, but worried that it will

00:40:07.120 | take away from my new love of reading difficult books.

00:40:10.720 | How should I balance this?

00:40:12.000 | - Well, Danny, first, I appreciate the mini case study there.

00:40:15.560 | Zachary from before, listen to the benefit Danny got from digital decluttering.

00:40:21.780 | Reading Reddit and YouTube comment sections, which was probably just like a default behavior

00:40:25.320 | for Danny, was giving him anxiety.

00:40:28.800 | And he learned in his declutter, I feel better when I'm not doing that.

00:40:32.200 | He no longer does that.

00:40:33.320 | His life feels better.

00:40:35.280 | We don't realize sometimes the cognitive burden of our technological habits until we take

00:40:39.240 | a break from them.

00:40:40.240 | All right, to the specific question, video games versus books, I'm going to argue having

00:40:44.940 | rituals around both, Danny, being intentional about it.

00:40:48.440 | So when it comes to video games, I think it's fine if there's like a particular video game

00:40:52.000 | you really like playing, or you like the idea of there's a new video game, I like video

00:40:57.640 | games, I'm going to play this through over the next month or two, and then like a new

00:41:01.320 | game comes out, I get that game and I play it through.

00:41:04.480 | I think that's fine.

00:41:05.920 | Video games are a pretty impressive media art form right now.

00:41:10.400 | They have budgets bigger than big Hollywood movies.

00:41:12.760 | They make more money than big Hollywood movies in a lot of cases.

00:41:15.160 | It's an interesting art form.

00:41:17.720 | The danger here, I think, is online video games.

00:41:20.240 | So if it's a video game that you play it online with other people, those can be some of the

00:41:24.240 | most addictive activities in the whole digital space.

00:41:27.200 | Be very wary of those.

00:41:29.120 | Engineered games that are meant to be played over about a 40 to 50 hour period that you

00:41:32.320 | spread out over a couple months and it has an arc and then it finishes, it's like a drawn-out

00:41:36.120 | movie or novel experience, fantastic.

00:41:39.020 | Online games, I just say there be dragons.

00:41:42.760 | That can eat up endless time and press buttons in a way that almost nothing else can.

00:41:48.120 | If you want more on that, read Adam Alter's book, Irresistible, where he talks about addictive

00:41:52.560 | technology.

00:41:53.740 | Those massively multiplayer online video games are the most addictive technology, so be wary

00:41:58.960 | of those.

00:41:59.960 | All right.

00:42:00.960 | So what do I mean by rituals?

00:42:01.960 | I have a ritual around video games.

00:42:03.720 | This is when and how I do it.

00:42:04.760 | I look forward to it.

00:42:05.760 | I have a ritual around reading hard books.

00:42:07.240 | This is when and where I do it.

00:42:08.280 | I've learned to look forward to it.

00:42:10.200 | Like for video games, it could be like, yeah, there's certain nights, like Thursday night

00:42:14.680 | after dinner, I have this nice period and also like Sunday morning, these are like my

00:42:19.200 | video game times and I put it aside and I can really get lost in the game for three

00:42:25.240 | hours.

00:42:26.240 | I do this two times a week or three times a week.

00:42:27.860 | You know, that could be fine.

00:42:29.560 | It's when I do it, where I do it, I look forward to it.

00:42:32.760 | Same thing with books.

00:42:33.760 | Yeah, I really, I want to get in this habit of reading hard books and here's how I do

00:42:37.560 | it.

00:42:38.560 | It's, you know, it's like most nights at seven, like after dinner, but before I put

00:42:41.960 | on TV and I make the certain tea or have like a little bit of whiskey or like whatever,

00:42:46.680 | you know, you can make a thing about it, put on a record and I just make this a habit.

00:42:50.600 | I have a ritual around that it's done at the same time.

00:42:53.080 | Just have these really nice rituals around both of the things.

00:42:57.200 | Rituals that are built to a schedule that gives you a reasonable balance.

00:42:59.600 | So I think video games are cool.

00:43:01.960 | I just don't like the massively multiplayer online ones.

00:43:04.600 | They're meant to be addictive.

00:43:05.920 | If the game cost you 70 bucks and you can only play it for 40 hours, I have no problem

00:43:11.560 | with that.

00:43:12.560 | If the game was free and you can play it 40 hours a week, I mean, and still not be enough.

00:43:18.440 | Be very, very wary about that.

00:43:20.040 | Right?

00:43:21.040 | That's the way I think about that.

00:43:22.040 | So just make rituals and schedules about both those things and keep both of those things

00:43:25.680 | still in your life.

00:43:26.680 | And congratulations on the declutter sticking.

00:43:28.480 | I mean, imagine all the cool stuff you can do without that time spent stressing about

00:43:33.720 | Reddit and YouTube comments.

00:43:35.920 | All right, what do we got next?

00:43:39.480 | Next question is our slow productivity corner.

00:43:42.920 | Oh, fantastic.

00:43:43.920 | Let's get that music.

