Ep. 336: On Screens and Solitude  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 336: On Screens and Solitude - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/f38d1fc0-243a-49eb-a564-d32e895e8d97 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Solitude vs. Loneliness** - The real issue isn't loneliness, but increased solitude. - Solitude leads to a lack of "neededness," a crucial element of social fulfillment. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, so I want to read, I'm going to read a quote from this, but just to set it up, the key idea in this article is Derek notes a lot has been said about the so-called loneliness epidemic. So loneliness is an actual negative subjective state connected to the sense that you are not connected to other people. Derek says this is a bit of a misnomer in the sense that if you look at the data around loneliness in particular, it's not like that is getting a lot worse or that's getting worse in some Sort of pronounced way. He says the real issue is solitude, which he defines his time spent alone. Solitude does not depend on you feeling bad about it. It's just an actual physical state. Let me read you a key quote about this from his article. The privatization of American leisure is one part of a much bigger story. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data going back all the way to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20%, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So the issue is not necessarily that we're lonely, but that we're spending more time alone, and in a lot of cases, we don't mind it. Derek goes on to say, self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America. All right, so there's a lot of problems that Derek surveys in this article that come from this rise in solitude. But there's one point in particular that I want to highlight because I think it's particularly relevant to the modern digital environment. So again, I'm going to quote from the article here. This is Derek talking about one of multiple problems with solitude. Richard V. Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me that for men as for women, something hard to define is lost when we pursue a life of isolationist comforts. He calls it neededness. The way we make ourselves essential to our families and community. I think at some level, we all need to feel like we're a jigsaw piece that's going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere, he said. This neededness can come in several forms, social, economic, or communitarian. Our children and partners can depend on us for care or income. Our colleagues can rely on us to finish a project or to commiserate about an annoying boss. Our religious congregations and weekend poker parties can count us to fill a pew or to bring the dip. All right, so let's talk about this notion of neediness. I think we can kill this here, Jesse. In my book, Digital Minimalism, which actually made a lot of points that I think are being underscored by the experts in this article. I made this related argument where I said, look, when it comes time, when it comes to sociality, what our brain really looks for is us sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on behalf Of someone else. So we have evolved to think about if I am sacrificing non-trivial time and attention, so reproductively relevant, survival relevant resources, on behalf of another person, that Person is someone with whom I have an important connection. We're connected. We are in a community, right? This is an important person to me. So it's sort of measuring how much you sacrifice for someone to measure how important that person actually is in your life. So you can imagine if we're drawing a social graph, so we put points for all the different people around you, like in a tribe back in the Paleolithic period, and you draw a line between People if they are sacrificing non-trivial attention on behalf of each other. And what you would want is your point in the middle of that graph to be densely connected into this web. You have lots of people to whom you're connected to, and a lot of those people are connected to each other as well. So now imagine you're drawing your social life, one of these social graphs today. The problem is, if you're not sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on behalf of someone, you don't get to draw a line. And so we're seeing a lot of people's social graphs are sparse. And if your social graph is sparse, you're not feeling that neededness that Reeves talked about. So I just think this is two sides of the same coin. He talks about neededness. That's a subjective description of what it means to have a connection to an individual community, that they need you. You play an important role. I use sacrifice of non-trivial resources as a sort of quantitative or functional description of what this type of connection means. It's about what are you actually giving up on behalf of another person. So the more of these actual neededness or sacrifice connections you have to other people around you, the more resilient you become, the more fulfilled you become, the more satisfied You become about your life. ([Time 0:04:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/59a5f3c9-579a-4317-bdd0-cf44092dc63e)) - **Technology's Impact on Neededness** - Technology reduces "neededness" by replacing real-world sacrifices with low-friction digital interactions. - These digital interactions don't register as meaningful connections in our brains. Transcript: Cal Newport So why then is this dissolving, as Reeves points out in Derek Thompson's article? Well, I think technology plays a major role in that story of dissolution. And it does so in two major ways that sort of work together into a negative symphony. So the first type of way where the modern digital technology plays a role in this is it leads us away from that type of behavior, that sacrifice of non-trivial time and attention that's Really required to feel connected to someone. Let's think about the ways in which it does this. Digital communication, low friction digital communication, simulates enough of the idea of connecting to another person that it can help stave off loneliness. But it doesn't require sacrifice, so it doesn't give us that neededness that we also crave. I think there's a subtle point that's really important here. It's easy to text message someone that's very low friction. It's easy to jump on someone's social feed, see what they're doing, and leave a comment. It's low risk, low friction. It doesn't take much energy. If you're doing enough of this, you're probably not going to feel lonely because you're interacting with people. Like, I am not alone in this world. There are other people that I am interacting with. But this is so low friction. It's not requiring you to sacrifice any non-trivial time and attention. You're not taking out your afternoon, putting everything aside to go for a walk with a friend to help them figure something out. You're not cooking soup and driving it over to your friend's house because they're sick and giving it to them. You're taking that. You're making that sacrifice to make their life better. You're not doing anything, any significant investment or resources. So the social circuits in your mind don't see these people as being a part of your social graph. So we get this mismatch. I don't have loneliness because I'm simulating these social connections. And without loneliness, what's driving you to sacrifice this time and attention? There's nothing left to drive you. It's comfortable to be at home. You don't feel particularly bad in the moment. Why get off the couch and go for that walk or deliver that soup? This is a point that's emphasized actually in Derek's article, that loneliness serves the purpose of feeling really bad. So to make that bad feeling go away, we get