Break up with your phone and read books
The foundation for every other life goal
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Five years ago, and for the previous decade, I was addicted to the dopamine of the phone. I was constantly opening every social media and news app in succession as if on autopilot, but also constantly on Facebook (back when people used it). Facebook had me from its birth and my college entrance (when it was still for college students). Everything I did was worse because of social media and the phone. It short-circuited my brain and thwarted my endeavor to cure my depression because it inherently causes anxiety with its user experience - notifications are an app’s lifeblood. A life governed by notifications and unread messages isn’t a life.
We set goals and intentions on January 1st, as though the arbitrary marker of a new calendar year in mid-winter is the ideal time to implement drastic changes. However, the habits you and I want to build are founded on the ability to do difficult things and focus for extended periods. Instead of setting goals, you should train your discipline and focus muscles by breaking up with your phone and developing a reading habit.
If you do nothing else, do this. Your ability to focus will determine your life outcomes because everything with meaningful rewards requires it.
Mastery is not accumulated by watching YouTube videos but by sustained skill practice over a long period. Books will improve every aspect of your life, even if they’re unrelated to anything you do for work. They should be an integral part of the vision for your ideal lifestyle.
Nothing worth having was achieved with a distracted brain and spending inordinate hours on the phone. The phone prevents deep engagement with ideas and saps your focus.
Focus and discipline are intertwined, as the former requires the latter. Focus is controlling the object of your attention and keeping it fixed for a non-trivial amount of time to make significant progress on a complex problem. One’s ability to solve complex problems and concentrate long-term will determine success in a perennially distracted society.
If you can train your focus, you will have an edge over 95% of people in all parts of your life. If you want to be known for a skill, train your concentration like you do your body’s muscles. Your brain also requires calisthenics to focus, and reading is the best training regime. And for the love of god, don’t use smartphone games that purport to ‘train your brain.’ The smartphone inherently robs everything of depth, regardless of format. It’s not a place to train your brain for anything other than attention deficit disorder.
Breaking up with your phone is more complicated than it seems.
But we still have to try. I’m unsure in what universe one can argue that more phone time is the answer to a good life. There will always be those who insist that phones don’t cause these problems, but enough research shows the harm of phones, plus all the drum beatings done by Jonathan Haidt in his books and online. I applaud the man for being so concerned with our collective well-being.
It is imperative to leave your phone in another room while training yourself to read. That’s it. It’s simple. At first, this may seem impossible, but remember that the phone is the primary obstacle between you today and who you want to become.
When sleeping, too, you should keep your phone outside the room so you’re not tempted to use it right before bed. The mere presence of a phone can negatively affect sleep quality. You don’t need it for an alarm; get a physical one. Put a smart home speaker in the bedroom if you need to make yourself available for a midnight emergency. I promise it’s not a security blanket but a stealer of sleep. Similarly, it saps your will to concentrate if it’s next to you or in your sight area while reading. You will be scrolling Instagram before you realize it, and then you will feel like trash.
How to wean yourself off the phone:
Make your phone boring, and remove any social media or news apps. I promise you don’t need them. There's more foundational work if you’re having trouble with this step.
Choose a place in your house where the phone is kept. This is your “phone foyer.” If you want to use it, you have to stand there like it’s a phone with a cord from the 90s.
While working and sleeping, leave the phone in the foyer. You don’t need it.
Choose another default activity, like reading, writing, knitting, or anything to quell the nervous energy and void of boredom that once meant grabbing the phone.
Replace the phone with a book (or writing) as your default action.
I have written about this before, but reading is the foundation of my life. It is the pillar of my professional mastery of complex skills and my writing ability. I read voraciously for two years and gathered ideas before I wrote my first post a year ago. If I had not read widely, I wouldn’t have enough original thoughts to justify writing a blog. I have wide-ranging interests because books saved me from the worst effects of social exclusion. As a bonus, they were instrumental in my beating depression. It was the chasing of philosophy and the ability to grapple with complex texts that finally solved it, not meds or therapy (though I have done both and am still on meds).
When bored, instead of picking up the phone, have a book or notebook nearby to scratch the itch. This will help you practice focusing without effort and fill the vacuum of boredom with something good for your brain.
Every other habit you want to form arises from your will to be a disciplined person. Start with reading (which will, in turn, induce writing). Chances are that you have at least one intellectual interest or work of fiction you’ve wished you could sit down and read. Pick up something you’re excited about (not something you think you should read but something you emphatically want to read) and become the person you’ve always wanted to be - able to achieve hard things. I read ~16k pages this year; in 2020, I barely got to 2.5k.
