Dr. Cal Newport

I'm going out with friends again.

OK, every week I'm going to have – we're going to have drinks with this person and every Thursday morning I'm going to go running with this person.

The people who aggressively tried to put in place a more positive alternative through self-reflective experimentation, they lasted to 30 days and beyond.

And so then I came to realize like, oh, I see what's happening here is you have these unmet needs.

These tools can give you sort of a simulacrum of meeting them.

I'm a social being.

I need to be connected to people.

Well, I'm texting and like doing comments on social media.

It sort of touches that a little bit, just enough that you don't feel hopelessly lonely.

But it's not really fulfilling that.

I have a need to like see my intentions made manifest concretely in the world.

Humans want to do this.

Well, I'm posting these things and people are responding.

It's sort of this simulacrum of real creation.

So it's like kind of satisfying that just enough that it's not just intolerable, right?

And so what happens is if you remove that, you have to actually fill those things the right way.

So now I'm not socializing on social media, but I'm going out of my way to sacrifice time and attention on behalf of other people.

I'm filling the social void in the right way.

Now I don't really feel like I need to go back.

I'm actually making my intentions manifest.