00:43:53.200 | It's from Dirk and Dirk says slow productivity embraces a larger timescale.

00:44:00.200 | This makes perfect sense if you expect to have enough lifetime left to finish your projects,

00:44:05.080 | i.e. books and achieve your goals.

00:44:07.900 | But how does the idea of slow productivity relate to age?

00:44:10.640 | How do you apply it to older people who fear that they may be running out of time?

00:44:14.040 | A good question, Dirk.

00:44:16.280 | For people who don't know, slow productivity corner is our question.

00:44:19.960 | Once per episode, we have at least one question that is related to my new book, Slow Productivity.

00:44:24.560 | All right.

00:44:25.560 | So Dirk is talking about an idea I mentioned in an earlier question of this episode as

00:44:29.520 | well that slow productivity says, look at productivity on longer timescales.

00:44:36.920 | Not did I have a productive day, but like was the last five years productive, right?

00:44:41.520 | When you think about productivity at larger timescales, you don't sweat the busyness of

00:44:46.440 | a particular day.

00:44:47.720 | What you worry about is like returning to important things over time.

00:44:51.280 | All right.

00:44:52.960 | So Dirk, what you're saying is like, you know, if I'm later on in life, maybe I don't want

00:44:56.960 | to be thinking about a 10 year timeframe.

00:44:58.280 | I think that's fine.

00:44:59.280 | I think fair enough.

00:45:00.280 | Right.

00:45:01.280 | There's other reasons, by the way, that you don't want to be thinking about a too long

00:45:04.360 | of a timeframe as well, unrelated to being older.

00:45:07.760 | So Dirk, like in slow productivity, I talk about, there's a section where I talk about

00:45:12.360 | laying out your vision for the longterm and measuring your productivity against it.

00:45:16.720 | And I said, there's natural, there's sometimes there's natural breaks in this.

00:45:22.200 | Like if you're in school, you're probably thinking about what do I want to look back

00:45:27.360 | on my school experience and say, this is what I did and here's what I'm proud of it.

00:45:32.040 | That could just be two more years.

00:45:33.480 | You're a sophomore, you're thinking about your next two years of school.

00:45:36.280 | It could be a particular job, like a posting.

00:45:41.060 | I work for the state department.

00:45:42.320 | I've been posted to, you know, Tel Aviv for the next two or three years.

00:45:47.280 | That's a natural constraint.

00:45:48.720 | I want to just think about what do I, what do I want to look back on this post, this

00:45:52.760 | time limited part of my life, what I want to look back at and say happened in here.

00:45:57.840 | I would do this when we had babies, right?

00:45:59.640 | Like I would see that as there's this particular year, typically when you have a new baby and

00:46:03.920 | like, what do I want that year to look like?

00:46:05.720 | And it's very different because a very difficult year in terms of like, you're trying to take

00:46:09.340 | care of this young thing and you have a different, different measure of what productive means

00:46:14.280 | than in another part of your life.

00:46:15.740 | So Dirk, these longer timescales don't have to be decades.

00:46:20.240 | It could be like, what do I want to do?

00:46:21.880 | Like what would productive be for me for this year?

00:46:24.720 | What would productive be for me for this season?

00:46:26.720 | It's a particularly, completely fine timescale, like, okay, it's winter time.

00:46:31.880 | What do I want to do?

00:46:33.120 | Like what would I look back and say this was a successful winter?

00:46:35.280 | Like, well, you know, I want to learn how to do this.

00:46:39.000 | I want to finally like clean that out.

00:46:40.920 | I want to like spend time outside every, like build a habit of like getting outside every

00:46:45.400 | day when it's cold.

00:46:46.720 | So we can, the timescale bigger than just the immediate future is key for slow productivity,

00:46:51.860 | but it doesn't also have to be the distance future.

00:46:54.320 | The timescale used to slowly measure productivity can vary depending on what's going on in your

00:47:00.120 | life.

00:47:01.120 | All right.

00:47:02.120 | So good, slow productivity question, Dirk.

00:47:03.120 | I think we need that music one more time, Jesse.

00:47:09.080 | All right, let's, do we have a call?

00:47:17.400 | We do.

00:47:18.400 | Let's do a call.

00:47:19.400 | Hi, Cal.

00:47:20.400 | This is JJ calling.

00:47:21.400 | I'm a senior in high school, and I had a question regarding formulating a deep life vision and

00:47:28.080 | living that out.

00:47:29.640 | So I have some big decisions coming up regarding where to go to school for college and university,

00:47:34.880 | what to major in, what to study and eventually what career to go into.

00:47:37.880 | But given my youth, I don't know how to formulate an actual deep life.

00:47:44.440 | I just simply don't have enough life experience to know what a life well-lived good life would

00:47:51.240 | look like.

00:47:52.440 | So I'm hoping you could speak on to fellow young people like myself who just don't have

00:47:57.400 | the life experience to know what a deep life should look like and how to formulate that

00:48:02.400 | vision.

