Every day I have an hour commute by BART – San Francisco Bay Area’s delightful transit system. When you are waiting for the train, there is a sight that will grab your attention every single day. Everyone is on the phone, mindlessly swiping gems on a game, binge-watching Netflix, and catching up with the latest on their favorite social media outlet. Caught up in their screens, it is fun to see people miss their stations.

As permanently connected devices have taken over our world., our attention span has shrunk. The endless bombardment of news, gossip, and fake news has made us information addicts. In this context, author, Cal Newport makes the case for choosing a focused life in a noisy world with the philosophy of Digital Minimalism. He argues that the current relationship with technology — where we are slaves to technology — is unsustainable and has to change.

“Your Time = Their Money.” This is the equation by which social media companies operate. Your attention is sold to advertisers. These companies have invested lots of energy in channelling human attention in a way that old media like newspapers and television could not do. They have invested a lot in figuring out how to exploit psychological vulnerabilities and trick the user into spending more time with their app. It is no accident that you are addicted to your phone.

In fact, it is the new tobacco. Checking “likes” is the new smoking. The major issue is that it affects behavior. Within a few seconds of getting bored, people opt for their phones. Positive reinforcement coupled with the need for social approval is re-wiring our brains and this is due to the perfect execution of a massively profitable business plan.

Digital Minimalism is not about becoming a Luddite, but it is about you being in control of your life than technology wagging you. It goes beyond simple solutions like observing a digital sabbath and turning off notifications. It advocates being concious of your media consumption. It is a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else. Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.

The book also gives practical tips on how you can achive this (eg, delete social media apps from the phone and use it on a computer). It also makes a call to have an enriching life by building things with your hand and having real life experience in the world instead of virtual ones. It also has tips from people who have adopted this ideology by reducing time spent online to focussing on high-value activities. As argued, our current unease with new technologies is not really about whether or not they’re useful. It’s instead about autonomy. In this new state, digital technology is still present, but now subordinated to a support role: helping you to set up or maintain your leisure activities, but not acting as the primary source of leisure itself.

While the initial part of the book is about the philosophy behind Digital Minimalism, the second part of the book is about actionable steps you can adopt. These steps are about making you from people analog than digital. It advocates getting out of passive consumption and instead spend that time doing a demanding activity which engages your brain. It calls to seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions. This is a timely wake up call.