off our butts and go do things for other people and the neededness follows. Social media and digital or in particular digital communication, more generally, short circuits the loneliness loop. And so we feel completely contented to keep sitting there, not really noticing that that actual substantial social graph is quietly beginning to dissipate behind us. Social media itself, if we focus in here more, also plays a role in being led astray from these type of non-trivial sacrifice behaviors because it gives us a sense, if you're a user, that You're a part of a community. Yeah, I'm a community. I have leadership. I'm out there. I'm needed, right? There's my followers need me because, look, I post the things and they give me reactions and it passes around. So again, it short circuits the sort of natural human drive we have to be in community, to be there for our community, to be someone that people look up to and depend on. It kind of simulates that enough that we don't feel bad about ourselves, but those deeper parts of our social circuitry say we're not sacrificing on behalf of a community. We're not really out there doing something that is hard and requiring energy. These aren't real connections. These are Potemkin podiums at which we're making our imagined grand speeches. But it's just an algorithm ginning up some fake response so that we feel important. So again, this is a theme that we see. Video games are doing the same thing, especially for young men. It scratches that itch to be a leader, to stand up and be someone people can count on because your Call of Duty squad is killing a bunch of Nazis. But you're not really. You're deeper down. Your mind knows this isn't real. Where's the actual physical pain or hardship? Where's the time we're actually investing, you know, helping the guy down the street dig, you know, dig his car out after the storm. We're not actually doing this stuff our brain counts. So again, this theme comes back again and again, where the technology scratches the itch that would otherwise drive us to do the stuff that matters just enough we don't do the stuff that Matters. And we have a disconnect between one part of our brain is happy with the simulated sociality, but the other part of our brain is not. And we don't have that neededness because we know deep down our Call of Duty squad and our social media followers don't really need us. ([Time 0:09:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d04fcab1-4307-4f21-aeb0-ad12c0066e40)) - **Reconnecting With Others** - Combat solitude by directly increasing non-trivial sacrifices for others. - This reactivates social circuits, reducing technology's appeal. Transcript: Cal Newport Once we know what's going on here, the solutions are obvious. We got to add back more links to that sacrifice social graph. That's it. We got to add back more links. Now that we know that's the problem, that those are being taken out because of technology, we need to add those back in. And we could be indirect about this, and I think this is the problem. It's too often what happens in these discussions is we say, well, maybe we need to think about how to get rid of the forces that are causing this problem in the first place. And we have to completely reform both our relationship and our cultural relationship with technology and work so that we can finally have the time and drive to get back to building social Lives in a way that we're more used to doing it. Or we could just say, I'm just going to go add links directly. We'll figure that out on the way. I just want to go sacrifice non-trivial time and attention on behalf of people I care about. Let me just go do that. Just do that first. Let's just directly add the lines back. And then we can figure out how to fix the bigger problem and fix our culture and get utopia. So it's not a hard thing to understand that we need to do. Spend more time actually doing things for other people. That's what we need to do. How many people like in the last month have you like gone out of your way to really be there for them or to sacrifice on behalf of them? Like if you have a family, you've probably done it for your kids, maybe for one friend or another, but this should actually be something I'm doing multiple times a week. You start adding those lines back in your graph. You could even draw one of these things. Here's a dot for like all the people I really know well. And each month, I'm going to draw a line if I do at least one non-trivial sacrifice on their behalf. And each month, like how thick can I get this graph to look? How many points on this star can I actually create if I'm at the center and they're around the periphery? Not a bad exercise to actually do. Now, here's the good news. If you go right to that solution, what are you going to find? Well, you're going to find something getting reactivated within you. And suddenly that drive to be on the devices so much goes down because this is better. We're on our devices a lot because we were missing this. We're on our devices a lot because we're convincing ourselves this counts as sociality. But when we get re-exposed to the real thing, suddenly this other stuff, this digital simulation comes across as sort of trivial or a low-resolution simulation. It's no longer as appealing. As we get used to sacrificing other people, we say, that's important. Now, I'm not going to do email all evening. We'll have to just figure that out. I'll have to figure out another approach to my work, either grow some confidence or change some systems, or this is just what it's going to have to be. It pushes back on the digital. So the digital pushed us into this problem. Sure. But instead of trying to fix our digital life first, just go right back and fix this social problem. And actually the digital itself will suddenly seem less urgent. So I think that's the good news in this, because really, you know, what we do on the show is like, we're often navigating the perils of the modern digital environment, figuring out what Are causing the disorders and mismatches of this and then trying to figure out how to actually solve it. This is one of the biggest perils right now, this lack of neededness caused by the sparsification of the sacrifice social graph. And no, Jesse, I don't like to create alliterative unnecessarily technical terms. That's just how normal people talk. Let's just be clear about that. Sparsification of the sacrifice-driven sociality graph. That's how normal people talk, Moms and Bionds. This is, I think, one of the big problems of culture right now. Technology got us there. Technology is keeping us there. But going back to our roots as a social being suddenly makes technology's role in this seem more glaring and hard to miss, and therefore the role that technology plays in our lives begins To reduce a little bit. ([Time 0:16:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4b7841e6-c886-4a2c-abbd-d075769e5fc4)) - **Balancing Work and Study** - Accept the difficulty of studying after long work hours. - Explore options like improving energy, study habits, or adjusting work temporarily. Transcript: Jesse Is from Kay. I'm a medical doctor switching specialties. This requires I study for entrance exams. I time block my nights for studying after my eight to five doctor work, but I struggle with this as I'm too tired. This leaves only the weekends to study. How can I improve on scheduling and following through on weekdays? Cal Newport Well, as I learned doing research for last week's episode on morning routines, I think the key is, and Jesse will agree with me, is to do your studying from within a cold plunge. Because what that's going to do is the cytokines are going to sharpen your focus muscles and then it's going to be very difficult. Actually, what you need to do is in the cold plunge, you need a cold plunge that's deep enough that you can do pull-ups