00:48:03.400 | Thank you.

00:48:04.400 | That's a great question.

00:48:06.280 | So let me talk briefly, generally about my philosophy around the deep life and then let's

00:48:12.320 | get to your specific question about what someone at your age, a high school senior, how you

00:48:17.600 | should be thinking about these ideas.

00:48:19.120 | All right, so what's my general conception around the deep life, a term that I coined

00:48:23.480 | early in the pandemic, and it's sort of our shorthand for a life that's lived on purpose.

00:48:29.120 | It's intentional.

00:48:30.280 | You've constructed the life in a way to amplify the stuff you really care about and reduce

00:48:33.760 | the stuff you don't.

00:48:35.280 | It's a life you're sort of proud to be living.

00:48:37.640 | It's a life that's remarkable to other people who know you.

00:48:40.040 | So this is what people really want.

00:48:43.360 | That sense of I have designed, my life is mine and it's on purpose is what people really

00:48:48.920 | seem to want and what a lot of people seem to be missing.

00:48:52.160 | So what's my general philosophy around this?

00:48:54.800 | Well, longtime listeners of the show knows I'm not a fan of what I would call goal centric

00:49:01.560 | planning, which I think is the dominant.

00:49:04.740 | This is the dominant mode of thinking about something like the deep life in the Western

00:49:09.000 | culture, especially American culture of the last hundred, maybe 150 years, but especially

00:49:14.080 | the last hundred years or so.

00:49:16.980 | It's this idea of you need a big goal, a cool goal, right?

00:49:22.080 | Like this big thing I'm going to go after and do.

00:49:25.280 | And if I can get that cool goal in its slipstream, the rest of my life will become good.

00:49:30.960 | Often this is professional, right?

00:49:33.240 | So this could mean a couple of things that could mean we have the follow your passion

00:49:37.440 | terminology here.

00:49:38.440 | So often this means like, well, if I can just find the perfect job, that's my passion.

00:49:41.640 | My whole life is going to feel redeemed and validate.

00:49:44.100 | I'm going to really enjoy my life.

00:49:45.680 | Sometimes it's much more just baldly achievement focused.

00:49:47.960 | If I could just reach this level of achievement in this complicated competitive path, the

00:49:52.520 | rest of my life will fall into place.

00:49:53.960 | It's a big, bold goal.

00:49:55.880 | We see, especially during times of disruption like the financial crisis, and then more recently

00:49:59.880 | during the pandemic, we have location-based, goal-based planning.

00:50:04.360 | If I could just move to this dramatic place, my life is going to be better.

00:50:09.520 | I could just leave the city and be on a farm or whatever.

00:50:14.120 | In the side effect of this one big change is going to make a big difference.

00:50:17.360 | The other type of goal that goal-centric planning often builds around is ideology.

00:50:21.160 | If I could just have like an all-encompassing ideology that I can dedicate my life towards,

00:50:28.000 | then my life is going to be remarkable and all the other parts are going to be good.

00:50:32.160 | Here's the problem.

00:50:33.160 | That doesn't typically work because there's a lot of elements that go into defining your

00:50:37.160 | everyday experience.

00:50:38.920 | It is unlikely that the pursuit of a specific grand but narrow goal is going to happen to

00:50:46.080 | have the right positive change in all these different aspects of your life, many of which

00:50:50.060 | have nothing to do with professional pursuits.

00:50:53.600 | So I'm a big believer in lifestyle-centric planning.

00:50:56.160 | Why don't you just directly identify, "This is what I want the different aspects of my

00:51:00.280 | life to be like," and then say, "How do I directly engineer my life to get closer

00:51:06.160 | to these things?"

00:51:08.200 | And now it's more like you're moving chess pieces around the chessboard, the chess pieces

00:51:11.960 | here being the particular options you have.

00:51:13.900 | Well, if I go for like this job in this place in this way, these three different things

00:51:20.360 | I can sort of get closer to, and this thing over here I could handle by doing this, it's

00:51:24.240 | just directly getting to the core of the issue, which is what defines the quality of your

00:51:28.360 | life is not what is the top item on your resume or your obituary.

00:51:34.040 | It tends to be what is most days feel like.

00:51:37.560 | Where am I living?

00:51:38.560 | What am I doing?

00:51:39.560 | Who am I around?

00:51:40.560 | What's taking up my time?

00:51:41.560 | What's not taking up my time?

00:51:42.560 | It's the day-to-day lifestyle that determines your subjective well-being.

00:51:44.600 | So why not directly identify and engineer that lifestyle to be what you want, as opposed

00:51:49.120 | to hoping that one big goal, one big swing will somehow fix all these parts of your life

00:51:55.880 | in just some sort of happy coincidence.

00:51:59.200 | That's really my approach towards the deep life lifestyle-centric planning over goal-centric

00:52:02.080 | planning.

00:52:03.080 | All right, so now let's get to the particular question here.

