Can I Be a Digital Minimalist in 2026? | Monday Advice

Cal Newport· Host0:00

Back in 2019, I published a book called Digital Minimalism. It argued that we should be much more intentional about what digital technologies we use and how we use them. Now, when I started working on the idea for this book, we were still in the, the tail end of that golden age of social media, where we still saw these devices as offering a societal good, a sort of inevital- inevitable evolution of the town square that would ultimately empower us all. But by the time the book actually came out, people were beginning to get fed up, which turned out to be great timing for me. That book became my first New York Times bestseller, and it led to opportunities that I never would have previously imagined for myself. But here's the thing, a lot has changed since 2019. Back then, social media meant Twitter, Facebook, and that old version of Instagram where you mainly just followed creators that you cared about. Today's social media, by contrast, has become a race to the bottom of the brain stem as every service is trying to copy the highly addictive, algorithmically optimized short form strategy of TikTok. Existing glo- global conversation platforms like Twitter, now called X, have given up on any illusions of being a global town square and are really now just serving up, I, I don't know, straight up gonzo garbage for the most part. Um, and then there's AI, which wasn't on my radar at all in 2019, but today it's increasingly threatening to cor- corrupt or co-opt every last occasion where we might