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Deep Questions with Cal Newport cover image

Ep. 131: The Elements of the Deep Life

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

NOTE

How Does Technology Best Serve This Vision?

To make big life decisions, focus on your vision and purpose before considering technology. Determine what you want in life and how technology can best support that vision. Evaluate the personal technologies you currently use and determine if they align with your vision. Make intentional choices about how to use technology, such as limiting social media access. By filling the void with an aspirational vision, you are less likely to rely on technology as a distraction. Instead of focusing on fixing your technology habits, focus on personal growth and let technology serve your goals. Once you prioritize your life and values, technology choices will naturally fall into place.

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And once you have figured out this is what I want to be, this is what I want to spend my time on, this is what I want to make of my life, then and only then you can ask and answer the question, how does technology best serve this vision? And then you go through these optional personal technologies that are capturing so much of your attention right now and say, which of these are really needed to support this vision? And is there better options for supporting this vision? You really go out there and you enumerate them. I'm going to use this service in this way. I'm an artist. I'm going to keep Instagram to post my pictures and to look at these 10 artists I like. But that's my only use of Instagram, and I'll do it on my computer, and I'll do it just once a week. I need this Facebook group because this is where my bike team organizes their rides. But I'm going to take Facebook off my phone. I'm going to unfollow everyone so that when I go right to the page for this Facebook group, I don't see any news feed. I just get the information I need what's going on. I've been chatting with these people on Twitter, but we're going to set up our own Discord server, and we're going to have twice a week we get together to have a conversation because I don't really need all of the other amygdala priming functions of Twitter in my life. So you figure out what you want to do in your life, what tech can help that, and how specifically you want to use that tech to help it. And then you make the answers to that question be the technological life you proceed with going forward. That again is much more likely to succeed than instead looking at what you don't like right now and saying, let me just do that less. Now again, the reason why this works is that you're filling that void by doing the hard work through experimentation reflection of figuring out at least a tentative answer to the question of what am I all about? What do I want to be doing with my life? Where am I falling short? Where do I want to be? You're feeling that void. It's not so terrifying to be alone with yourself anymore because you have this aspirational vision you feel good about. Your technological choices are then supporting this vision, and that's what makes them likely to be sustainable. Because now when you get that knee-jerk urge, let me just go load up Twitter and start scrolling and see if I can see something there that presses some buttons and makes me feel some things. The argument is not, should I do this or not? It is, do I no longer believe in this vision I have of what I want my life to be that's so powerful that does not include Twitter in it? And you're like, no, I love this vision. It does include Twitter. So no, I'm not going to use Twitter. On the other hand, if you've done none of that work and instead you just say, I use Twitter too much, I should use it less. The argument is, okay, I know I should use it less, but is it really that important that I don't use it right now? And your mind says, no, I'm tired, so let's do it. And that's an argument you're much more likely to lose. So James, the solution to your phone addiction is the work not on your techno habits but the work on yourself then let tech serve yourself in a very intentional way and you look back at the habits the addictive habits you have now just like the recovered substance addict that have turned their life around looks back at the late night drinking that they used to do and say, that has no place in my current life that's so important to me, you will feel the same way about the tool. So forget the tips and the hacks and I'm going to, you know, not use Instagram at night and I'm going to try to use less Twitter. Forget that. Right. You're not fixing a broken appliance. You're fixing your actual life. The tech issues will follow much naturally once you do that. All right. It's not an episode of the Deep Questions podcast without at least one sermon slash rant. So, James, thanks for affording me that opportunity. Let's do one more question here. This one comes from Fernando. Fernando asks, how do you make a big life decision when there are so many choices available? I want to move to a different state or country, but I'm not sure which one is better.

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