while in the cold plunge. You're maybe doing pull-ups in and out of the cold plunge, and then that will help you get after it. Now, okay, let's get to the heart of this here. Okay, I'm going to tell you first of all to use a phrase from the older episodes of the show, to face the productivity dragon here, which means confronting and accepting the reality of A particular workload that you're struggling with. You have a very hard job, and so you're finding it hard to also do a lot of hard studying after your job is over. That is just the reality. That's not a broken thing. It's not unusual. It's not inexplicable. It's not a problem. In fact, it's not at all surprising. It's hard to be a doctor. Those are long shifts. And so the study, something intense after a hard shift, might just be really hard. So we have to just accept that at first. But we can't see it. To ignore the productivity dragon is just to really want something to be doable, to be frustrated that it's not, and just hope if you get upset enough or focus on it enough, you can just Sort of make it possible. That dragon is there and sometimes it's going to block you from getting where you want to go. All right. Once we accept that, now we can review what are our options and tools here without yet trying to assess whether any of these is going to solve the problem. Let's just put on the table. There's a dragon up here. All right, townspeople, what weapons do we have? Let's see what we have and then we can build a plan. So in your case, there's a few things that could be relevant. Better energy could help, right? There's things you could do so that you coming off of your shift. You have higher energy. Maybe you're able to persist in more studying than you are now. These are things like sleep, exercise, and nutrition. Those are probably the big ones, maybe with like a good shutdown routine from the doctor job. In theory, if you're in really good shape and have really good health, in theory, you probably would have more energy you could probably spare. I don't know if that's going to be a lot because the physical and intellectual are related, but they're not completely congruent. But that's a tool we have on our table. That might take a while, though, to get healthy, to get in a good shape. Well, that takes time. And kind of ironically, you don't have a lot of time each day to work on this. We could get around that. Doctors get around that. They work out at the hospital, etc. But it takes a lot of time to get in, you know, to get healthier. And you might have to be done with this in a couple months. All right. Another tool, though, better study habits. So if you're using the right study habits, maybe a shorter amount of time per day, you can get more out of it. Also, studying is less exhausting when it's more focused and you trust it, right? When you're a really good studier, I was a really good studier. I wrote books about how to study. When you're a really good studier, it's a lot less exhausting. Why? Because the sense of exhaustion from studying in particular is sometimes generated from your mind having resistance to the activity that you're about to do. It doesn't want to do it. So it's like, I don't want to do this. And now you're competing with your mind trying to drag it into this activity. That's exhausting and not super sustainable. Why does your mind reject studying? Well, one of the reasons why it rejects it is because studying is not a precise verb. Your mind doesn't think you have a particularly good plan for how you're going to get prepared. Your mind knows that you're just going to sit down and open up your books and then look at your phone and then look at your instant messenger and then kind of read some things and kind of Look over at something else. It has no confidence that this is going to lead to anything good at all. And so it holds back motivation. So now you're dragging your mind through it. By contrast, if you're a really good study, your mind's like, oh yeah, we got a good plan. We know how to prepare for these type of questions. We're giving this 50 hard minutes, and we are going to really make progress in these 50 minutes. You're going to have a lot more motivation to do it, even if it's intellectually harder. So improving your study habits is something else that could help here. Let's step back now and look at more drastic or reconfiguration-based plans. You could just take longer. You know, maybe you want to sit for these master's exams in three months. Maybe like what I really need to do here is do this six months from now or a year from now because my studying is going to be, I can't study every night. And maybe I'm doing my study on the weekends or just one night a week. It's going to take me a lot longer to prepare. So if I push this off by a year, then I can get there in a reasonable timeframe. That's like a real slow productivity type of idea. No one knows how long it took you to do something. They just know in the end what things you did. And often like the key to sustainability is simply just taking longer. 10 years from now, all people are going to know is like, oh, you made this shift in your clinical practice. They don't remember exactly how long did it take from you having this idea to you taking the entrance exams. The final tool we can put on the table here is change your work situation temporarily. Maybe you take a leave for two weeks. You can just do nothing but seriously study and just like get this thing done. Right? So we have different tools on the table. And your question is just, okay, what combination of these is going to get me where I need to get? Facing the productivity dragon, rarely as people fear, leads them to the conclusion of this thing that's important to me I can't do. That's not what happens. What happens is you come up with a more reasonable plan for how to get there. And it might not be as easy as you hope or as quick as you hope or as painless as you hope, but typically you find a way to take care of that dragon once you actually see it and you're looking At it and having an honest conversation about what options you actually have. So probably some combination of those things I mentioned will get you there. And almost certainly it's not going to end up being as quick or as easy as you hoped when you first went down this path. But that's okay. ([Time 0:26:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e3a4cf89-50ed-42f1-9c57-11e766b09e6e)) - **AI's Impact Gap** - AI's practical impact lags behind its functional breakthroughs. - Product development and integration remain crucial for AI disruption. Transcript: Jesse Question is from david as a non-tech person interested in tech, I enjoy your comments on AI. Can you comment on Leopold Ashenbrenner's situational awareness essay? It's getting a lot of hype and criticism. Cal Newport Yes, I think I have something. I loaded up something here. Okay. I'm not going to load up. So for people who don't know, Leopold Ashenbrenner, I think now he's an investor. He runs a fund, but used to be in tech, wrote this essay called Situational Awareness, AI from now to 2034, which is basically he's synthesizing. These conversations with people in tech, and he's laying out this vision of axioms and predictions for the future of AI. And it's pretty extreme, and it's because of that gathering a lot of attention. I'm not going to read that or even go through the essay because I think it's like 160-something pages long. I mean it's a book basically. It's like this huge, really long thing. But I did find a good – Mike Allen has a good summary of the main points on axios so i'll read a few of these i have it on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening Like here are some of the points that are made some of the the stickier points that were made in this big long essay um one trust the trend lines the trend lines are