I'm honestly surprised at the amount of reactionary responses on this thread. Everyone is so quick to take up arms against this man because he's systematically eliminating distractions from his day to day. Some people are making wild jumps from point A to point X -- postulating that he'll be friendless and alone, telling him that he's selfish, theorizing that it's not going to work, calling him a robot.
None of us are in Matt's situation. Stop projecting your moral compass, fears, and/or insecurities on him.
If it works, I envy his ability to cut out noise from the signal.
The vile lie of social: that we're all 'connected' to one another, when we're really mostly just typing text back and forth. And most of that communication is noise, status-signaling, or self-promotional.
It's exhausting.
There's nothing normal about ingesting loads of human opinions on the most trivial facts several times a day.
I realized this recently while pondering "The Wisdom of the Crowd/Cloud":
Using a (inter)net to fish out all the wisdom of the crowd mainly brings all the most common opinions up to the level of common sense. It's only additive to that niveau; it doesn't extend to brilliance. The wonderful human collaborations, like GNU/Linux? Those are created by a concentrated coterie, just as most other impressive creations. Surely, the web has catalyzed them, but they were strong anyway, not the result of amplified ignorance. Expecting a shotgun approach to advance beyond common sense means using a additional filter to except those ideas which do not rise to the level of common sense, and therefore, is more work.
I'm sure humans, pre-media, exchanged numerous opinions about things for much of their days and evenings, but they weren't work. Work was toil, solitary endeavors, and collaboration with mostly familiar people and a few strangers (imagine a marketplace with travelers). Now, with "social media," opinions have become work, and as you say, exhausting.
There is no "wisdom" of the crowd/cloud. There's only the collective consensus which is, by definition, mediocre. True progress requires unconventional thinking and slightly obsessive qualities which are often rejected. Additionally, the burden of the work itself is extremely unevenly distributed. (A lot of my OSS work seems more like people requesting features rather than actually, you know, implementing them for themselves and submitting a pull.)
Another way to phrase this is: show me one great thing the collective crowd has created. Just one! We have thousands of examples of brilliant individuals, who, working alone for long (and often seemingly fruitless) hours produce incredible works of engineering, art, mathematics, etc.
These opinions are slightly taboo; as they cast doubt on the value of our 'connections.'
None of us are in Matt's situation. Stop projecting your moral compass, fears, and/or insecurities on him.
If it works, I envy his ability to cut out noise from the signal.