Dr. Cal Newport

So I think the major players are giving away their competitive advantage, which is this social graph IP that no one will ever replicate again.

They're giving away that advantage.

And now it's a free-for-all playing field of all sources of attention and engagement.

So I don't know.

I think TikTok accidentally destabilized the social media decade that had been defining until I think just recently.

Yeah.

Now, this is an idea I've written about before.

In Deep Work, I had this chapter called Embrace Boredom.

That was the entire idea, right?

So the idea was boredom by itself is not, I think,

There's a reason why it feels distressing.

When things feel distressing, that's usually an evolutionary signal that there's something going on here.

But what I was arguing in that chapter was exactly what you're talking about.

You should have some moments every day where you're free from distraction even though you could be accessing distraction and you want to.

And like a little bit each day, 20 minutes each day, and then maybe a longer session once a week, like a couple hours.

My argument for that was it's about breaking a Pavlovian connection in this sense, right?

So if it's every time I feel bored, I'm lack of novel stimuli, I get this release of the phone.

Your mind is really going to make that association of like this is what we always do.

If sometimes you don't.

It's a different cognitive landscape, right?