Digital Minimalism

Leisure Lesson #2:
Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.
SUPERCHARGED SOCIALITY
Another common property of high-quality leisure is its ability to support rich social
interactions. Journalist David Sax witnessed the power of this property firsthand when an
unusual café named Snakes & Lattes opened down the street from his Toronto apartment.
This café didn’t serve alcohol and offered no Wi-Fi, the food was forgettable and the chairs
uncomfortable, and it cost five dollars just to enter. But as Sax reports in his 2016 book,
The Revenge of Analog, on weekends the café’s 120 seats would easily fill, with the line to
enter spilling out onto the sidewalk. The wait for a table could be up to three hours.
The secret to Snakes & Lattes’ success is that it’s a board game café: you enter with a
group of friends, are assigned a table, and then can select any game you want to play from
the café’s extensive library. If you need help, a game sommelier can make
recommendations. The success of this café is somewhat puzzling, as analog games were
supposed to disappear in a digital world. Why would you push plastic trinkets on a piece of
cardboard when you could fight photorealistic ogres in a multiplayer video game like
World of Warcraft? But they haven’t. People are more eager than ever before to play
Scrabble with neighbors, or trash-talk co-workers over poker, or line up in the Toronto cold
for a table at Snakes & Lattes. The classic games that were popular in the pre-digital 1980s
—Monopoly, Scrabble—remain popular sellers today, while the internet is fueling
innovations in new game design (one of the most popular categories on Kickstarter is
board games), leading to a renaissance in smarter, European-style strategy games—a
movement best exemplified by the megahit Settlers of Catan, which has sold more than 22
million copies worldwide since it was first published in Germany in the mid-1990s.
David Sax argues that this popularity is due in large part to the social experience of
playing these games. “Tabletop gaming creates a unique social space apart from the digital
world,” he writes. “It is the antithesis of the glossy, streaming waterfalls of information and
marketing that masquerade as relationships on social networks.” When you sit down at a
table to play a game in person with other people, you’re exposing yourself to what the game
theorist Scott Nicholson calls “a rich multimedia, 3D interaction.” You scrutinize your
opponent’s body language in search of clues about their strategy and try to project yourself
into their mind to understand what they might be plotting in their next moves, searching
for what Sax calls “the signal flares of our most complex emotions.” The sting of defeat is
all the more real when you sit across from your smiling victor while packing up the pieces,
but because the defeat is within the structured confines of a game, it fades, allowing you to
practice the complex inter-social dance required to defuse the tension. We’re wired for
these master-level social chess matches, and games allow us to push these abilities to their
limits—a thrilling experience.
Playing games also provides permission for what we can call supercharged socializing—
interactions with higher intensity levels than are common in polite society. Sax describes
the excited chatter and loud belly laughs he encountered at Snakes & Lattes during a busy

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night. This observation doesn’t surprise me. Every couple of months, a group of dads I
know get together to (poorly) play poker. These sessions provide us an excuse to joke and
chat and vent for three hours. When a player in our game runs out of chips early, he always
sticks around for the rest of the game. It’s not really about the cards, just as playing Catan
at Snakes & Lattes is not really about building roads.
These benefits of old-fashioned, in-person playing help explain why even the fanciest
video games and shiniest mobile entertainments haven’t ruined the board game industry.
As Sax writes: “On a social level, video games are decidedly low bandwidth compared to the
experience of playing a game on a square of flat cardboard with another human being.”
Board games, of course, are not the only type of leisure that promote intense social
experiences. Another interesting intersection of leisure and interaction is emerging in the
world of health and exercise. Arguably one of the biggest trends in this sector is the “social
fitness” phenomenon, in which, as one sports industry analyst describes it, “fitness has
shifted from a private activity at the gym to a social interaction in the studio or on the
street.”
If you live in a city, you’ve probably seen groups who gather in the park to be put
through boot-camp-style calisthenics by a barking instructor. The group I used to see
gather on a grass patch near my local Whole Foods consists of new mothers who arrange
themselves in a ring around their strollers. I don’t know if this group offers better fitness
results than the Planet Fitness gym that operates a few blocks down the road from this
location, but the social experience is almost certainly much richer. To meet with the same
group of women, who are all facing the same challenges of new motherhood, enables a level
of interaction and support that’s entirely missing when you walk into a fluorescent-lit gym
with your earbuds blaring.
Another popular group fitness organization is F3, which stands for Fitness, Fellowship
and Faith. F3 is only for men and is entirely volunteer led, with no money ever charged.
The concept is that you join or start a local group that meets several times a week for an
outdoor workout—rain or shine. Given that the workout leader is a position that rotates
among the group members, men aren’t drawn to F3 for expert fitness guidance. They’re
attracted to the social experience. This reality is evidenced by the almost comic level of
male camaraderie that members embrace (with a knowing nod). As the F3 website
explains:
For FNGs [new members], the swirl of inside-baseball lingo and jargon used at
your average F3 workout can be a bit confusing. Like, for instance, What’s an FNG
and why do people keep calling me that?
The site then provides a “lexicon” of F3 jargon that contains over a hundred different
alphabetized entries, many of which reference other entries, creating a complex recursive
morass. Case in point, the following definition from the lexicon:
BOBBY CREMINS (as in, to pull one): When a man Posts to one Workout, but
leaves after Startex to go to a different AO. Also, a non-Workout LIFO initiated by
the M or CBD.
To an FNG like me, this definition makes no sense. But then again, that’s the point. By
the time you do understand what it means to pull a Bobby Cremins, you’ll have earned a
satisfying sense of having been accepted by a tribe. This pursuit of inclusion is perhaps best
exemplified by the circle-of-trust ritual that ends each workout. During the ritual, each
participant gives their own name and their F3 nickname before offering some words of
wisdom or gratitude. If you’re new to the group, you’re given a nickname on the spot—an
initiation.
To some, these artificial rules and jargon might seem a little over the top, but its
effectiveness is undeniable. The first free F3 workout was led by co-founders David
Redding (nickname “Dredd”) and Tim Whitmire (nickname “OBT”) on the campus of a
Charlotte-area middle school in January 2011. Seven years later, there are over 1,200
groups operating around the country.