00:52:05.120 | The caller is in high school, about to go to college, and says, "I don't know how to

00:52:08.680 | make these plans yet," to which my answer is, "Yeah, you don't, and that's fine."

00:52:13.280 | The first reasonable lifestyle-centric plan that you should produce will be later in your

00:52:18.360 | college career when you're deciding what to do right out of college.

00:52:22.920 | So you're going to build your first plan later in your college career to cover through your

00:52:26.840 | mid-20s.

00:52:28.400 | Expect to revise that plan after a few years out of college and in the real world, and

00:52:33.080 | then you'll be able to revise that plan to cover all of your time through your 20s and

00:52:36.720 | set you up for interesting options in your 30s, but not be too specific.

00:52:40.400 | As you approach your 30s, you're going to revise this plan again.

00:52:42.640 | So you revise these plans a lot.

00:52:44.960 | You are too young to have your first plan.

00:52:47.100 | So what is your goal for college?

00:52:49.000 | It's going to be gathering enough raw material to build your first plan later in your college

00:52:55.920 | years.

00:52:56.920 | Some of this is going to come from just you getting older and being in an environment

00:53:02.080 | where you have more autonomy that you can just reflect and figure out yourself and your

00:53:06.160 | identity.

00:53:07.160 | You're going to be learning things about yourself and about the world, and you can build your

00:53:10.320 | sort of first draft of your adult identity, which will help you identify your first lifestyle-centric

00:53:14.400 | plan.

00:53:15.440 | It's also where you're going to be able to expose yourself to new fields.

00:53:19.480 | You're going to gain a lot of information about what people do.

00:53:23.320 | This person graduated, they went to this job.

00:53:26.200 | You're just going to learn a lot about yourself and about the world that will help you make

00:53:29.880 | your first plan later in your college career.

00:53:32.520 | So you're off the hook having to have a vision right now.

00:53:37.180 | So then how do you select a college?

00:53:41.160 | Lower the stakes in your mind.

00:53:45.080 | You're not selecting a college right now as a key.

00:53:49.480 | This college has to be just right, otherwise my plan for a good life won't happen and I'll

00:53:53.080 | be miserable.

00:53:54.080 | Lower those stakes.

00:53:56.440 | You know, go to probably like the best school that is reasonable for you to go to, like

00:54:02.720 | the best school I can get into and we can afford.

00:54:05.240 | Like you're never going to go wrong with that.

00:54:06.360 | I want to be around interesting people, think about interesting things, and have access

00:54:10.200 | to as many opportunities as possible so that when it comes time to determine my first lifestyle-centric

00:54:15.040 | plan and start making some decisions for life after college, I'm going to have as many interesting

00:54:18.280 | opportunities as possible.

00:54:19.400 | So it's like go to the best school that you can afford is not bad advice.

00:54:25.280 | For a lot of people that means like, let me aim, because colleges get expensive, folks.

00:54:29.640 | It might mean like, let me aim for like, I have a good state university in my state,

00:54:34.080 | unless like things are my academic, whatever's going well enough that I can maybe get access

00:54:38.080 | to like a pretty elite school, we can figure out a way to make that work and maybe that's

00:54:41.880 | worth it.

00:54:42.880 | If you're a, look, if you have a very specific skill set or interest, there's also some matches

00:54:48.560 | that happen here.

00:54:49.560 | I mean, if you're really into math, if you're really like into science and math and are

00:54:54.400 | really good at it and it turns you on and you're like bored, then like a school like

00:54:59.240 | MIT is going to give you an experience you're not going to get elsewhere.

00:55:01.860 | If you're really into government, like for whatever reason, you're young Bill Clinton,

00:55:06.960 | think about Georgetown.

00:55:08.040 | Right.

00:55:09.040 | I mean, there's classes here that we teach at our campus downtown where the class walks

00:55:16.040 | to the Capitol to sit in on hearings as part of the class, right?

00:55:19.300 | So you know, you're, we have a longtime listener who's a French horn player, shout out with

00:55:24.640 | a Juilliard because, okay, that makes sense.

00:55:26.640 | But if you don't, it's not like I need this very specific thing, go to the best school

00:55:32.060 | you can that makes sense.

00:55:33.060 | You want to be around the best people you can have access to the best opportunities

00:55:36.560 | you can.

00:55:37.860 | Mix the raw materials, gather, gather, gather, and then we'll make our first plan as we get

00:55:43.060 | near the end of college.

00:55:44.640 | Let me point you towards a couple of things to help you get through that college experience.

00:55:47.760 | Then I want to point you towards my, my newsletter, my early days of my newsletter where I was

00:55:52.360 | mainly addressing or as mainly addressing college students, go to cal newport.com/blog, go to

00:55:57.880 | the archive, go back to 2007, 2008, read my post on this in valedictorian, read my post

00:56:04.600 | on the romantic scholar.

00:56:05.600 | I'm going to lay out there a, a mindset and framework for going through your undergraduate

00:56:11.520 | years in a way that you're exposed to lots of interesting things.