intense and they were Right The magic of deep learning is that it just works and the trends lines have been astonishingly consistent despite naysayers at every turn. Another big point, over and over again, year after year, skeptics have claimed deep learning won't be able to do X. They've been quickly proven wrong. Point three, it's strikingly plausible that by 2027, models will be able to do the work of an AI research engineer. By 2027, rather than a chatbot, you're going to have something that looks more like an agent, like a coworker. Number five, the data wall. There's potentially important source of variance for all this. We're running out of internet data. Number six, AI progress won't stop at the human level. We would rapidly go from human level to vastly superhuman systems. He points the idea of superintelligence possibly by AD 2030 and so on. Interesting essay and it's getting a lot of attention. I would say, you know, be wary to just naively dismiss this essay because Ashton Brenner knows a lot about this technology and he really did talk to a lot of people. Like he really has a sense for it. On the other hand, you do have to take his essay with a grain of salt because his fund is basically focused on we are investing in the technologies that are going to lead directly to AGI. Like that's his pitch to investors. So it is, of course, very much in his benefit. It's very much to his benefit for people to believe that AI technologies trends are very extreme and noteworthy because that's the pitch of his fund as well. So you have to keep those things in mind. A couple, I'll add a couple observations. These aren't like limits to what he's saying, but I'm going to put a couple, potential breaking observations to keep in the mix here. So one thing that interests me that Ashton Brenner doesn't talk about in the summary, at least, you know, he says over and over again, year after year, skeptics have claimed deep learning Won't be able to do X and have been quickly proven wrong. If there's one lesson we've learned from the past decade of AI is that you should never bet against deep learning. Well, it is true. Like, its capabilities keep growing. And as we say, well, it's still bad at this. Then engineers work on this. And then for a lot of those, this is it gets better at. But there have been year after year predictions that have not been coming true, which is the predictions about the practical impact in our lives. As soon as ChatGPD came out there, it was like we're six months away from this disruption. Whole industries are going away. Homework apocalypse, education as we know it is done. These whole sectors are gone. Look, this guy over here fired half of his call center. That's going to be everyone. These jobs are gone. So far, there's been almost no major disruption. So the one place where there is a gap is the impact gap. So the connection that we've been getting wrong is we thought there would be this type coupling between functional breakthrough and disruption. That as the magnitude of a functional breakthrough on AI models jumped, the immediate disruptions would jump as well. Well, it turns out that there's at the very least a large lag between these two things. I think this is a significant thing to keep in mind. It is turning out that to make this technology high impact on people's day-in lives, there is no escaping the actual sort of hard, hard-to product development cycle. That it's not just the fact that these models can do amazing things. It doesn't mean they're doing amazing things in people's lives. People still have to now do the painstaking work of integrating this AI into specific products. Nine out of ten ways you do this is not going to work or be that useful. So it's hard. There's competition. Companies are going to fail. Initiatives are going to lose money for these big companies. And then in there, you're going to find, oh, here's the right product that actually works. The internet was the consumer internet was the same way. We knew it was a big deal. And a lot of companies were like, this is a big deal. This changes everything, which it did. But we thought at first, like, great. So if I just put money into anything internet, it's going to be successful. And it was. And then most of the early things we did didn't really work. And we had the first dot-com crash in the early 2000s. And then what ended up being required was like years of different companies and startups and people trying. Like, well, what's the right way to get the internet to people or how do people actually want to use it? And then we got out of it some of these like Web2 based models that have then become incredibly profitable, right? But you had in 1999 people being like, yeah, well, Time Warner should be on just buy AOL. We'll have this sort of online version of the articles and Webvan will warehouses full of food you can buy on the internet. And we're all going to make a lot of money. None of that worked, but you fast forward another 25 years and meta has a trillion plus dollar market cap. So like they were right, but just took a long time to try to figure out what works and what did it. So that's going to slow down AI's progress some because we're three years out of highly capable language models and don't yet have large disruption use cases. So just that lag is longer than we think. On the flip side, that means when the disruptions come, it might seem like it's coming out of nowhere because it's not going to be tightly coupled to an innovation. I actually think the power, I was just giving a talk at Microsoft recently, we were talking about this. I actually think that we have sufficient capability and AI tools today to support major disruption to the way knowledge work happens. We don't actually need, if we have no future innovation, like we have to freeze everything like where it is now. ([Time 0:36:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/60acbd8a-4454-4d9d-a418-19a927221e81)) - **Pursuing Values** - Translate abstract values into concrete goals by finding resonating examples. - Focus on one value at a time for deeper integration. Transcript: Jesse All right, what do we got next? Next question is from Colin. I'm fortunate to have a remote job that supports flexibility, but I often struggle to translate the values I care about, learning, curiosity, self-improvement, connection, and Adventure into concrete goals and actions. I want to be able to sustain these practices. Too often I find myself stuck in a cycle of pseudo productivity going through the motions without feeling truly fulfilled. Cal Newport I think this is a common problem, especially if you have the blessing of time, is you get kind of systematic and say, okay, well, here's the things that matter to me. And then you kind of start, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, and I'm going to do this. And it feels sort of soulless. I have these like checklist of things I do every day that's connecting to the things that I value. And I don't know, it just feels like going through the motions. It doesn't actually feel like it's infusing my life with value. That's a really common problem. Actually like acting on your values in a way that's really meaningful. I have four things I want to mention that could be helpful here. One, you know, once you've identified what's important to you, you have your buckets, have some sort of keystone habit in each. Sure. It's a starting point, something you do for each of these values or things you care about on a regular basis. This is not trivial, but it's tractable. So you're just signaling to yourself, I care about these things. Sure. But then choose one and say, this is the thing I'm going to really work on for the next six months. This is the thing for the next season. I'm going to try to figure out through experimentation and focus how to integrate this into my life in