are you tired of of doom scrolling are you tired of social media taking up more and more of your mental space and making your life somehow more constrained and somehow like less less alive or vibrant well back in 2024 i recorded a podcast episode that was exactly about how to free yourself from the situation i gave step-by-step advice for what i called decluttering your life today anyways it was really popular it's one of the more popular episodes i've aired but what i want to play for you now is like the core clip from that episode because i think this advice is just as useful right now as it was back then check this out i think it's going to really make a difference for you so one of the things i'm most known for is the fact that i have never used social media my 2016 ted talk which is titled quit social media just past the 10 million view mark my 2019 book digital minimalism has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in recent years i've been extensively covering the social media industry from a critical perspective for the new yorker so this is something that i am deeply associated with it occurred to me recently however um how do i know i'm not missing out on something special what if social media really has evolved into something that is a a true source of value in a way that i am forgetting so i thought today it might be fun if i was to actually live here in the show load up some actual social media apps and see what's going on jesse you can attest i did not look at these in advance so god knows what we're going to find yep but we're going to look into some social media together and then talk about how we might uh repair our relationship with these tools jesse it would be funny if uh when i turn on these tools it turns out that you know i'm in the middle of like a global canceling campaign that i didn't realize that cancel cal is like the number one trending hashtag would be a funny way to figure that out all right let's let's look at some real social media uh for those who are watching at home i'm bringing this up on the screen we're starting with twitter or as the kids call it today x let's see what we can find all right right right off the bat there is a tweet response here so there's a tweet i don't know if you can see this uh there's a tweet first of all that's showing taylor swift hugging travis kelsey after their super bowl win we're recording this a couple days after the super bowl the original tweet says imagine being against this all right but this tweet is being responded to this response says oh lord okay this response from smug fecundity so i'm sure this is going to be very well reasoned and compassionate is the following look i hope everyone finds a wonderful spouse and brings 10 kids into the world and raises them together here's why this falls flat for quote the audience end quote there is no hero's journey no character arc this is a perfect example of potential marriage as the capstone to a perfect life and i'm against this message jesse i don't even know if i know what that means i don't know what that means either okay i smug fecundity is upset that taylor swift is hugging travis kelsey um i wonder if she's whispering into his ears only two receptions for serious yardage come on travis you can do better see that could be on twitter all you got to do is like think of um something mean to say and hope that you get clout for it let me click on something else on here uh hashtag farmers protest all right let's just see what else is going on on twitter um i don't know this is a protest going on in india it looks like and then there's a lot of arguing back and forth about um what's going on so let me read this they're fighting for regime change on behalf opposition parties said the professional protester cheese ver singh uh and here's some video of what looks like tear gas and a crowd there's a drone flight all right look this is i think this is like classic as i would expect this is classic twitter and i don't mean this in a dismissive way because what we're seeing here is both the good and the bad in twitter the bad i think is let's all just take a pop culture event involving people that are impossibly distant from us like super bowl champions and taylor swift and just take turns seeing who can say like the more uh mean thing or smarmy thing and sort of hope we get clout on the other hand we also see twitter highlighting here a protest happening in india that you know maybe you otherwise wouldn't come across it unless you were reading a newspaper all right so there's twitter let's check in on some other social media see what we are missing all right let me load up a browser here we've jumped now on the instagram the gram as i'm told it's uh called um i'm on the page here jesse loaded up is popular hashtag so i don't know if that actually means popular post or posts that just happen to be associated with the word popular um i'm gonna click on one all right i should be nervous jesse if i click on this post is it going to be something let's see it looks harmless it looks like uh a nice couple in their young 30s well dressed with complicated glasses uh arms interlocked so let's click on this post oh i gotta log in oh well this is good this means jesse you don't use instagram all right so we can't actually click on these without logging in so let's just look at them uh that looks nice here's a person with huge muscles in the gym uh looking nice we have people on vacation this is kind of classic instagram looking over a nice swimming pool with cabana so they're probably bragging about their vacation all right so uh here's a football thing all right this is a classic instagram people everyone looks kind of happy everyone looks like they're in good shape everyone is sort of showing off a life that they're want you to think is good all right god help us let's jump over to tick tock all right what am i looking at here it's a person playing a video game all right i mean good i suppose uh oh i see so is it look at this so this is classic tick tock every time i touch the screen it just throws up another video as soon as i get bored all right here's a girl saying how much do i owe you someone else says it's okay it's on the house i don't even know what they are showing probably something inappropriate here's a video game let me swipe again uh i got hired security guard at a