You travel to the tropics and arrive at your beachfront lodging. Tired, you take a 20-minute nap. You awaken and decide to go out into the hot sun. All your stuff is laid out before you, as in this photo. Which of these items do you reach for first—before touching any of the other items?

Don’t think about it too much. Just look at the photo, pretend the stuff is yours, and envision reaching for one of your things. What do you grab?

If you grabbed your phone—so you could check whether you’d gotten any texts, emails, or social media notifications during the past 20 minutes—you may, according to Cal Newport in his most recent book, suffer from a particularly subtle, invidious, pervasive, and modern addiction.

Three years ago, Newport brought us the book Deep Work, which elucidates truths about the human brain, as regards getting things done. As it turns out, to be maximally productive, we need periods of deep work—that is, sustained concentration on difficult tasks—but also breaks from deep work. Trouble comes when people’s schedules become unbalanced one way or the other. For most people, the scales tip toward too much time doing mindless things like Internet surfing, and not enough time in sustained concentration.

In his newest book, Newport examines the causes behind why so many people have difficulty carving out time for deep work. Unsurprisingly, he identifies digital devices, their applications and apps, and how we incorporate them into our days as key culprits. Also unsurprisingly, he uncovers evidence that large, web-based corporations that profit off people’s time (through advertising revenue) actively strive to foster addiction among their users. Newport then recommends remedies for us hapless addicts (and I def include myself in that category!).

The 2019 book is called Digital Minimalism. In its opening pages, Newport defines the term digital minimalism:

“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.”

FOMO is not permitted in Newport’s philosophical world! To cure readers of its pull, he recommends taking a one-month hiatus from all nonessential digital use. Only then, he says, can one break the compulsive habit and gain enough perspective to make rational decisions on how to reincorporate nonessential digital activities into one’s daily life.

And so, I took the month-long journey. I did not use social media for the month of February, with some exceptions for essential activities. For example, I manage the social media accounts for the company I work for; naturally, I continued to perform this paid work. There were also instances in which I needed to log in to the sites to access information or communicate with people whom I could not conveniently contact another way. In addition, I deleted some of my most tempting phone apps and used only my laptop to access those sites. I also turned off, or restricted by time of day, my phone notifications. And I used an app blocker to prevent me from accessing certain apps at certain times of day.

I wish I could say that taking this journey cured me. I still struggle to control my urge to check, check, check, all day long. I am still experimenting with different phone settings and personal codes of conduct, in an attempt to hold on to the biggest benefits of owning a smart phone, while also avoiding disruption to more important life activities. However, even though digital minimalism is still, for me, an unrealized goal, I have seen big improvements in my quality of life. I do have more time in my day when I’m not being constantly sucked into the digital app vortex. I do feel better able to concentrate on deep work tasks. And the next time I take an actual journey, maybe—just maybe!—I’ll reach for the flip-flops first.

Have you taken any minimalist journeys lately?

What do Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics and David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College (known as the “This Is Water” speech) have in common?

Both of these famous philosophies, according to Matthew B. Crawford in his book The World Beyond Your Head, are faulty—and for the same reason.

It’s a bold claim. Crawford attempts to topple two towering figures of Western culture and thought in one fell swoop! So let’s back up a sec and analyze what Kant’s and Wallace’s philosophies, in these instances, are. Then we can delve into why Crawford thinks they are wrong.

Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysics of Freedom

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a German philosopher famous for a philosophy called the categorical imperative. He states that morality exists beyond the realm of the everyday world, and can be derived through reason alone. The moral law, he says, is categorically (“unconditionally”) imperative (“crucial and essential”).

Crawford points out that Kant held a mind thinking rationally, in an ideal state, in far higher esteem than a mind grappling with the way things are in the messy, real world:

“Kant builds a high wall between the empirical world and the purely intellectual, where we discover a priori moral laws. Reasons to act must come only from the latter if we are to be free, and the will is to remain pure, ‘unconditioned’ by anything external to it. . . . To be rational is, for Kant, precisely not to be situated in the world.”

David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” Commencement Speech

As those who know me well know, I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace (1962–2008). Infinite Jest was well worth the struggle to read. I have also enjoyed and marveled at the brilliance of many of his other works, fictional and nonfictional. However, I was distinctly unimpressed by his work—for the only time ever—when encountering, ten years ago, the commencement speech he delivered on May 21, 2005: and for the same reasons Crawford cites.

Even ten years later—and I remember it very well: it was exactly ten years ago, give or take a few months, when my boss (at the time) printed the speech and gave it to me, as a benefactory gesture, an offering* of moral guidance from mentor to mentee, and which I duly read, but did not duly (oops) compliment, nor, however, criticize, because, after all, who criticizes David Foster Wallace?!!

But I seem to have gotten off track. As I was saying, even ten years later, I distinctly remember the bit in the speech about the annoyance of grocery shopping. Wallace opines that if you are engaged in one of the many frustrating activities of modern life—such as grocery shopping, after a long day at work, in an ugly and crowded supermarket, when all you want to do is go home and rest, but everything is annoying and taking too long, etc.—that you should remember that you can always control what you are thinking.

Here’s what Crawford has to say about this:

“Wallace’s core suggestion in the speech is that ‘you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.’ . . . His solution is thus emblematic of the problem we are addressing in this book: we have an uncertain grasp of the world as something with a reality of its own.”