the coolest possible way. Because it actually can be hard. You could say, I like adventure. Great. Building an actual rhythm of adventure that's meaningful to you in your life, that might take a lot of experimentation. It's not an obvious thing to do. So maybe you spend a full summer, like really focusing on that. Like, well, what if I go like on weekend trips and that's not enough? Maybe what I want to do is like once a quarter, go on a, let me try one of these quarterly trips. What's that feel like? Maybe I want to have a challenge myself every week, like to go, go to a place that, you know, I haven't been before. Maybe I want to get a group of friends. We do this together. Like you, you figure out what's really pressing my buttons on this value and how do I best integrate that into a part of my life? And that takes time and experimentation. So just focus on one till you feel good about it. And then you can move on to another. It can take years to kind of button down a full lifestyle setup, and then at the end of that, you kind of say, okay, now I had kids. Whoops, we got to change all these again. Like what adventure means is very different now than it did before, and that's okay. So spend more time and go one by one in figuring these things out. There's a patience thing. The second solution, go back to lifestyle-centric planning. The better understand what it means for these values to be a part of your life, in particular the part of lifestyle-centric planning that's key when you're thinking about these type Of values like curiosity or adventure, for example, is to find examples that resonate. Like, you know what? What I'm looking for is someone who is doing something in their life that really, that specific thing they're doing really resonates with me. So get more concrete, move from the abstract to the more concrete. Like, oh, I really love the way this guy, this guy works. Like maybe you're really, when it comes to adventure and you try to get concrete, the thing that resonates with you is this movie which i watched a bunch as a kid i don't know if you would Know this one jesse k2 oh yeah right spacey is it spacey yeah right oh it might be yeah um where they they go to climb k2 it doesn't go well i know that was that was it everyone it's a mountain Climbing movie wait i'm looking this up because... Jesse He was in like K-something else. Yeah. Oh, oh. K-Pax. Exactly. Exactly what you're talking about. Cal Newport I can think of... I'm looking this up here. 1991 film. Man, I used to like this film. Oh, it's Michael Biehn. Yeah, Michael Biehn and Matt Craven. Spoiler alert. Don't think it goes well for Matt Cra Anyway, so it was this mountain climbing movie. K2, you know, is the second highest mountain in the world behind Everest. And it's like the most dangerous mountain. People die. I mean, people die all the time. I mean, okay, not the rabbit hole. But the reputation of K2 at the time was like, this is the real killer. Like Everest, you can have these companies that like take you up to the top. If you pay them $60,000, you don't have to be a world-class athlete. K2 is really, really hard. It's the second highest mountain. It was really, really hard. And it had the highest death toll. It was like one out of five people die or whatever. But then after this movie came out, you know, you get the disaster on Everest where Krakauer into thin air was there where all these people died. And then like a lot of people died on Everest after that. It's like no one thinks about Everest as being easy. I mean, in theory, you can do it without being an elite athlete. You can pay to do it. But now its death rate is also pretty high. Anyways, the reason why I think about this movie, because I saw it all the time, is that Michael Biehn was a corporate executive in this movie. And they were always showing he was in his skyscraper office and he had like a Nordic track machine in there because he was training for this. So he was like a world-class mountaineer and had this job, right? So maybe that really resonates with you. Like, yeah, that's what I want to be like. Adventure is like I have my job just fulfills other things for me and it's specific and corporate or whatever but I want to be the guy who's also has like the NordicTrack machine in my office Because I'm training to go do like these extreme things and like there's these like two sides of me you're like so so maybe that's what resonates with you then that gives you like a concrete Way of thinking about integrating adventure into your life so you look for what resonates because sometimes the abstract principle, you don't know what about that appeals to me or What way of integrating that into a life really is interesting to me. And the concrete examples that get there. So you want to use a single purpose notebook for this or have like a Fields Note or Moleskine notebook where you're taking notes on these things as you watch things, as you read things, As you meet people. Take notes on what's resonating and that's going to give you some better ideas of how to implement this. Solution three, you might want to simplify, right? Maybe you want to simplify down the things you're focusing on so that you don't have too many specific things that you're trying to make progress on. So connection, it might like heart, body, mind. You know, heart is like community and connection. Body is I want like to be in good shape and healthy and it fuels all these other things and go do things that like uses my body and mind is like I want to like enjoy the world of ideas and interestingness And just do cool stuff with my mind or like simplify it. And then under those things, there's lots of different things you could do. And maybe you do different things at different times. Like I'm going to start by this season, like this winter, I want to read these like five great books and have like a discussion group about them. And, you know, maybe in the summer I'm doing something else with my curiosity and with my body right now, maybe it's just like in my case, getting my back to work again. But then like the next season I might be working on, know, returning to ([Time 0:51:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/829d62e8-9151-41bc-9508-8b5c634fab9d)) - **Improving Writing Skills** - Improve writing through deliberate practice, like editing and targeted challenges. - Seek feedback and stretch beyond your current skill level. Transcript: Jesse Up the speed. Um, it has been fun writing columns, but man, that's a fast pace. All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from Holden. Speaking of writing, how would you recommend somebody go about deliberate and consistent improvement in writing? You know, my thing for writing, it's like other, any other sort of skilled activity you have to train. Cal Newport Doing it a lot will get you part of the way. So if I'm writing a bunch, I want to do my pages every day, that will help. You will become a better writer than if you don't do that at all. You get more used to it. It's less hard. You build some circuits in your brain. Words come more easily. Then you're going to hit a wall. And if you want to get better, you have to have activities designed to stretch you in specific ways past where your current capabilities are. Writing for editing is really the best way to do that. I'm trying to make this good enough that this person likes it. So like someone's going to evaluate it and you're going to get that feedback. Like it stretches you and the feedback helps you get better in particular ways. Taking on specific writing challenges also helps. I want to work on this technique here. I'm going to read people who are good at that technique, try to understand it, and then use that knowledge in this thing I'm writing now. So it's writing where you are specifically stretching a particular piece of the writing