Quit social media | Cal Newport | TEDxTysons

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

'Deep work' will make you better at what you do. You will achieve more in less time and feel the sense of true fulfillment that comes from the mastery of a skill.

Cal Newport is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. In addition to studying the theoretical foundations of our digital age, Newport also writes about the impact of these technologies on the world of work. His most recent book, Deep Work, argues that focus is the new I.Q. in the modern workplace and that the ability to concentrate without distraction is becoming increasingly valuable. He previously wrote So Good They Can’t Ignore You, a book which debunks the long-held belief that "follow your passion" is good advice, and three popular books of unconventional advice for students.

You probably don't realize

that right now, you're actually
looking at something quite rare.

Because I am a millennial
computer scientist book author

standing on a TEDx stage,

and yet, I've never had
a social media account.

How this happened
was actually somewhat random.

Social media first came onto my radar
when I was at college,

my sophomore year of college,

this is when Facebook
arrived at our campus.

And at the time, which was
right after the first dotcom bust,

I had had a dorm room business,
I'd had to shut it down in the bust,

and then, suddenly, this other kid
from Harvard, named Mark,

had this product called Facebook
and people being excited about it.

So in sort of a fit of somewhat
immature professional jealousy,

I said, "I'm not going to use this thing.

I won't help this kid's business;
whatever's going to amount to."

As I go along my life,
I look up not long later,

and I see everyone I know
is hooked on this thing.

And from the clarity you can get

when you have some objectivity,
some perspective on it,

I realized this seems
a little bit dangerous.

So I never signed up.

I've never had
a social media account since.

So I'm here for two reasons;
I want to deliver two messages.

The first message I want to deliver

is that even though I've never had
a social media account,

I'm OK, you don't have to worry.

It turns out I still have friends,

I still know what's going on in the world;

as a computer scientist

I still collaborate with people
all around the world,

I'm still regularly exposed
serendipitously to interesting ideas,

and I rarely describe myself
as lacking entertainment options.

So I've been OK,
but I'd go even farther and say

not only I am OK without social media
but I think I'm actually better off.

I think I'm happier, I think I find
more sustainability in my life,

and I think I've been
more successful professionally

because I don't use social media.

So my second goal here on stage

is try to convince more of you
to believe the same thing.

Let's see if I could actually
convince more of you

that you too would be better off
if you quit social media.

So, if the theme of this TEDx event
is "Future Tense,"

I guess, in other words,
this would be my vision of the future,

would be one in which fewer people
actually use social media.

That's a big claim,
I think I need to back it up.

So I thought, what I would do

is take the three most
common objections I hear

when I suggest to people
that they quit social media,

and then for each of these objections,
I'll try to defuse the hype

and see if I can actually
push in some more reality.

This is the first
most common objection I hear.

That's not a hermit,

that's actually a hipster web developer
down from 8th Street; I'm not sure.

Hipster or hermit?
Sometimes it's hard to tell.

This first objection goes as follows,

"Cal, social media is one
of the fundamental technologies

of the 21st century.

To reject social media would be
an act of extreme [bloodism].

It would be like riding to work
on a horse or using a rotary phone.

I can't take
such a big stance in my life."

My reaction to that objection
is I think that is nonsense.

Social media is not
a fundamental technology.

It leverages
some fundamental technologies,

but it's better understood as this.

Which is to say,
it's a source of entertainment,

it's an entertainment product.

The way that technologist
Jaron Lanier puts it

is that these companies
offer you shiny treats

in exchange for minutes of your attention
and bites of your personal data,

which can then be packaged up and sold.

So to say that you don't use social media
should not be a large social stance,

it's just rejecting one form
of entertainment for others.

There should be no more
controversial than saying,

"I don't like newspapers,
I like to get my news from magazines,"

or "I prefer to watch cable series,
as opposed to network television series."

It's not a major political
or social stance

to say you don't use this product.

My use of the slot machine image
up here also is not accidental

because if you look a little bit closer
at these technologies,

it's not just that they're
a source of entertainment

but they're a somewhat
unsavory source of entertainment.