In other words, Wallace, in this speech, held a mind thinking rationally, in an ideal state, in far higher esteem than a mind grappling with the way things are in the messy, real world.

Matthew B. Crawford’s Praise of the World Beyond Your Head

I believe in the power of the mind, thinking rationally; but I also concur with Crawford that thinking in an idealized bubble is not enough. There’s a real world to contend with out there! If the deep, rational thinkers aren’t up for working to make a difference . . . whom does that leave?

Crawford titled his book The World Beyond Your Head. His thesis is that we should work to apply our minds to real things, in the real world, despite the many powers that be and cultural conceptions guiding us in less grounded—and more illusory—directions. This quote of his is buried in a footnote, but it’s one of my favorites in the whole book:

“Wisdom is impossible without biography.”

The mind is not an empty shopping cart, hovering in an imaginary space. It has a history. It has been filled and emptied a bit, filled a lot more and emptied a bit more. It has traveled the aisles again and again and again. It has been knocked around quite a lot, but it keeps going. It keeps moving. It keeps engaging. And the more it moves and engages, the fuller it becomes.

With what real-world activities will you fill your cart today, this week, next year?

*I thought I'd throw a footnote in here, just for good measure. (RIP DFW.)

Do you remember having had, as a child, sudden realizations about who you were and what life was about?

I do. I have many childhood memories: of picking strawberries, catching grasshoppers and roly-polies, making mud pies . . . and having kid epiphanies.

Kid epiphanies can be empowering, frightening, or merely evocative of curiosity . . . but they are surely always accompanied by strong emotions.

One of the best reasons to read Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury is that you will encounter many, many brilliant depictions of kid (and also adult!) epiphanies. Some serious existential life talk happens in this book . . . and yet, you don’t need to be a philosophy major to understand it. You just need to stretch your memory back to childhood.

Here’s one kid epiphany that occurs near the beginning of the novel. Actually, it’s what one might call a pre-epiphany, the realization that a realization is about to occur:

“Dad laughed and lunch was over and they moved again into the shadows to find fox grapes and the tiny wild strawberries, bent down, all three of them, hands coming and going, the pails getting heavy, and Douglas holding his breath, thinking, Yes, yes, it’s near again! Breathing on my neck, almost! Don’t look! Work. Just pick, fill up the pail. If you look you’ll scare it off. Don’t lose it this time! But how, do you bring it around here where you can see it, stare it right in the eye? How? How?”

I won’t give away what the realization is, but I will say that I experienced something similar as a kid.

What kid epiphanies do you remember having?

I don’t often buy books without consulting online reviews or a friend. When I do, it feels like I have a delicious secret.

Having confronted no direct evidence that another human had encountered the book Perfect Me by Heather Widdows, I felt like a voyager alone, making a profound discovery that I hoped to one day share with the folks back home.

My feeling of secrecy was compounded by the fact that the book’s introduction launches into a discussion of philosophical concepts that don’t usually arise in ordinary conversation. And so, like an intrepid explorer, both exhilarated by and afraid of marching into an exotic place, I read this passage:

“It is important to remember that one thing worse than locating the self in the body is locating the self in the mind and neglecting embodiment . . . (the ghost in the machine). . . . As embodied beings, appearance—beauty—should matter, but it should not be all that matters or what matters most.”

Thus Widdows begins her book by reminding her readers (or, for all I knew, just me?) about Descartes’ philosophy declaring a dualism of mind and body. Today, this idea is often referenced through the term the ghost in the machine. Is the ghost (a.k.a. the mind or consciousness) a separate phenomenon from the machine (a.k.a. the body and brain)?

Sidestepping that debate, Widdows reminds us (or only me?) that, just as it’s not a great idea to live in your head and ignore your body and everything else in the world, it’s also not a great idea to focus solely on your body and what others think of it, to the exclusion of your intellect, emotional strength, values, and so on. She fears that, in the age of the Internet, appearances matter too much: that the primacy of machinelike attributes is making ghostlike attributes increasingly irrelevant.

Widdows declares, sensibly enough, that we should strike a balance when it comes to beauty. A machine without any hint of a ghost is like a doll. She may be beautiful . . . but she’s lifeless.

So I did it—just couldn’t help it!—I judged a book by its cover and title and nothing else.

An ad in a magazine caught my eye. The cover was a bold splash of color, which on closer inspection turned out to be face paint on a face. The title was Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal. I was intrigued.

My local bookstore didn’t have it in stock, but I found it at the bookstore across town. After the briefest of flips through the pages, I bought it.

As it turns out, Perfect Me is a scholarly work by British philosopher Heather Widdows. The style is so scholarly, in fact, that I remain pleasantly astonished that it was in stock at a bookstore not attached to a university. The work is about the judging of people, including others and oneself, by how well they conform to modern—and, Widdows argues, increasingly global—beauty ideals. She argues that we should not judge people for either conforming to norms or not conforming to norms:

“Women recognize the extreme costs of rejecting all beauty norms,” she writes, pointing out that adhering to beauty standards can offer real benefits, from career and social successes to the joys of self-improvement and communal bonding. On the other hand, not adhering to beauty standards can save significant time, money, and effort; be better for one’s health; and promote more positive societal values.

Do you sometimes find yourself, despite yourself, judging others or yourself (or books!) superficially?