Start with an attainable goal, like reading five pages a day of any book, or a short time.
Your phone should be in another room and silent.
Leave the house, or at least leave your living room.
Keep a log of what you read to see your progress building on itself.
Jot down thoughts as you read in the margins or a physical notebook. This helps cement the threads and surface novel connections between seemingly disparate subject areas.
Do audiobooks count?
You can find endless justifications for why listening to an audiobook is equivalent to reading. I don’t think audiobooks don’t count as training for the brain in the same manner. If you want to absorb fiction, it might be fine, but it won’t serve the purpose of exercising your concentration. Reading is the only method to digest complex ideas and connect them to others effectively; you cannot as easily connect the sentence you just heard to something else you heard without missing the following one or pausing every few seconds if listening.
While reading a book, you are in conversation with the author in a way you cannot be with audiobooks. The act of reading is unique to humans and our linguistic capabilities. Listening to a narrator is a passive activity and doesn’t train your brain to focus because it allows multitasking and using other senses. And most of us will multitask while listening to audiobooks. Reading books trains your ability to focus because you cannot multitask similarly.
Reading allows deeper engagement with the material. You aren’t bound to the narrator’s pace and will likely digest complex topics better by reading them. Finally, original ideas are born of connecting seemingly unrelated concepts from different places. Audiobooks are unsuited to this kind of deep thinking. No profound thinker I’ve seen has asserted audiobooks as equivalent to physical.
A thinker on how to live more with more purpose
I would start a cult for Cal Newport’s ideas. Newport’s methods for living a deep life help you counter the influence of tribalism and the toxic internet environment. He taught me how to construct my life to promote mastery of complex skills, reading and writing, and how to intentionally spend my limited time on earth. I wouldn’t be writing if not for him, nor would I have solved my depression. His books changed my life, proving that books can be some of the most valuable objects anyone can own. Without Newport, I wouldn’t have a good life, nor would I have been able to climb to my current station. Almost all I’ve achieved in the past five years is thanks to his writing and podcast. Where I am now is miraculous compared to where I was before his ideas entered my brain. I would have been lost to mindless media consumption.
Miscellany
Top Books of 2024
For more, see this list.
Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care and Social Class (Henderson)
Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout (Newport)
Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (Taiwo)
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Brooks)
Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women (Ungar-Sargon)
The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America (Hughes)
Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling and What to Do About It (Reeves)
Chaotic Neutral: How Democrats Lost Their Soul In the Center (Burmila)
Several Short Sentences on Writing (Klinkenborg)
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Odell)
Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYIsm, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See (Kahlenberg)
Substack Growth
It’s been exactly a year since my first essay. I began with three people and am now well past the point I imagined reaching in a year. I’m incredibly grateful for all the thoughtful readers I’m lucky to have. You all inspire me to write more, even when it feels terrible. Unfortunately, numbers matter for the initial impression, but engagement is far more critical. I sincerely appreciate all the thoughtful and emotionally authentic comments you all leave.
Audience Overlap
I don’t know what to think about my audience overlap, but here it is. I think this indicates that my audience is ideologically varied. Please take the survey to help me make sense of this.
Personal Growth
This has been, by far, the best year of my life. I’m almost middle-aged, yet life is still rich in possibilities. This is because I did everything possible to branch out beyond my usual hobbies and social contexts this year. This community has been a significant driver of these changes. I also have progressed in the most technical jobs I’ve ever held and found a passion for helping others acquire these skills. But I could only have such a fantastic year because my phone time has been generally under 2.5 hours a day (and even that feels high).
The most momentous change, however, was to accept that I am not for everyone. Longtime readers know how I’ve struggled with friendship since I started changing my views and have lost several. But when it happened this year, I didn’t bat an eye. That’s partially because you all gave me the courage to be authentic and stand alone with my unpopular views. I’m ever grateful. The biggest compliment I can get is for my work to be shared with others. Happy reading!
I also have heard it said, that even the dopiest romance novel is better brain training than any program out there, because the novel forces the reader to be active, to do the work, to form the words "flick of the tail" in the head.
I noticed I get more done if my phone is off and in a cupboard or room away from me - just the presence alone is an atomic bomb on attention
There's this excellent video series talking about unbundling the phone (from a music POV):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou2dW4qebbw&list=PLhgVLgz7Hja5g8uZRXm3n-gu4aPjmtq1h