00:56:15.000 | You open up lots of potential, interesting opportunities, but you also have a sustainable,

00:56:21.440 | meaningful experience, intellectual, social experience on campus that's really, that you

00:56:25.840 | really enjoy, that you get to know yourself that is fulfilling.

00:56:30.600 | So you can get some advice there about how to navigate these years.

00:56:33.040 | You can gather raw material, get to know yourself, really love your time at college, have cool

00:56:36.440 | opportunities, get all those things done.

00:56:38.400 | What I hate to see, for example, is when people see college as like a bootcamp.

00:56:41.920 | Yeah, man, I got to grind through this thing because that's, what's going to open up the

00:56:46.160 | whatever job I really, the really elite job.

00:56:49.360 | And so I'm going to suffer through college so I can get that job and then I'll get the

00:56:52.880 | benefit.

00:56:53.880 | Of course, you go to the first few years of that job, like, well, this really sucks, but

00:56:57.120 | that's okay.

00:56:58.120 | If I could just suffer through this, I'll get the managing director and then I'll get

00:57:01.200 | the benefit.

00:57:02.200 | Well, then you get to that, you're like, well, this is, you know, I want to get partner.

00:57:04.560 | And so now I really got to suffer through, it never ends.

00:57:08.000 | Don't have the mindset of, I want to suffer through so that the benefit comes.

00:57:10.640 | So, you know, check those things out to help guide you.

00:57:12.840 | Romantic Scholars and Valedictorian to help guide you through college, go to the best

00:57:16.280 | school you can, that makes sense, the best school that makes sense for you, that you

00:57:20.640 | can gather the raw material, learn how to your adult identity and how to get interested

00:57:26.520 | in things and be an autonomous human.

00:57:29.760 | And then we'll make our first lifestyle plan as that gets a little bit farther along.

00:57:33.520 | I'm thinking about a lot more of this now, Jesse, because I'm, you know, I'm in the early

00:57:36.320 | stages of my deep life book.

00:57:38.360 | And so I'm starting to think through more, how to more clearly articulate like what the

00:57:42.560 | deep life is, this idea that emerged during the pandemic here on this podcast and the

00:57:46.240 | newsletter and how to actually pursue it.

00:57:49.720 | I'm really leaning into now just the idea of just being practical.

00:57:52.600 | Like it's just, if we put aside the what of your definition of a deep life and just get

00:57:59.200 | to the how of like, how does someone figure out what's important to them and then make

00:58:02.760 | that actually happen?

00:58:04.840 | So take out the specificity of like, these are the things that should matter to you.

00:58:10.380 | And more about, here's how you find out what matters to you.

00:58:12.600 | And then here's how you much more systematically get more of this in your life.

00:58:16.240 | It's not going to be one bold goal.

00:58:17.720 | It's going to be this sort of lifestyle centric planning that we talked about on the show.

00:58:20.760 | And like, I'm really trying to work that out.

00:58:22.240 | Have you been taking walks with a single purpose notebook?

00:58:25.560 | I filled one.

00:58:26.560 | Yeah, so I have to open up another one.

00:58:29.800 | I spent like a month, the last month of my book tour, just working on these ideas in

00:58:35.640 | a single purpose notebook.

00:58:37.960 | And then recently, I finally, I filled a feels note and I finally kind of cracked like, okay,

00:58:45.280 | I see a structure for this book I'd be happy with.

00:58:48.240 | And I recently then moved that all into Scrivener.

00:58:50.840 | So now there's a Scrivener project for the book where I can start gathering sources for

00:58:54.440 | the chapters and it's moved out of my notebooks into like my more formal professional system.

00:58:59.760 | Now that the project's unfolding, and it's going to generate a huge amount more of ideas

00:59:03.680 | and sources, it's moved from my single purpose notebook and into Scrivener.

00:59:07.800 | For those that are new to the show, we had an episode on single purpose notebooks like

00:59:11.880 | 10 episodes ago.

00:59:13.080 | Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:59:14.080 | Definitely check that out.

00:59:15.080 | It's on the YouTube channel as well.

00:59:16.320 | All right, let's do a quick case study before we get to the final segment.

00:59:20.520 | Case studies where people send in a report of using some of the things we talked about

00:59:24.880 | on the show in their own life.

00:59:26.960 | So we can see what these things look like in actual people's lives.

00:59:31.160 | So this one comes from Valerie who says, "I've been tweaking CALS practices to my personal

00:59:39.320 | life as a retiree.

00:59:41.640 | I love adapting CALS practices to the range of activities I undertake in my life, voluntary

00:59:47.080 | work, life management, deepening hobbies, and interest.

00:59:51.480 | Today I had some fun thinking about how I had used a range of CALISMS to a long-winded

01:00:00.440 | but important task.

01:00:02.880 | In my new time block planner, I have decided to have themes for a morning's tasks to avoid

01:00:09.080 | context switching.

01:00:10.720 | And today my theme was health.

