{"id":3122,"date":"2025-01-10T06:23:12","date_gmt":"2025-01-10T06:23:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/?p=3122"},"modified":"2025-01-10T06:23:14","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T06:23:14","slug":"the-decline-of-meaningful-leisure-in-the-internet-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/deep-work\/the-decline-of-meaningful-leisure-in-the-internet-age\/","title":{"rendered":"The Decline of Meaningful Leisure in the Internet Age"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Number of words: 531<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Bennett wrote about these issues more than a century ago. You might expect that in the intervening decades, a period in which this middle class exploded in size worldwide, our thinking about leisure time would have evolved. But it has not. If <a><\/a>anything, with the rise of the Internet and the low-brow attention economy it supports, the average forty-hour-a-week employee\u2014especially those in my tech-savvy Millennial generation\u2014has seen the quality of his or her leisure time remain degraded, consisting primarily of a blur of distracted clicks on least-common-denominator digital entertainment. If Bennett were brought back to life today, he\u2019d likely fall into despair at the lack of progress in this area of human development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To be clear, I\u2019m indifferent to the moral underpinnings behind Bennett\u2019s suggestions. His vision of elevating the souls and minds of the middle class by reading poetry and great books feels somewhat antiquated and classist. But the logical foundation of his proposal, that you both <em>should<\/em> and <em>can<\/em> make deliberate use of your time outside work, remains relevant today\u2014especially with respect to the goal of this rule, which is to reduce the impact of network tools on your ability to perform deep work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In more detail, in the strategies discussed so far in this rule, we haven\u2019t spent much time yet on a class of network tools that are particularly relevant to the fight for depth: entertainment-focused websites designed to capture and hold your attention for as long as possible. At the time of this writing, the most popular examples of such sites include the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Business Insider, and Reddit. This list will undoubtedly continue to evolve, but what this general category of sites shares is the use of carefully crafted titles and easily digestible content, often honed by algorithms to be maximally attention catching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Once you\u2019ve landed on one article in one of these sites, links on the side or bottom of the page beckon you to click on another, then another. Every available trick of human psychology, from listing titles as \u201cpopular\u201d or \u201ctrending,\u201d to the use of arresting photos, is used to keep you engaged. At this particular moment, for example, some of the most popular articles on BuzzFeed include, \u201c17 Words That Mean Something Totally Different When Spelled Backward\u201d and \u201c33 Dogs Winning at Everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These sites are especially harmful after the workday is over, where the freedom in your schedule enables them to become central to your leisure time. If you\u2019re waiting in line, or waiting for the plot to pick up in a TV show, or waiting to finish eating a meal, they provide a cognitive crutch to ensure you eliminate any chance of boredom. As I argued in Rule #2, however, such behavior is dangerous, as it weakens your mind\u2019s general ability to resist distraction, making deep work difficult later when you really want to concentrate. To make matters worse, these network tools are not something you join and therefore they\u2019re not something you can remove from your life by quitting (rendering the previous two strategies irrelevant). They\u2019re always available, just a<a><\/a> quick click away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Excerpted from page number 210-212 of \u201cDeep Work\u201d by Cal Newport.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Number of words: 531 Bennett wrote about these issues more than a century ago. You might expect that in the intervening decades, a period in which this middle class exploded in size worldwide, our thinking about leisure time would have evolved. But it has not. If anything, with the rise of the Internet and the &#8230; <a title=\"The Decline of Meaningful Leisure in the Internet Age\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/deep-work\/the-decline-of-meaningful-leisure-in-the-internet-age\/\" aria-label=\"More on The Decline of Meaningful Leisure in the Internet Age\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[49,57],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Decline of Meaningful Leisure in the Internet Age - BullsEye<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/deep-work\/the-decline-of-meaningful-leisure-in-the-internet-age\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Decline of Meaningful Leisure in the Internet Age - BullsEye\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Number of words: 531 Bennett wrote about these issues more than a century ago. 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