talent. It's the stretch and the specificity that's going to make you better. So you got to think about it as something that you're going to train. I mean, it's why, for example, at the very upper levels of fiction writing, like elite literary fiction writers, so many of them go to MFA programs. They just often need that final really learning and being pushed with other writers and reading their stuff and they're reading your stuff. You just need that final push of like where you're still a little rusty. Someone who's better at something than you are and like reading their thing and then trying to be better in years. The next time they need that final training push. If you want to be like an elite level fiction writer, but that persisted every, every level on the writing ladder, you got to train to get to the next level. ([Time 1:00:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3247ab84-a679-4b02-9840-8271a0481a70)) - **Slow Productivity and Elite Performance** - Slow productivity principles are often followed by elite performers in various fields. - This includes writers, athletes, and academics. Transcript: Cal Newport The main reason we do this segment is so that we can play the segment theme song, which we're going to hear right now. All right, Jesse, what's our Slow Productivity Corner question of the week? Jesse It's from JJ. Many individuals who've reached the absolute pinnacle of their fields, from athletes like Michael Jordan to entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, seem to follow a different pattern of obsessive, All-consuming work without clear boundaries. While your approach clearly leads to meaningful achievements in a fulfilling life, I wonder if someone can truly reach the uppermost echelons of their field while maintaining the Balanced approach you discuss in slow productivity? Well, it's a good question. I don't know necessarily that you would use balance as one of the key adjectives for slow productivity. Cal Newport I would say it's focused. I would say it's sustainable. I would say it's kind of the opposite of pseudo productivity, which is performative activity for the sake of activity. That's what it rejects. But I was thinking about people in the top 1% of their field and in a lot of fields, elite level performers, if you look at how they approach their work, it echoes a lot of the ideas from slow Productivity. So let's consider, for example, elite writers. I used elite writers as examples frequently in the book, Slow Product because to be an elite writer, you almost always have to take a slow productivity approach. You're not working on many things. Like you're basically just like all in on the book you're writing. You kind of simplify your life in that way. You're, of course, are obsessing over quality if you're an elite writer. Like I want this thing to win the whatever literary prizes that I'm hoping are becoming New York Times notable books. You really care about quality more than anything else. And yeah, it's seasonal. I'm really working on a book hard. Now I'm completely doing nothing. Now I'm brainstorming the next book. Now I'm editing a book. There's real variations. And because they have such autonomy, there can be seasonality in their day. Often these writers have specific hours they write in and then they're done. They're not writing all day long. And there could be seasonality in their month or week. Like I was thinking if I was just a full-time writer, like just a book writer, I bet this back thing I'm dealing with would be so much easier to deal with because like, oh, all I'm doing is Writing. I could just take the foot off the gas pedal while I work on this rehab and it's bothering me and then just put it back on again. Maybe because writers are full-time writers and you sometimes have to be pretty much elite to do it full-time to have that type of ability to be more seasonal. Elite athletes I actually think about as practitioners of slow productivity as well. I mean, they do one thing. They're sport. They're not working on 30 things, right? They're not answering emails and jumping off and on calls. They're training for their sport. Of course, they obsess over quality. That's what makes them elite athletes. And their work is literally seasonal. Here's the sports season. Here's the off season. We treat these things very differently. So they have different rhythms of their week. Elite academics, often they become elite because, again, they are slow productivity practitioners as well. Hey, I'm focusing on just this result. Academia is very seasonal, teaching, non-teaching, but also working on a result and being done with a result. It might take you a couple of years before you get going again on another big project. And they obsess over quality. Now, of course, a lot of academic positions have the slow productivity subverted by the injection of the administrative. But in this context, we note that's a problem. Like they say, I'm worse at being a professor now because I have to do all this administrative work. Like what made them elite was not the busyness you see of a later stage career professor holding all these administrative positions. What made them elite is when they were more true to the slow productivity principles. So I see it. I mean, what's missing here? You mentioned balance. I think what you mean by balance is like the total number of hours you're working in a day is not too bad. Athletes, I guess, violate that because it takes a lot of hours if you're just in a season. Yeah. Riders don't work huge number of hours. So I think that's still okay. Elite academics, they can work a lot of hours. Yeah, I think, especially if it's a lab-based academia. So like fair enough on that point. In which elite level is not really compatible with slow productivity principles. Entrepreneurship is probably the classic example of that, like starting up a company. You just, you aren't doing one thing. You're doing lots of things. It's not seasonal. It's all out all the time. And it's not really obsessing over quality because you don't have time or energy to do that. It's just like putting out fires and trying to keep things rolling forward. So yeah, starting big companies is usually not compatible with slow productivity. Elite leaders are complicated teams. Those type of positions often aren't compatible. I'm thinking about like Navy commanders. You're the CO on a big ship, like a destroyer or something. Like that's not compatible with slow productivity. It's doing many, many different things. It's all out all day. It's getting things done right but not trying to like push the quality. You don't have the time, energy or luxury of like, I'm just going to obsess over quality in one thing. It's like trying to prevent bad things from happening. So yeah, no, not every job has the elite levels be compatible with slow productivity, but a lot do. And you'll see that if you read the book, because I draw from stories of knowledge workers who've done elite work in times past to draw out these principles. So it should be no surprise. All right. ([Time 1:02:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3b161ac3-4e09-4d95-8ba6-3961d0badf2c)) - **Managing Projects** - Don't put ongoing projects on task boards; reserve them for weekly planning. - Use "waiting for" columns to track outstanding requests. Transcript: Cal Newport Just relax people to get good work. All right. Do we have a call this week? We do. All right. Let's hear it. Hi, Cal. This is Chris. I'm a data architect in Minnesota. And I have a question about how do you manage different projects in the columns, specifically active and waiting on someone else. I created a personal project in Asana that I have one task for each of my projects, and I have the active column, I'm trying to keep that to no more than three open projects at a time. But I also have projects that I'm waiting on