01:00:12.720 | Specifically, I dealt with three things relating to a long-term mobility issue.

01:00:18.240 | Number one, a concentrated period dedicated to making a query about my medical insurance

01:00:23.760 | and its coverage.

01:00:25.240 | Two, tackling a related subject because my brain was in the zone, which was investigating

01:00:31.720 | ordering some orthotic shoes online.

01:00:35.160 | And three, and one I'm very proud of, searching for and finding appropriate YouTube videos

01:00:40.580 | to learn more about chair-based yoga.

01:00:45.120 | Much of this got done as a result of deciding an overall context.

01:00:49.760 | Apologies for the detail, but it amused me to see how over the years of listening to

01:00:53.000 | CAL, various elements of practice have become a way of life.

01:00:56.520 | And having written this email, I've included another element, reflection for future learning,

01:01:01.080 | which I got from your episode with Dave Epstein.

01:01:03.840 | So many things and can't wait for the next episode."

01:01:05.640 | I said, "Valerie, I appreciate that case study.

01:01:09.620 | The thing I want to underscore from that for everyone else is the appreciation of the cost

01:01:14.300 | of context switching.

01:01:16.540 | We get into this a lot, but it's really hard for the human brain to switch its context

01:01:21.980 | rapidly between different things.

01:01:23.460 | This is why just going through an email inbox in order is very tiring because you have an

01:01:28.860 | email about your kid's camp and the next email is about an unrelated event and the next email

01:01:33.340 | is about your car needs to be taken in to get its registration renewed.

01:01:37.160 | Each one of these emails triggers a cognitive crisis in your brain trying, 'Oh my God, what's

01:01:42.500 | this about?

01:01:43.500 | What do we know about this?

01:01:44.500 | Let me shut down these neural networks and turn on these other neural networks.'

01:01:47.340 | We kind of force our way through and move on to the next context before we ever fully

01:01:51.420 | switch there.

01:01:52.420 | It's very tiring."

01:01:53.420 | So if you can put a lot of tasks that share the same cognitive context together, it feels

01:01:58.100 | less difficult.

01:02:00.680 | It's because of the way our brain works.

01:02:02.720 | And that's what Valerie did.

01:02:04.440 | These are tasks that are annoying, but if you put them all together, she kind of got

01:02:08.440 | into the zone because she's like, "I'm in my personal health kind of logistical mode."

01:02:13.060 | She picked up Steam and got through a lot of these, including stuff that was optional

01:02:16.340 | that she otherwise wouldn't have done, like finally learning about chair-based yoga.

01:02:19.580 | It's a great idea.

01:02:21.240 | You can do this in your personal life.

01:02:22.500 | You can do this in a professional life.

01:02:24.060 | Type together tasks of the same type.

01:02:26.420 | You should even do this when answering emails.

01:02:30.800 | Have a label in Gmail for temporary inbox and go select a bunch of emails that are all

01:02:37.120 | the same context.

01:02:38.400 | It's all about the same project or it's all about your kid's school.

01:02:42.440 | And then just label those and show only those on your screen and answer those one by one

01:02:46.860 | by one.

01:02:48.340 | You get one or two emails in, you're like, "I'm in the zone," because your brain loads

01:02:51.580 | the context once and uses it again and again.

01:02:53.560 | And then go find another group of emails that are another context.

01:02:56.840 | Go through those.

01:02:57.840 | This is going to feel much better and you're going to get better results than trying to

01:03:03.440 | take all these emails and interleave them together.

01:03:05.280 | So I love the idea of, I call it monotasking, but working on the same context as long as

01:03:10.040 | you can, even when dealing with small things.

01:03:12.800 | And also, I appreciate the mention of the Dave Epstein episode.

01:03:15.960 | That's another sort of secret fan favorite.

01:03:17.720 | Dave is great.

01:03:18.720 | He's got the best ideas, I think.

01:03:21.320 | So check that out.

01:03:22.320 | That's, God, I don't, that's, it feels like it was recently.

01:03:25.040 | It was not.

01:03:26.040 | Yeah.

01:03:27.040 | It's been a little while, right?

01:03:28.040 | It's probably.

01:03:29.040 | I'll look it up.

01:03:30.040 | Yeah.

01:03:31.040 | Anyways, worth checking out.

01:03:32.040 | All right.

01:03:33.040 | We've got a final segment coming up, sort of like profiles and slowness, which I'm looking

01:03:35.960 | forward to.

01:03:37.240 | But first let's take a brief break to hear from another sponsor.

01:03:40.840 | I want to talk in particular about our longtime friends at ExpressVPN.

01:03:46.520 | Look, if you use the internet, you need a VPN.

01:03:51.400 | Here's why.

01:03:52.900 | When you access a site or service, you might be encrypting like the contents of your message,

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01:04:03.040 | So if you're using a wireless access point out somewhere in public, people can look at

01:04:07.960 | what you're sending on the airwaves and see exactly what site and service you're talking

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01:04:17.760 | what sites and services you're talking to, they can gather that data.