We now know that many
of the major social media companies

hire individuals
called attention engineers,

who borrow principles
from Las Vegas casino gambling,

among other places,

to try to make these products
as addictive as possible.

That is the desired
use case of these products:

is that you use it in an addictive fashion
because that maximizes the profit

that can be extracted
from your attention and data.

So it's not a fundamental technology,

it's just a source of entertainment,
one among many,

and it's somewhat unsavory
if you look a little bit closer.

Here's the second common objection I hear

when I suggest that people
quit social media.

The objection goes as follows,

"Cal, I can't quit social media

because it is vital to my success
in the 21st century economy.

If I do not have a well-cultivated
social media brand,

people won't know who I am,
people won't be able to find me,

opportunities won't come my way,

and I will effectively
disappear from the economy."

Again my reaction is once again:

this objection also is nonsense.

I recently published this book

that draws on multiple
different strands of evidence

to make the point that,
in a competitive 21st century economy,

what the market values

is the ability to produce things
that are rare and are valuable.

If you produce something
that's rare and valuable,

the market will value that.

What the market dismisses,
for the most part,

are activities that are easy to replicate
and produce a small amount of value.

Well, social media use is the epitome

of an easy to replicate activity
that doesn't produce a lot of value;

it's something that any six-year-old
with a smartphone can do.

By definition,

the market is not going to give
a lot of value to those behaviors.

It's instead going to reward
the deep, concentrated work required

to build real skills and to apply
those skills to produce things

- like a craftsman -

that are rare and that are valuable.

To put it another way:
if you can write an elegant algorithm,

if you can write a legal brief
that can change a case,

if you can write a thousand words of prose

that's going to fixate
a reader right to the end;

if you can look at a sea of ambiguous data

and apply statistics,
and pull out insights

that could transform a business strategy,

if you can do these type of activities
which require deep work,

that produce outcomes
that are rare and valuable,

people will find you.

You will be able to write your own ticket,

and build the foundation of a meaningful
and successful professional life,

regardless of how many
Instagram followers you have.

This is the third comment objection I hear

when I suggest to people
that they quit social media;

in some sense, I think it might be
one of the most important.

This objection goes as follows,

"Cal, maybe I agree, maybe you're right;
it's not a fundamental technology.

Maybe using social media is not
at the core of my professional success.

But, you know what?

It's harmless, I have some fun on it
- weird: Twitter's funny -

I don't even use it that much,
I'm a first adopter,

it's kind of interesting to try it out,

and maybe I might miss out
something if I don't use it.

What's the harm?"

Again, I look back and I say:
this objection also is nonsense.

In this case, what it misses is
what I think is a very important reality

that we need to talk about more frankly,

which is that social media brings with it

multiple, well-documented,
and significant harms.

We actually have to confront
these harms head-on

when trying to make decisions

about whether or not
we embrace this technology

and let it into our lives.

One of these harms
that we know this technology brings

has to do with your professional success.

I just argued before
that the ability to focus intensely,

to produce things
that are rare and valuable,

to hone skills the market place value on,

that this is
what will matter in our economy.

But right before that,

I argued that social media tools
are designed to be addictive.

The actual designed
desired-use case of these tools

is that you fragment your attention
as much as possible

throughout your waking hours;

that's how these tools
are designed to use.

We have a growing amount
of research which tells us

that if you spend
large portions of your day

in a state of fragmented attention -

large portions of your day,
breaking up your attention,

to take a quick glance, to just check,
- "Let me quickly look at Instagram" -

that this can permanently reduce
your capacity for concentration.

In other words, you could
permanently reduce your capacity

to do exactly the type of deep effort

that we're finding to be
more and more necessary

in an increasingly competitive economy.

So social media use is not harmless,

it can actually have
a significant negative impact

on your ability to thrive in the economy.

I'm especially worried about this
when we look at the younger generation,

which is the most saturated
in this technology.

If you lose your ability
to sustain concentration,

you're going to become less and less
relevant to this economy.

