An open letter to India’s youth: Get off that smartphone. It can destroy you

All three of those are forms of media.

It's especially liberating to those young of us to have grown up with the phone always on all the time. Never get to hang out after school without everyone wanting to know where you are. Never get to roam the neighborhood without everyone wanting to know where you are. Never getting to encounter danger without extreme societal pressure to take the least risks and encounter the least amount of strange and difficult situations possible. Never getting to rely on your own ingenuity and tact because the phone can always answer better and faster. The phone does improve life in some ways, but it also strips us of others. If you had lived your adolescence without the god-mind constantly watching you, you might not understand what it's like to grow up these days. I'm sure you had your own difficulties but I wouldn't comment on those like I understand them.

I frightens me that we've set up our society to value perfect productivity over all else. It's unhealthy, at least for some. Maybe even life was worse on the whole before the connectivity singularity stole our privacy and our free time, but you cant say it was worse in every way. Why are we opposed to allowing others the ability to gain that perspective? Why should we tell someone that the way they discovered more of their humanity is pointless because it might "waste time". Do we meditate? Do we rest? I could just as easily say that spending all your time on your phone on a bus or transit is just as much wasting your time as is sitting and staring at the ceiling. The mind never shuts off. Could I ask anyone to repeat to me the important information they learned from that post on their bus transit 3 Tuesdays ago? Maybe they did learn something important and do remember. But maybe I came to a realization that I wouldn't have, without giving myself the space to think. Or maybe I met this beautiful girl who I just had my first date with. Or maybe I just sat and stopped stressing about everything that's bad in the world. Maybe I took some time to breathe so that I could be a more pleasant person for my child after a difficult day of work.

You could say that these things are all achievable through the phone and I think we can all agree there are marked differences between conversations over text and those in person, between an interesting point we read and an epiphany that we came to ourselves.

I don't want to be hypocritical tell you that your way is wrong or that your perspective is incorrect, just maybe a little push to think about what it would be like to be someone else. Who might have written that post? What might their life be like to make them think those things? What in my life has lead me to believe what I do? In my experience, these are the kinds of thoughts I don't have through the phone.

As an addendum, I'd say that there are many many uses for the phone, I would guess that you don't have a snapchat and an instagram to check and constantly worry about. But these days you can't be social or even participate in high school (college to a slightly lesser extent) without having one or both of those things (probably even newer ones I don't know about). It's not necessarily just freedom from google maps, but from the panopticon and extreme pressures to portray your life in a certain way.

You can browse Hacker News on Apple Watch.

- Sent from my Apple Watch

This not only came off as condescending, but also desperate and whiny.

The first paragraph (paraphrased) “I am writing in a BIG newspaper, and I was taught that when someone writes in A Real Serious Newspaper, I deserve to be read”

I look at newspapers like churches. Churches and newspapers are businesses in some ways, they exist because they meet the needs of their customers. I went to church as a little kid but I don’t as a man because it does not meet my needs, I have community in other places and I don’t need old white dudes yelling at me that I am living my life “wrong” (aka, not the way they think life should be lived).

Also, from an intellectual level this argument is extremely boring and stale. It has literally been made continuously throughout time since the Greeks and the beginning of our records of recorded discourse, and was probably made too before we have records.

I think you’re misunderstanding the suggestion. The OP isn’t claiming the things you describe are dumb or wasteful or that you should never carry your phone. The suggestion is that sometimes doing without it can teach you interesting things, including about your phone.

I’m an avid backpacker (>60 nights on the trail most years) and I experience the same phenomenon (I don’t mean the phone, which is just a deadweight in the country). I sometimes just do without some piece of equipment and find out I’m fine. You often don’t need a tent, even in the snow.

It turns out less clutter makes much of the experience more enjoyable; you have fewer decisions to make and more “attention” to pay to other things which could be where you are or it could be something in your head you brought with you. It can also be a real PITN if, say, it’s raining and you foolishly don’t have shelter.

Do I bring a tent? Often. But it’s ok if I don’t.

And what is the phone but an infinitely large backpack full of clutter? Worse, much of that clutter is actively designed to distract you and imbue FOMO (suggesting new things precisely as you complete the old, ruining the cognitive desire for “completion”). Phones are great and I always carry mine around in town. But losing it would be inconvenient, not devastating.