01:04:21.420 | They can sell that data.

01:04:22.940 | They do gather that data.

01:04:24.400 | They do sell that data.

01:04:26.160 | Going into private mode in your browser does nothing about that.

01:04:30.440 | You're still sending packets that have the address of the site and service you're using.

01:04:34.920 | Anyone who's interested can see it.

01:04:36.440 | A VPN solves that problem.

01:04:38.620 | With a VPN, you do the following.

01:04:40.240 | You say, "Okay, if I want to access this site, right?

01:04:42.920 | I want to access calnewport.com, and I'm going to Google the word 'Calism.'

01:04:49.120 | There's a new website, calism.com, and I'm kind of embarrassed to go there."

01:04:52.640 | If they use a VPN, what happens?

01:04:54.280 | Instead of contacting that site directly, you send an encrypted message to a VPN server.

01:04:59.200 | Inside that encrypted message, you say, "What I really want to do is go to the Calism website."

01:05:04.440 | The VPN server contacts that site on your behalf, gets the response, encrypts it, and

01:05:09.560 | sends that back to you.

01:05:11.000 | So what does people near you, looking at your packets in the air, your internet service

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01:05:20.080 | They have no idea what sites and services you're actually using.

01:05:22.600 | So you need to use a VPN to protect your privacy online.

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01:06:27.840 | I also want to briefly talk about our friends at MyBodyTutor, T-U-T-O-R.

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01:06:40.440 | makes so much sense.

01:06:41.440 | If you want to get healthier, the hard part is not necessarily getting the information,

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01:06:49.120 | It's the consistency.

01:06:50.120 | Actually following the advice.

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01:07:08.360 | Here's how I went with my exercise.

01:07:09.520 | So you get the consistency of knowing someone, you're being held accountable.

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01:07:19.680 | And that sense of accountability means you're much more likely to be consistent.

01:07:23.040 | They can also help you adjust and correct as needed.

01:07:26.320 | This isn't quite working.

01:07:27.320 | Let's make a change.

01:07:28.320 | I have a trip coming up.

01:07:29.320 | What should I do?

01:07:30.320 | And you have that coaching, but because it's 100% online, it's going to be much cheaper

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01:08:20.680 | All right, Jesse, let's do our final segment.

01:08:25.760 | I want to react to something I found online that I just thought was cool.

01:08:30.160 | It's a demonstration of slowness in practice.

01:08:34.320 | You know, that's why I'm calling it kind of a case study in slowness.

01:08:37.040 | All right, I'm going to load this on the screen.

01:08:39.480 | Definitely if you're listening, if you want to see this, the link is in the show notes,

01:08:42.840 | but also this is episode 300.

01:08:44.920 | Just go to TheDeepLife.com/listen.

01:08:47.200 | Go to that episode.

01:08:48.200 | We'll post a video below.

01:08:49.200 | All right, so what this is, it's a website called A Portrait of Tanakda Tillan.

01:08:55.680 | I'm not saying that quite right, but the original name for Mexico City, Tanakda Tillan.

01:09:02.040 | Now you see this picture on here, Jesse, it looks like a photograph of a city.

01:09:07.480 | What this is, is an entirely computer generated, meticulously researched computer generated

01:09:15.200 | image of this city circa 1518.

01:09:21.400 | So this Thomas, I believe his name is Thomas Cole, he's a programmer from the Netherlands,

01:09:28.240 | just took on this project.

01:09:29.320 | He's like, what did Mexico City, when it was before the Colombian contact, what, when it

01:09:37.960 | was still, let's see, an empire ruling over more than 5 million people with 200,000 people

01:09:43.000 | in the city alone, this old Aztecs capital, what did it look like back then?

01:09:48.800 | And he began this long, slow process.

01:09:51.400 | Here's more.

01:09:52.400 | Look at that.

01:09:53.400 | That's computer generated, Jesse.

01:09:54.400 | That's great.

01:09:55.400 | See that?

01:09:56.400 | The temples, the causeway across the lake.

01:09:57.880 | And he spent about a year and a half just slowly learning about this, learning all the

01:10:03.200 | tools he used to build this were open source, just using free software, just slowly learning.

01:10:11.160 | There's another rendering and just sort of meticulously working on this because he just

01:10:14.960 | thought like it would be cool to just, what would it look like to go back in a time machine?

01:10:19.880 | Another picture here.

01:10:20.880 | Look at this.

01:10:21.880 | Here it is.

01:10:22.880 | The main temple at sunset, the twin pyramids.

01:10:28.360 | These pictures are cool.

01:10:29.360 | They're beautiful.

01:10:30.360 | Here's another one.

01:10:31.360 | So you can see like the main temple and the lake.

01:10:32.840 | And this is like what this, this is accurate stuff as well.

01:10:36.600 | So archeologists, people who work on this have commented on this project and said, this

01:10:40.440 | is really cool.