other people to get back to me for. And so I'm curious if you have any advice or rules of thumb around what to do if that list of projects that I'm waiting on people starts to stack up and then say four people get back to me at The same time. Wondering if you have any advice on that. Yeah. Okay. Really appreciate the show. Thanks. That's a good question about these task storage boards. Two things I want to say. First of all, I don't have everything I need to do on my task storage board. These tend to be sort of like tasks that need to get done. But what's not typically included on those boards for me is like ongoing work. You know, if I'm working on a book chapter, for example, that's a major thing I'm working on. There's not a task on my task board that says like work on book chapter. That's something that's going to come up in my weekly planning. I'm like, what am I doing right now? Oh, I'm working on my book is one of my big goals for this quarter. So what do I want to get done this week? Well, let's see if I could finish a draft of chapter three this week, that would actually be good. Greatly put down my weekly plan. Like today's big, you know, this week's focus is working on chapter three. And in fact, maybe I want to actually block out a few big writing blocks to make sure I have time on my calendar for working on chapter three, right? Nothing here ever touched a task on a Trello board. But the Trello board stuff might be, they often are, they're like one-off tasks or individual tasks, like stuff I need to do or get back to people that I don't want to forget about. All right. So I'll keep that in mind first. Second. Okay. So what happens if you have a lot of stuff waiting to hear back from? Well, you put these items on the waiting to get back column. So you don't forget about them. You're telling your mind. Yeah. I sent out this request. I don't want to forget that that's out there. Like that person may never get back to me again. That's going to be an open loop. That's going to generate stress in my brain. So I want to make sure I remember like, yeah, I asked Jesse about this, that I'm waiting to hear back and a good waiting to get back card on a Trello board will say what you're going to do when That comes back. When that gets back, make a decision and tell Jeremy. So here's what I'm waiting to hear back on and here's what I'm going to do when I get it. Okay. You don't have to execute that right away. So, you know, if someone gets back to you, um, you can take that off the waiting to get back to your list. Now, Hey, that's back in my world. But then what you do with that's up to you. It's kind of like a new task has entered your life. You could put it on. You could just do it right then. You could put on your active list. It's something like, I want to try to get to this as soon as possible, or it could go on a back burner list. All right, balls back in my court. I'm not going to act on this right now, but like, okay, it's, it's, it's changed. The status has changed. I've heard back. I have this information. Now I have a new thing to do. I'm going to put that back, you know, under whatever column is appropriate. So you don't have to do those things right away. The goal of that list is, you know, not to forget things that are outstanding, but you don't have to execute those things right away. All right. So hopefully that helps. And also, you know, I'm pretty loose about these things. Like often the things I have on my active list, it's non-major things, but from my list of things I kind of want to make progress on. And as I go through my daily plan, I, and I have like put, put aside admin blocks. I'll go look at those and see how many of those I can churn through. But you know, Hey, sometimes things take longer or you lose some admin blocks. You don't get them done. And like, that's fine. I find that kind of loose. Like the critical stuff is going to end up being a part of my weekly plan and probably make its way onto my calendar. So hopefully that makes sense about waiting for. ([Time 1:08:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/831ddbb9-8050-4a87-8b37-6d86713f39ad)) - **Grad School at 34** - Amy succeeded in grad school at 34, finding it easier than at 18. - Life experience makes academic challenges less daunting. Transcript: Cal Newport Just because you've been waiting for something for a while doesn't mean you have to act on it right away when it comes back to you. We got a case study this week where people send in a description of using that type of advice we talk about here on the show in their lives. If you have a case study, you can send them to jesse at calnewport.com. This case study comes from Amy, who we talked to in episode 323. She was also one of the listeners who pointed us towards the Derek Thompson article that we talked about earlier in the deep dive. So thank you, Amy. All right. So I don't remember episode 233, Jesse, in detail, but I guess it was about, she was going back to grad school. It had been a few years since she'd been in school. She's in her early th and we were giving some advice about how to tackle school and I think one of the points we made is hey don't be too stressed about this you probably are going to find Coming back to school in your 30s it's not going to seem as hard of a job as it was when you were 20 whatever all right so here's her follow-up study. I got all A's in my first semester of graduate school. Going to school and doing well is much easier at 34 than it was at 18. And it wasn't like I wasn't interested in my college education. I went to Berklee College of Music because I was and still am obsessed with music. But after having some more life experience, my grad school program, though challenging and demanding, feels much easier than undergrad. My unsolicited advice for anyone considering college or grad school, take a gap year. If you're 18 and planning to go to college, seriously consider deferring your acceptance for a year. This is a common practice in other countries for various reasons, but Americans would do well to adapt it too. I appreciate that, Amy. It is a true point. Older people find school easier because school is not that hard once you're used to doing hard things. An 18-year not really used to doing hard things, but a 34-year is. And if it's their full-time job, they say it's not too hard to study. Like, studying's not fun, but honestly, this is going to take me like five hours this week to be prepared for this exam. Five hours is not that much time. I used to spend five hours just on my inbox on Monday morning alone. This is no big deal. I noticed this again and again when I would advise non-traditional college students. So at Georgetown, I would help advise or give talks to the advising program that would work with non-traditional college students. So people coming back later in life, but also we did some work with veteran programs. So people coming back on the GI Bill and they would just crush it. All right. They'd seen real hardship. If you are new to school, the gap year is a good idea. Another idea, just read my book, How to Become a Straight A Student. Read it and do it. Your friends are idiots when it comes to studying. Do not look at how they study. Take no advice from them. They are really bad at it. Do the stuff in that book. You'll get very good grades. That's just it. Like that book is like, here's how the people who get after it. This is how they actually study. This is the stuff that works. This is what you really need to do. Do that stuff. It tells you how to be organized, how to take notes, the right way to study for math, right way to write papers. Just do it that way, and you're going to get really good grades, and it's going to be a lot easier than what your friends are doing. So, yeah, if you treat being a student like a job, it's like an easy job. If on the flip side you do