keyaar.in / Exif: Blog V 3.0

Touching Things

→ May 3, 2019 | Reading time: 2 minutes

[Talking about the Amish way of dealing with ‘new’ stuff.] If it’s going to make it [core principle valued above all else] stronger, then we can adopt it, and if it’s not, we’re not. Often the way they’ll do this is they’ll test it. They’ll essentially the Amish equivalent of an alpha geek use it. Great. Here’s a cell phone came along. Use a cell phone for a while. Let’s watch it. Let’s see what happens. Here’s a car. Great. Someone buy a car. Let’s watch. Does this make things better or worse in terms of the thing we really care about which is community strength? …
I think if you leave the walled garden of social media and go back out to the wild web, you can find interesting things. You can connect to interesting people. You could express yourself in interesting ways and you can do it in a way that’s just so much healthier because you don’t have these algorithmic forces trying to push you into weird extremes, or to pacify you, or to get you upset, or to get you mollified or whatever’s going on that’s necessary to get revenue up at these private companies.

— Cal Newport in conversation with Brett McKay. Podcast discussing Digital Minimalism, with transcript; I don’t think the second excerpt above does justice to being representative of the rest of it. He discusses the not-easily-perceived opportunity costs (such as in the Amish example) in detail in Deep Work, as well.