Hi, I'm Cal Newport. Of the things I am known for, perhaps the most prominent is the fact that I have never had a social media account. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no TikTok, no Snapchat. Now, as someone who writes about technology and its impact for culture, this has been a really big advantage for me.

It gives me distance from the culture I'm writing about. I can observe with some clarity the impact of these tools on our lives without actually having to be completely overwhelmed by these tools myself. I have become convinced over the years, however, that there are perks to not using social media that are applicable to everyone, not just to people like me who write about technology for a living.

So that's what I wanna talk about in this video, four perks to not using social media. Number one, more boredom. Now, this might be surprising at first, but follow with me here. One of the things that happens when you have these highly addictive applications on your phone is that your phone becomes a default mode of distraction.

At the slightest hint of boredom, you whip this thing out and start scrolling through those social media apps. I can't blame you for doing that. They have been engineered by some of the smartest people in the world to be incredibly compelling. So why sit there in line and just be bored when you can have tens of billions of dollars worth of attention engineering at your service to give you that perfect moment of distraction?

There is, however, a cost to having this perfect, always accessible distraction there in your pocket. That means there is no more boredom in your life. The slightest hint of boredom, you're looking at that phone. This can be a problem. So what happens when you're alone with your own thoughts?

Because you don't use social media, so there is nothing on that phone that's all that interesting to look at. It's a situation I find myself in all the time. You're now left to just think about the world around you, what's going on in your head. That might sound scary at first, but it's actually critical to your development as a human.

It is when you are alone with your own thoughts in the state that is known as solitude, that you can actually take those experiences you're having in your life and fit them into a framework, a common framework by which you understand your experience. It's where you can reflect on yourself, what's going well, what's not going well, what's resonating with you, what you're worried about in your life, and make progress in your identity, in your self-definition.

It is in this time alone with our mind that we evolve as humans. And if you rob yourself of that solitude by always looking at that shiny, highly distracting treat sitting there in your pocket represented by the apps on that phone, you miss out on that solitude. The other advantage of the boredom you will encounter not having these apps on your phone is that it will push you to do higher quality leisure activities.

You're sitting there, it's the afternoon, you don't have anything to look at, you don't have anything to watch. This might drive you to read, the exercise to pick up that new hobby, to go for the walk, to go join some sort of organization and club. Boredom is a very useful instinct.

Typically when it comes to human nature, whenever there's a very strong or disagreeable feeling that is pushing us to do something that is important to us, we feel hunger, it feels terrible. Why? Because it's important that we eat. So what is boredom, which feels very bad, pushing us to do productive activity?

The phone interrupts that push, the productive activity. It short circuits that instinct and gets you just looking at that glowing piece of glass. But without the phone there, you can actually feel through that boredom instinct to go do things that are actually productive, stuff that's good for you, for your soul, for your family, for your community.

Your leisure will get better when you can't default to the quick fix of tapping on social media. So more productive boredom, that is one of the perks of not using social media. Another one, lower anxiety. Your world is what you pay attention to. There's way more information out there possible to consume than you can ever possibly actually take in.

So your mind looks at what you have consumes and tries to construct an understanding of the world around you, not just a physical or visual understanding, but also an emotional understanding of the world as well. If you are living in the world of social media, especially on a highly combative platform like Twitter, the image of the world that your mind will construct is one of terrifying, almost unbearable strife.

It is a world in which villains ride freely through the virtual town square and the townspeople fire at them with their revolvers. People dropping dead from this metaphorical virtual saloon window. It is a scary world. This is an upsetting world. It is a world of outrage. It is a world in which people are castigated at a moment's notice and criminals must be rooted out.

It is not a happy world. Have you ever met, for example, a frequent Twitter user who was happy? No, why? Because the world that exposes your mind to is not a nice one. So if you spend a lot of time on social media, you're gonna be living in a world of your own construction that is not going to be an environment to thrive.

Now you might say, "Well, why don't I avoid Twitter? I'll go, I'm over on Instagram. I don't wanna see the political stuff. I don't wanna see the fighting." Well, what are you gonna get on Instagram? Highly curated portrayals of people's lives. Everyone's happy. Everyone's in great shape. Everyone is doing more interesting things to you.

That's a world where you feel inferior. The worlds created, again, when you're marinating yourself in these social media worlds are not good ones. So you're gonna be more anxious. You're gonna be less happy. When you don't have social media on your phone, when you don't have it on your computer, when you do not expose yourself to that weird, unnatural, highly curated, algorithmically optimized type of information, the world you see is actually much more the world around you.

Your friends, the people in town, what you're reading in books, what you hear on the radio, what you saw on your walk home. It is a world that is calibrated to the human mind. It's the experience that we actually are expecting. It's a calmer world. It's a less anxiety producing world.

It's a slower world. And all of that is much better. All of that is much more sustainable. That's the second perk. Third perk, privacy. If you're on these platforms all the time, you have to be generating content all the time. This content is going to reveal over time more than you probably want to actually reveal.