what many students do is you treat being a student like a vacation, then you're like, this is a really crappy vacation because I keep having to go to the library. And you see, like, everything you have to do is somehow be negative because it's getting in the way of you having fun. But if you see it as a job, like this is the easiest job I ever had. It's like a halftime job and I'm doing great and getting a lot of praise for it. So anyway, Amy, thanks for helping to emphasize that point. ([Time 1:12:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/816a7b92-db86-49f3-a9f1-a174c8fe93f1)) - **Shifting Social Media Landscape** - Current social media lacks the strong justifications of its predecessors. - It offers diversion but not substantial benefits. Transcript: Cal Newport They do it kind of last minute. Jesse Yeah. Yeah. It's been occasions where i wish i had a version of it so it's not like the book cover input that you have yeah i don't know how it works sometimes they're drawing it from scratch and sometimes Cal Newport They're like they have it already i don't quite know how it works um but i guess this is probably not an artwork i want blowing up large in my house because it would give me nightmares it's A cool picture though all right here's the article i wrote it's's a column. This is me again. I took over Kyle Shaka's infinite scroll column for a month. This column is titled, What Happened When an Extremely Offline Person Tried TikTok? So the premise was, hey, I'm recovering from this injury. I've got kind of laid up a little bit. Maybe it would be fun to try TikTok. The formal journalistic experiment I was doing here was to see how is the experience of social media and our relationship with social media changed since when I was last like really Actively writing about like how people use social media, whether they should use social media, which was really about a decade ago. I'm just going to point out a couple points. So perhaps one of the most striking things I found is that when I was writing about quitting social media, this was like 2013 and 2016, that's when I became known for that. I went back and read those articles again for this. There were really big debates happening. Supporters of social media had very strong reasons why it was important. I was debating against those reasons. So my articles were like very carefully walking through these arguments and saying these arguments are not as strong as you think. And people would get upset about those stances. It was really a pretty robust debate. I've talked about this before on the show, but like I would write a Times op-ed and then the Times would publish a response op-ed, or I would go on the radio to talk about that article and Then they would bring on someone to push back on me on the radio show to say, you know, Cal is wrong. Like it was a pretty contentious debate that was unfolding at that time. Most of those articles that I – arguments I used to debate against, none of them apply anymore to social media. We use the same phrase, but when I was on TikTok or trying YouTube shorts or Instagram reels, the arguments that people used to make in favor of social media just don't apply anymore. They said, this is how you keep up with your friends and your social life. No one keeps up with their friends or social life on TikTok. They said, this is going to open up career opportunities. This was a big one. People were like, you're crazy. You're going to disappear and have no job if you're not using these platforms. No one's saying that about TikTok. No one's saying like, yeah, I got my job because my boss at the insurance company thought my TikToks were fire, right? That just doesn't happen. The other major argument from 10 years ago was this is the online town square. This is where like culture is being formed, right? This is like the Twitter argument back then. The most important articles are moving around Facebook. TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, you're getting these incredibly individualized, atomized feeds. Your feed looks nothing like the person next to you. It's not creating collective culture. It's creating isolated, customized distraction. So I was really struck. I was like, man, all this fighting I used to do, none of it's relevant anymore. Right? So these big arguments for why social media is important don't apply to the latest, most popular generation of social media. So I went and I talked to some young people who do use these services. I had them show me TikTok. I was like, well, why do you use it? And here's the thing. They don't have a great answer. None of these young people were giving full-throated defenses of TikTok in the way that I used to get full-throated defenses of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram back in the day. They're like, yeah, it's pretty stupid, but it's diverting. The one guy I talked to, Zach, would talk about it. It's like, there's these memes, these video memes, and it's funny, and he showed them to me, and they're funny and interesting, and they remind me of some of the absurdist type of humor That was popular on the early web when I was in college in the early 2000s. And I get it, but that's not like a profound argument. It was like, yeah, this is funny. I like him. He would actually use the funny TikToks he found as just a social lubricant. Like you could send these to friends via text message and it gave you something, an excuse like ping your friend or to talk to someone. So the young woman I talked to was like, I don't know, it feels kind of authentic. It creates emotion. She sent me some TikToks. It was like a recipe thing that was visually appealing and a video of vets returning home early to surprise their kids. And that was like touching. None of them have the grandiose theory like you used to get from communication professors back in 2013 about why this was at like the key of culture or this was at the key of your success Or it's at the key it's the evolving civic life people it's like i don't know it's diverting and i could use a little diversion in my life there's a lot of fears around this because it's Very diverting and we see young people they have a hard time turning their eyes away from this because once we get rid of all those other justifications, you can hone in on just being as Engaging as possible and that could be pretty addictive. But I found an almost hopeful note in this. If we're no longer fighting for social media, then I think its footprint on our lives is going to get smaller. I think the, yes, it's addictive nature maybe is higher, but the addiction is no longer protected. It's no longer protected in the clothing of virtue. It's just addicting. It's cigarettes in the eighties versus cigarettes in the fifties. No one wants to be smoking anymore. We all get it. It's still hard to stop, but everyone kind of agrees like, yeah, I probably should do this less. So we use the term social media today. We use the term social media 10 years ago, but it's describing something different. And in some ways it's something more insidious, but in other ways it's something that feels like it's much more solvable because it feels much less important. Its grasp is hard, but its grounding is shallow. So I actually came away from this like, not as scary because no one's fighting me on this. We're all on the same side. And the fact that we have the TikTok ban, at least in some form, seems like it's going through, that would be positive as well. You see one of these services be banned that also just like helps change their mindset of like, yeah, these things are kind of optional. It was okay. We took that one away. We all survived. It just kind of emphasizes the optionality, the triviality, the tangentiality of these services. ([Time 1:20:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6e4d3915-8b9b-4efe-9d72-e408b2e77539))