pizzeria they're pouring stuff onto avocados they fried an avocado all right fine here is some sort of mashed potato dinosaur volcano my god look at this jesse you just like keep flipping and it's it's here's something ah that's weird okay next uh that's weird okay so there we go we've seen we've checked in on social media in 2024 all right so here's my take look there's nothing intrinsically evil about what i just saw um there's nothing inherently bad about engaging with anything i just saw but i can tell you as an outsider who doesn't use these services who is looking at these with fresh eyes uh guys this stuff is really weird it's really weird looking at what we just saw there uh not in isolation that any one of those things is crazy but that the foundation for a huge portion of our culture the foundation of their engagement with their leisure time is based on these types of interactions that i find to be strange we get used to things once we've been in that world but the outsider perspective here is these these short videos the people uh trying to be smug about celebrities and who can outdo each other this pictures of various people's vacations for this to be the foundation of your engagement with leisure if a time traveler came forward from 2005 and looked at what i just looked at it's not that they would be horrified by the individual things i really do think however they would be somewhat perplexed by the idea that this is the foundation of our culture's engagement with leisure this stuff is okay but it really does not seem like this should be the core of how we engage with the world um outside of our work so if you agree with this what should we do about it if you're like you know what i don't want to oh my god the video now jesse because the tick tock's on my screen here still they're pouring gravy down the mashed potato mountain you see that i'm just just imagine you're the time traveler from 2005 like okay so i'm watching on the music plane is the jurassic world theme song while gravy pours down a shoot carved into a mashed potato mountain covered with chicken nugget dinosaurs the the algonquin algonquin round table this is not all right so we could do better we can we could do better than making this the main thing we're looking at all right so how do we make this better well let me start with the biggest mistake people make when they finally get fed up with uh how much time they're looking at their phone the biggest mistake people make is they go straight to white knuckle abstention you you know what i am fed up with people's comments on taylor swift and dinosaur dinosaur mountains so no more no more phone and i'm going to actually feel righteous by the fact i don't use my phone you know these people because they will tell you immediately that they don't use social media or their phone they will work it into uh every conversation you can be in a building that's on fire and you can say this way this way this is the only staircase that's not engulfed in flames quickly and they'd be like great uh don't worry about this going on instagram i don't check instagram anymore i have an account but i barely and then they catch on fire so you know when people are doing white knuckle abstention because they talk all the time about it that alone doesn't work very well my philosophy of digital minimalism my approach for dealing with these issues argues that these tools push out other things in your life and therefore then feel a void that those things used to fill when you just do white knuckle abstention you are faced with the yawning void of boredom and your own thoughts and anxiety it's very uncomfortable you just sit there like what am i supposed to do you need something to have that smoothing distraction so the first step is not to abstain from your phone the first step is forget your phone do what you want to do on your phone watch your dino mountain gravy videos but start adding at the same time really quality alternatives start adding into your life things that can eventually take the place of just looking at your phone that can eat away at that sensation of boredom and anxiety of being alone with your own thoughts that drives us back to the sucker of low quality distractions so what would these things look like i'm going to give you six different things we'll call this our high quality leisure toolkit six different things that you should probably engage with all of them to some degree in your life in preparation to change in your relationship with your phone one is going to be reading you should read a lot more this could be a mix of things that are just really fun magazine articles or books that are really fun to read as well as things that are smarter a recent episode of this show jesse i don't know if that was 286 maybe i got into how to engage with this higher quality leisure how to learn to engage with harder books so you might want to check out that episode all right second higher quality video media prestige tv movies documentaries this is another piece of this toolkit uh this is content which i'm going to go out on a limb here um and guess that slightly more money and time was invested than in the video of gravy being poured down the mashed potato dinosaur mountain so stuff in which real creative energy and focused effort was placed number three skill based hobby something you're into that requires a skill you can get better at your results get better as that skill improves this creates a feedback loop that our mind really likes that can be more compelling to our mind than low quality distraction hey i'm working on this new project that is more advanced than i've done before i think i might pull it off this is compelling to me compelling enough that these other lower quality distractions aren't so strong in their appeal four have some sort of exercise based hobby some sort of physical fitness where you're trying to build a streak finish a hit some marks in terms of where you want to get in your health some sort of serious engagement with the physical among other things this frees up it frees up your body it releases these chemicals into your mind that makes you less uh gets you out of this torporific state of i'm low energy i want to minimize energy what's the lowest energy thing i can do to engage it puts you more into a state of we're active our muscles are growing our lungs