01:10:41.440 | I have a couple of quotes from Thomas here.

01:10:44.880 | Let's see here.

01:10:45.880 | Here's a quote from him.

01:10:46.880 | The really hard part was gathering all the information, then trying things out.

01:10:49.960 | How do you create a city when you don't really know anything about it?

01:10:52.760 | How do you start gathering that information?

01:10:54.480 | That was really difficult and involved throwing out a lot of things when I found different

01:10:58.080 | sources with conflicting information.

01:11:00.240 | That's part of being a pioneer venturing into the unknown, into what no one has done before.

01:11:04.560 | But also that's very difficult because it takes a lot of time.

01:11:07.120 | Also I don't speak Spanish and I'm not an academic.

01:11:09.040 | So I really approached this as an outsider.

01:11:12.400 | It's a rainstorm coming across the city.

01:11:17.120 | Another cool shot.

01:11:18.120 | All this done with free software too.

01:11:20.400 | Here you do these comparison shots where you can see same angle before and after.

01:11:27.760 | So this Mexico City today, the Aztec capital in the 1500s, what I liked about this, and

01:11:36.600 | this one's cool, the new fire ceremony.

01:11:39.040 | So the Aztec calendar is on a 52-year cycle.

01:11:42.440 | They would do this ceremony every 52 years to begin the new cycle.

01:11:46.360 | It's beautiful renders, historically well done.

01:11:50.040 | He got a lot of appreciation for this from people who studied this Aztec history.

01:11:55.840 | But this is a profile of slowness.

01:11:57.680 | It's something he thought would be worthwhile and interesting, and he just took his time

01:12:02.440 | to do it well.

01:12:03.440 | He did it on the side.

01:12:04.600 | It's not a business.

01:12:05.600 | He's not trying to crush it, not trying to hustle, not trying to build up followers.

01:12:10.360 | Just worked on this slowly, built up something that was beautiful and cool that he really

01:12:14.240 | liked and other people really liked as well.

01:12:16.720 | It took him almost two years.

01:12:19.800 | Slow productivity right there.

01:12:21.840 | There's no hustling here.

01:12:23.640 | There's no complicated organizational systems.

01:12:26.880 | He just took his time to produce something cool.

01:12:29.680 | He's pretty happy it's done, but that was probably also a really fulfilling two years

01:12:33.440 | just sitting there and working on this and making progress and seeing this thing that

01:12:37.160 | was important to you come to light.

01:12:38.640 | So anyways, I just wanted to show this because I love this type of thing.

01:12:41.840 | The slow pursuit of something cool can be just as rewarding as the fast pursuit of attention

01:12:48.120 | or clout or shallow achievement.

01:12:51.840 | Sometimes just taking your time to do something that feels worth doing can be one of the more

01:12:56.320 | fulfilling things.

01:12:57.320 | So we've got a case study here of a deep life intersecting with slow productivity, hitting

01:13:01.720 | all the buzzwords.

01:13:02.720 | He's probably used a lot of deep work to do this and he's a digital minimalist and got

01:13:05.960 | some career capital out of this as well.

01:13:08.040 | So Thomas, you've hit the bingo card, the Cal Newport bingo card, but well done with

01:13:13.560 | this project.

01:13:14.560 | I love this type of thing.

01:13:15.560 | I bet when my kids get older, I need to do something like this, I think.

01:13:22.520 | But for me, it's going to be-

01:13:25.000 | Richmond?

01:13:26.000 | Over the top.

01:13:27.000 | No, it's going to be over the top Halloween animatronics.

01:13:29.160 | It's going to be to the point where people are a little bit worried about me.

01:13:33.880 | That's going to be my version of this project, is over the top Halloween animatronics.

01:13:38.760 | But there's just something.

01:13:39.760 | I'm just working on this slowly for no other reason than I want to see my intentions being

01:13:42.920 | manifest concretely in the world.

01:13:45.100 | It's a cool way to do things.

01:13:46.100 | Anyways, Thomas, thanks for sharing that.

01:13:47.640 | Links in the show notes.

01:13:48.840 | That's all the time we have.

01:13:50.840 | Next week, I'm going to be in England.

01:13:52.680 | So you'll see I'm going to be playing an interview of an interview episode.

01:13:57.640 | It's actually me being interviewed.

01:13:59.120 | I think you'll like it.

01:14:00.120 | And then after that, we'll be back with another standard episode of the podcast.

01:14:03.520 | So see you in two weeks.

01:14:05.340 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:14:08.040 | Hey, so if you like today's discussion of the way technology is hurting the professional

01:14:13.360 | future of young people, I think you might also like episode 295, which is about artists

01:14:19.520 | who are revolting from social media.

01:14:24.440 | Check it out.

01:14:25.440 | I think you'll like it.

01:14:26.440 | We're going to talk about a quiet revolt against social media that seems to be circulating

01:14:31.120 | mainly among artists.

The Burnout Society: How The Modern World Is Stealing Young Peoples’ Future | Cal Newport

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