We’re starting to become aware that being the victim of an attention

7 min readDec 5, 2020

Online shopping is only becoming more powerful. Online shopping was predicted to comprise 54% of all sales in 2021… and that was before a pandemic shut down half the world. No doubt that gave online shopping a huge growth spurt.Becoming a digital minimalist is easy. Unlike decluttering your house, which can be an effort that takes days, weeks, or months, it’s often very easy to become a digital minimalist in just a few days.Factfulness is strong. It is the project of a man who made it his life’s work. Like literally, Hans Rosling wrote it while he was on his death bed. It was LITERALLY the last thing he chose to do before he left the planet. It points a finger at all the fear-mongering news channels and hate-mongering politics and proves them wrong by showing that numbers, actually say that we are doing quite well as a planet and species. There is hope. There is in fact not just hope but a million reasons to celebrate. You will learn here how to show the full picture so that people can decide whether to be happy or sad at the happenings. On a global scale, turns out it is not that obvious what is “good”.

For instance, did you know that while most people can accurately guess the amount of time they spent online shopping, they cannot accurately guess the amount of money they spent. Studies show people routinely spend twice as much online as they think they did. When you consider that 77% of online window shoppers end up making an impulse purchase, it’s not hard to imagine how.

As we’ve become increasingly aware of during the pandemic, much of our spending is driven by our enjoyment of online shopping. But online environments drive more spending than we think.

For this reason, digital minimalists are ruthless about keeping their attention for themselves. Digital minimalists don’t want advertisement platforms making them angry or feel bad about themselves so platform owners can make more money. They keep their attention for themselves, so they can make their own lives great.

In the late 1980s, somebody bought a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) from a physical store, brought it home, and presumably enjoyed it for untold years. The console, with serial number N12180601, suffered greatly in the decades to come, eventually landing on eBay in a condition that can only be described as “junk.” The seller, located in Angleton, Texas, was asking a modest price of $11.99 for the system, which was not only nonfunctional and damaged, but missing a plethora of parts.

Covered in dirt and grease, partially disassembled, burned by ill-placed cigarettes, missing vital internal components, and sporting bright white paint drips, the console was a mess. If your smartphone, TV, or modern game console were in this kind of condition you’d simply throw it out and buy a replacement. But the NES was built in the 1980s, back when companies didn’t care nearly as much about making money off repairs, and as such, it was salvageable with my bare minimum of technological know-how and my very questionable soldering skills.

Levitt is an eccentric economist and Dubner is a witty journalist. Needless to say, Freakonomics is a controversially delightful book. Levitt chooses the most random-arse topics on the planet to apply data science to. Why? In the words of George Mallory, “because it is there”.

Thinking fast and slow is a brilliant book on cognitive biases written by noble prize winning economist Daniel Kahnemann. As an analyst, it is not just enough to know numbers but also what your client would choose given all the options, therefore how to package information not just report it. It tells a lot about our emotional tendencies as primates which clearly surpass our logic halves the brain. If it is of any consolation, you will learn the next time you make an illogical choice, that you are predisposed by evolution to do so, and may be, if you’re smart enough, will choose otherwise.

“The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your ‘likes’ is the new smoking.”

But because digital minimalists spend less time online, and spend it more mindfully, they aren’t making these impulse purchases. They keep their money in their pocket, where they can use it as a savings fund or as a way to invest in their next small business or adventure.

You can’t make a plan for how to spend time on your digital devices if you don’t know how you spend time on your digital devices. So the first thing you need to do is get a sense for how you spend time on them. The best way to do that is to install time trackers. Here are links to screen time tracking software:

Malcolm Gladwell never disappoints. He is a good journalist and a great storyteller. At the end of reading a Gladwell book, you may or may not have learnt something new, but you will definitely collect some proofs for what you already knew. He puts lay-man data analytics on tens of social situations until you can nod your head only in the direction of agreement. It convinces you that you are not good enough but great, and gets your proof with data science from the most random places on earth. If you ask the correct questions, there are answers everywhere. This is what you will learn from the book.We behave differently when people are watching and when people are not watching. The tone of the book is outright “spray-spit your drink funny!”. Just from the topics Davidowitz chooses to write about, such as brutally honest questions people type into google. It might reinforce some stereotypes such as whether men or women are more interested in pleasing the opposite sex orally (umm, if you know what I mean), and whether we vote like we say we do, and how different age groups fare in priorities at different stages in life. This book is pure humor masquerading as science.Malcolm Gladwell never disappoints. He is a good journalist and a great storyteller. At the end of reading a Gladwell book, you may or may not have learnt something new, but you will definitely collect some proofs for what you already knew. He puts lay-man data analytics on tens of social situations until you can nod your head only in the direction of agreement. It convinces you that you are not good enough but great, and gets your proof with data science from the most random places on earth. If you ask the correct questions, there are answers everywhere. This is what you will learn from the book.

We’re starting to become aware that being the victim of an attention

Written by Mohiddit

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