are being used it changes your look outlook at the world number five get involved with communities that meet regularly even if this is just friends that you have a standing we go and see a movie every other week we go to dinner once a month or a bigger uh more organized activity a league or a group that you go to have something that meets regularly that involves other people and six seek out adventures i want to go travel to see the sports team play at the away stadium i want to go to this museum there's a special exhibit that's coming i want to go read by a waterfall that i heard about that takes a two mile hike to get to things that are above and beyond what's easy and a really cool could create a really interesting experience if you have these six things in your life reading high quality tv movies skilled based hobby exercise based hobby regular meeting communities and adventures take some time to add all these into your life now you're going to be in a position where the monopoly that your phone has on your time and attention has dissipated it is now competing against higher quality versions of things that can satisfy the same needs that were driving you to your phone those needs are going to drive you one way or the other but the phone gives you a low fidelity solution to what you crave these high quality leisure activities give you a higher fidelity uh solution and therefore they're going to more be more easily victorious all right so that's step one you put alternatives to your phone in your life before you even worry about your phone habits step two we declutter now this is the core idea from my book digital minimalism i don't believe in detoxing in the sense of take a break and then go back to what you're doing before i believe in decluttering so you step away you take a break as step one of making permanent change so the way this works is that you take 30 days where you are now ready to stop using these optional digital technologies in your life the tick tock the instagram the twitter uh used to the video games youtube you step away from these optional technologies but now you're prepared to do so because you have these six areas of high quality leisure already in your life already rock and rolling just lean heavily into those you're not staring into the void you're not sitting there uh like a detoxing drug addicts shaking like what am i going to do next you're doing other things so you're getting a taste of life without these tools in doing so you can see what you miss you can also figure out what you really care about at the end of the 30 days then you can decide what if anything you want to add back into your digital life to add back a tool it must be really valuable like hey this actually satisfies something that's important to me and two when you add it back you should have clear rules for how and when you're going to use it so maybe twitter comes back into your life because you realized you really do need to keep up with baseball trade rumors that are going on this is really important to you that during the hot stove season you you do really like baseball and it helps you engage to to hear the baseball reporters sharing rumors on uh player trades let's say this is the situation well now that you know this is why you're bringing twitter back into your life you could have clear rules on it all right i check in on these these rumors on uh during lunch break it takes about 20 minutes i don't follow anyone on twitter i just bookmarked the four baseball reporters who i follow two for my team and you know maybe like kent rosenthal and and jay papasan or national reporters have good sources and i look at it on my desktop computer when i'm at work so now i get that value every day i go on and see what's going on but i also don't have twitter with me on my phone and these are part of a much larger timeline that i can check at any time it has endless information i put this tool back into my life for a specific reason with specific rules this is how you reconfigure a digital life that operates on your terms supports what you value and yet minimizes the uh unnecessary negative side effects so none of this is about this technology is good or that technology is bad none of this is about uh you need to live exactly this way versus that way it's about intention but you can't have intention about your digital life until you build a life that's better than what we just saw when we took this quick tour through the state of social media in 2024 again what we just encountered here is fine but also sort of weird and eccentric and idiosyncratic to look at that now and again who cares it's like reading the tabloid in the supermarket checkout line but if i found you reading the national inquire three to four hours a day seven days a week i would say okay buddy i think we need a better hobby and that is implicitly what we've all ended up doing so to fix this relationship with social media and our phones more generally put in place the alternatives that are much better get yourself to the place where your mind is increasingly embarrassed by choosing tick tock over all of these other much richer options and then do your organized declutter if you want to find out more about this my book digital minimalism of course dives into all these details but hopefully i've given you enough there to get you started did you see jesse in the super bowl there was an ad for snapchat i did it was it seemed to me like snapchat was trying to argue uh we're better we don't have some of the same problems as other social media platforms even though snapchat as any social media research will tell you has been at the core for example of the teenage mental health crisis and its intersection with social media is very big among teenagers and snapchat conversations it leads to all sorts of issues i was joking with the person i was with when we're watching the super bowl i was like this is sort of like having a an anti fentanyl ad sponsored by crack remember crack this was better in some sense than it was now with fentanyl that was sort of the sense like with that ad you know like it was hard to get crack so like you know you you want to do as much of it fentanyl is it's an interesting argument hey we're better than the other stuff that's causing damage hey if you like this video i think you'll really like this one as well check it out