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The biggest success story from the social fitness phenomenon, however, is
unquestionably CrossFit. The first CrossFit gym (called a “box” in CrossFit jargon) opened
in 1996. There are now more than 13,000 boxes in over 120 countries. In the US, there’s
one CrossFit box for every two Starbucks—an incredible reach for a fitness brand.
When first encountered, CrossFit’s popularity confused industry insiders who for years
had focused relentlessly on price and services at their gyms. The typical CrossFit box is a
somewhat grimy, largely empty warehouse. The fitness equipment—often pushed to the
peripheries—would fit in well in a turn-of-the-century boxing gym: kettlebells, medicine
balls, ropes, wooden boxes, pull-up bars, and metal squat racks. You won’t find treadmills,
fancy cable machines, nice locker rooms, bright lights, or, God forbid, television screens.
It’s also really expensive. The Planet Fitness near my house costs $10 a month—a price that
includes free Wi-Fi. The CrossFit box near my house costs $210 a month, and if you ask
them about Wi-Fi, they’ll chase you out the door with a kettlebell.
The secret to CrossFit’s success is probably best captured by one of the most notable
differences between a CrossFit box and a standard gym: no one is wearing earphones. The
CrossFit fitness model is built around the workout of the day (or WOD)—which is typically
a high-intensity combination of functional movement exercises that you try to execute as
quickly as possible. Here’s a sample WOD from around the time I was first writing this
chapter:
3 rounds for time of:
60 squats
30 knees-to-elbows
30 ring push-ups
You’re not allowed to do the WOD on your own. There are instead a small number of
preselected times each day during which you can show up at your local box and execute the
WOD along with a group of other members and a supervising trainer. The social aspect of
the workout is crucial: you cheer on the group while they in turn cheer you on. This support
helps push people past their natural limits, which is important; a core belief of CrossFit is
that extreme intensity in a short period of time is superior to a large volume of exercise
over a long period. The social aspect of the WOD also helps create a strong sense of
community. Here’s how a former personal trainer turned CrossFit devotee describes the
experience: “The camaraderie of other members cheering me on to finish strong as I fought
for a few more reps during a WOD at [my CrossFit box] was an exhilarating feeling which I
never have experienced at any other fitness facility.” Greg Glassman, CrossFit’s outspoken
founder, captures the sense of rough-edged but intense camaraderie created by his fitness
movement by famously describing CrossFit as a “religion run by a biker gang.”
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The local new-mom boot camp, F3, and CrossFit are successful for the same reason as the
Snakes & Lattes board game café: they are leisure activities that enable the types of
energized and complex sociality that are otherwise rare in normal life. Board games and
social fitness are not the only leisure activities that can generate these social benefits. Other
examples include recreational sports leagues, most volunteer activities, or working with a
team on a group project, like fixing up an old boat or building a neighborhood skating rink.
The most successful social leisure activities share two traits. First, they require you to
spend time with other people in person. As emphasized, there’s a sensory and social
richness to real-world encounters that’s largely lost in virtual connections, so spending
time with your World of Warcraft clan doesn’t qualify. The second trait is that the activity
provides some sort of structure for the social interaction, including rules you have to
follow, insider terminology or rituals, and often a shared goal. As argued, these constraints
paradoxically enable more freedom of expression. Your CrossFit buddies will holler and
whoop, and give you emphatic high fives and sweaty hugs with a joyous enthusiasm that
would seem insane in most other contexts.

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We can now conclude this exploration by stating our third lesson about cultivating a
high-quality leisure life.