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In How to Do Nothing O’Dell, an artist and writer, questions our society’s definition of what counts as “productive”:Į inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Rather than achieving this through sheer self-control, he suggests “constructing an environment that does not tempt you all the time.” In Joy of Missing Out, Brinkmann, a philosopher, argues that the path to happiness is not in acquiring more but wanting less. A digital declutter is an audit of your entire digital life, followed by removing or reorganizing everything into a simpler, more secure, and more backed up system.
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This double-edged sword was brought home for me recently after reading three books, each about building one’s life around less: Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, Jenny O’Dell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, and Svend Brinkmann’s Joy of Missing Out: The Art of Self-Restraint in the Age of Excess. The flip side of all that digital abundance is that we often feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and burned out from it all.
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Our digital lives today are seemingly limitless worlds of people to follow, music to stream, articles to read, and so on.
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