Dr. Cal Newport

It's like, oh my God, we're so overwhelmed with tasks.

All we can hope for is like these little moments of zen.

If we can just automate how we're just churning through these widgets, at least we can find some cognitive piece.

What happened in those 10 years was the front office IT revolution.

And now we just felt like we had to constantly be demonstrating that visible effort.

So, you know, I think that's where we got into the problem, pseudo productivity plus technology.

Yeah.

I mean, I think for a lot of people, it's papering over the void, right?

You have this void in your life because there's unmet potential, unmet interest, living in misalignment with the things you care about, right?

I mean, a lot of people, this is the classic sort of catastrophe of life, right?

Social media and there's – before this, it was other things, right?

There was other intoxicants or other sorts of distractions.

It's a way for some people of essentially putting a screen over that like gaping void and it like just makes it bearable enough that you can kind of go on with life.

And so it is true.

If you just rip it out, you see the void.

And that's really difficult, right?

I mean, because I did this experiment for one of my books.

I ran an experiment with 1,600 people.

And they all turned off all their social media for 30 days.

30 days?