There's also psychological harms
that are well documented

that social media brings,
that we do need to address.

We know from the research literature
that the more you use social media,

the more likely you are
to feel lonely or isolated.

We know that the constant exposure

to your friends carefully curated,
positive portrayals of their life

can leave you to feel inadequate,
and can increase rates of depression.

And something I think we're going to be
hearing more about in the near future

is that there's a fundamental mismatch

between the way our brains are wired

and this behavior
of exposing yourself to stimuli

with intermittent rewards
throughout all of your waking hours.

It's one thing to spend a couple of hours
at a slot machine in Las Vegas,

but if you bring one with you,
and you pull that handle all day long,

from when you wake up to when you go
to bed: we're not wired from it.

It short-circuits the brain,

and we're starting to find
it has actual cognitive consequences,

one of them being this sort of
pervasive background hum of anxiety.

The canary in the coal mine for this issue
is actually college campuses.

If you talk to mental health experts
on college campuses, they'll tell you

that along with the rise
of ubiquitous smartphone use

and social media use
among the students on the campus,

came an explosion of anxiety-related
disorders on those campuses.

That's the canary in the coal mine.

This type of behavior
is a mismatch for our brain wiring

and can make you feel miserable.

So there's real cost to social media use;

which means when you're trying to decide,
"Should I use this or not?",

saying it's harmless is not enough.

You actually have to identify
a significantly positive, clear benefit

that can outweigh these potential,
completely non-trivial harms.

People often ask,

"OK, but what is life like
without social media?"

That can actually be
a little bit scary to think about.

According to people
who went through this process,

there can be a few difficult weeks.

It actually is like a true detox process.

The first two weeks can be uncomfortable:

you feel a little bit anxious,
you feel like you're missing a limb.

But after that, things settle down,

and actually, life after social media
can be quite positive.

There's two things I can report back
from the world of no social media use.

First, it can be quite productive.

I'm a professor at a research institution,
I've written five books,

I rarely work past 5 pm on a weekday.

Part of the way I'm trying
to able to pull that off

is because it turns out,
if you treat your attention with respect,

- so you don't fragment it;
you allow it to stay whole,

you preserve your concentration -

when it comes time to work

you can do one thing after another,
and do it with intensity,

and intensity can be traded for time.

It's surprising how much
you can get done in a eight-hour day

if you're able to give each thing
intense concentration after another.

Something else I can report back
from life without social media

is that outside of work,
things can be quite peaceful.

I often joke I'd be very comfortable
being a 1930s farmer,

because if you look at my leisure time,

I read the newspaper
while the sun comes up;

I listen to baseball on the radio;

I honest-to-god sit in a leather chair

and read hardcover books at night
after my kids go to bed.

It sounds old-fashioned,
but they were onto something back then.

It's actually a restorative, peaceful way
to actually spend your time out of work.

You don't have
the constant hum of stimuli,

and the background hum of anxiety
that comes along with that.

So life without social media
is really not so bad.

If you pull together these threads,
you see my full argument

that not everyone, but certainly
much more people than right now,

much more people
should not be using social media.

That's because we can first, to summarize,

discard with the main concerns

that it's a fundamental
technology you have to use.

Nonsense: it's a slot machine
in your phone.

We can discard with this notion
that you won't get a job without it.

Nonsense: anything a six-year-old
with a smartphone can do

is not going to be
what the market rewards.

And then I emphasized the point
that there's real harms with it.

So it's not just harmless.

You really would have to have
a significant benefit

before you would say
this trade-off is worth it.

Finally I noted,
that life without social media:

there's real positives associated with it.

So I'm hoping that when many of you
actually go through this same calculus,

you'll at least consider
the perspective I'm making right now,

which is: many more people
would be much better off

if they didn't use this technology.

Some of you might disagree,

some of you might have scathing
but accurate critiques

of me and my points,

and of course, I welcome
all negative feedback.

I just ask that you direct
your comments towards Twitter.

Thank you.

(Applause)