It is a very unsettling position to be in as a human to know that there is an amorphous large crowd of people you mainly don't know who know a lot about you. And you don't even know how much it is that they know about you. It's very unsettling. If I was on social media as an author, if I had to be tweeting and doing Instagram and doing these types of things all the time, every day, post, post, post, post, post, I would end up revealing a lot more about myself than I want people to know.

I'm actually a very private person. Yes, it sounds paradoxical because I'm in the public eye a lot. You're watching me on a video. You may have seen me on TV. You may have seen me on other people's podcasts or radio shows, but that is a very controlled environment. This is me sitting down and maybe producing one video that I want you to see that I spent just today working on.

That's much different than having to throughout the day be, what do I think about this? What do I think about that? Giving takes on things, reacting to things, having back and forth conversations. That reveals too much. Happy to go on a radio show, happy to write an article and put it out there.

Happy to think through a video and have notes on it and record that, fine. But if I have to go back and forth all day, give my reaction on everything, I'm gonna reveal too much. And I don't wanna give up that much of myself. And you shouldn't either. It is not natural.

Human beings are wired to have relatively tight-knit communities where people know them well, through bounds of family or other types of community connection. You trust each other. They have your back. You have their back. They see your bad. They see your good. They see you at your best. They see you at your worst, but everyone trusts each other.

Everyone's willing to sacrifice on behalf of each other in these small, close-knit communities. That is the socialization we're wired for. Not there's 10,000 amorphous people here looking at my back and forth conversations on Twitter trying to figure out when to pounce. So we do not need to be that open to that many people.

It doesn't match our wiring. It can make us pretty unsettled. So you don't use social media, you don't have to worry about that. All right, number four, the fourth perk of not using social media, lower your sense of self-importance. This is one of the insidious side effects of social media is the degree to which it makes you feel as if at all times there is this vast audience that really cares what you have to say.

And you get this because of the little metrics. You get the little thumbs up, you get the little hearts, there's little numbers on next to it that begin to tabulate up. This was retweeted. This was liked. This was shared. Some of these platforms will even do this in a blatantly manipulative manner.

TikTok is known for example, to take your videos occasionally and show them to a much larger audience than normal just so you get that intermittently reinforcing burst of, woo, a lot of people like this one. So that you're gonna keep pulling that slot machine lever again to hopefully get that next burst before.

All of this gives you a sense of everyone cares what I have to say. It inflates your ego. It leads you to entrench, to glom on to weird ideas or conspiratorial thinking to begin to other the people who disagree with you or in the other tribe. You feel like you are at the center of some sort of apocalyptic life and death battle.

All of this is the human psyche being manipulated by these services. It is not good for us to be given daily this sense, this inflated sense of self-importance. You know, back when I wrote my book, "Deep Work", I had this advice that I gave to people who were active on social media.

I said, "Step away for 30 days, but here's the key caveat, don't tell anybody. Step away from 30 days, don't tell anybody and see if anyone notices." And a lot of people wrote back to me after that book came out and said, "That was momentarily devastating because I realized in my mind, 'cause I see all these thumbs up, I see all these numbers, all these likes, all these retweets, I thought that there was this vast audience that was waiting with bated breath for my next missive.

When I stopped posting for a month, no one noticed. No one said anything, no one cared because the platforms create the illusion of influence, the illusion of importance, and we should not be bathing in that context. Again, it pushes us to weird places. It's better for our sense of importance to come from the actual things we're doing in the real world with flesh and blood other humans.

I have the respect of this person because over time I had been there when they needed me. I have the respect of these people over here because they've seen my work, they respect it, they've read it, I've talked to them, I know them well. I have the respect of my family because I've been trying to be a leader, a leader trying to be there for them, sacrifice on behalf of them." You get a calibrated sense of importance which pushes you to actually do things of real importance to live a more sustainable, deeper life.

All of that, again, gets subverted and short-circuited when you allow these little manipulated metrics, these little numbers next to icons on an app on your phone, tell you whether you're influential or not, tell you whether you're important or not. You don't want that inflated sense of importance. You want a real sense of importance made from doing real things on behalf of real people that really matters.

All right, so those are my four perks that I think almost anyone will benefit if they do not use social media, or at the very least, significantly reduce their footprint on those platforms. So just to review what we have here, you will be bored more often, but that boredom will lead to good things.

Your anxiety will be lower because the world constructed by your mind is constructed from what you pay attention to. If you're paying attention to social media, that is gonna be a grim, unsettling world. You will have more privacy. Human beings are not wired to have amorphous large crowds of strangers watching you react to news and have interactions back and forth with other heated strangers.

And finally, it will lower your sense of self-importance. It will push you to seek sense of importance in real ways and tangible ways, and that's ultimately better for you. It's better for your family. It's better for your community. So if like a lot of people, you're not super happy about what's happening on social media, if you're not super happy about the influence that social media is having on your life, if you're thinking about stepping away, let me tell you as someone who has done this, it's worth it.

If you don't like what's going on there, go. The benefits of leaving might be much bigger than you at first guess. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)