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Life before smartphones (2020)

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Re: Life before smartphones (2020)

#101

Post by bee_rider »

xwdv wrote: post #67
legrande wrote: post #40

You can still live like what's described in this article. Get yourself a dumbphone and a paper atlas, only pay with cash, avoid loyalty cards, read paper books, newspapers, etc Now and then I do that, just to switch off from our hyper-connected world. Switching off is the new peace of mind.

You can't really. People think it's simply a matter of getting rid of all the new tech. It isn't. You'll just be an anachronism. If the entire world isn't living the same way then you are only getting a superficial experience. Instead of living a genuine life, you are merely pretending for a while.

And the world knows that everybody has a smartphone. The last restaurant I went to had QR codes on the tables rather than paper menus. Of course, I could have asked for a paper menu but they didn't provide one by default and it would have added a new extra step. It isn't a big deal of course, just slightly slower restaurant service, but a million little deals like that add up to a hassle.

Re: Life before smartphones (2020)

#102

Post by nicoburns »

fud7r7rgtf wrote: post #86
lordnacho wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding photos: People our age only have a few childhood pictures, and they are warped by time on analog media. Those pictures of us as a kid look really old because they are naturally filtered. Soon people will wonder WTF old-pic filters are for, and some historian will have to explain why it's blurred and the colors are faded. Also why did people have clothes for each decade? Our kids, by contrast, have had pictu…

This seems at least somewhat cultural. My family was big on photo albums so nearly everything had at least a cheap disposable camera picture taken. It wasn't to the extent it is now but you still got multiple pictures per year for birthdays, holidays, school awards, extracurriculars like ymca sports, etc.

Yes, my grandmother has photo albums of all her grandchildren that she likes to bring out when we go to visit.

Re: Life before smartphones (2020)

#103

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

ladyattis wrote: post #94

>I assumed the police were telling the truth. I gotta laugh at this. Being someone that's from a working town and being from a working class family, cops weren't to be trusted. Cops lied even back then. Life wasn't better back then. The fact he seems to mock gender fluidity and polyamory really shows how much has changed for the better. People who didn't fit in with the gender constructs then were out of luck. Either…

Why is polyamory good?

Re: Life before smartphones (2020)

#104

Post by dTal »

munificent wrote: post #64
m0ngr31 wrote: post #17

I've been working my way through Seinfeld, and I realized most of the plot lines couldn't have happened if cell phones were commonplace back then.

I love how every horror movie in the past ten years has an obligatory scene to establish some flimsy reason why their cell phone doesn't work.

To the modern net-addict human, a non-functional cell phone is a horror all by itself.

Re: Life before smartphones (2020)

#105

Post by tboyd47 »

Things I enjoy about my life now, after having ditched my smartphone:

* Being fully into a stimulating conversation with friends for an hour or more, without constant interruptions for people to check their phones and then change the subject to something irrelevant and mildly infuriating.

* Being able to go for random/spontaneous drives with my family in the car and negotiate where we're going next without having to pull over to update Google Maps or hear the phone bark "Make a U-Turn" a zillion times until I do.

* Looking forward to social interactions being events where I enjoy doing things I like with people whose company I value, instead of a constant stream of bullshit, dueling ego trips, and disconnected conversations where both parties spend more time correcting the other person about what they meant than actually saying something.

* Waking up in the morning earlier than planned, full of energy, then sipping my coffee slowly as the sun rises, because I got good, restful sleep last night.

* Not having to face surprise criticism about something I said X days ago, because most of my statements are verbal, only reach the people they were intended to reach, and are not preserved after that.

* Not having to spend more time taking pictures of an activity than actually doing the activity.

* Not being in a constant state of annoyance all the time due to a distinct lack of time spent correcting typos, fat-fingering menus, waiting on things to load, and dismissing popups.

* Tasting true solitude (not just alone time) once in a while.

I could go on and on.

Re: Life before smartphones (2020)

#106

Post by heavyset_go »

lubujackson wrote: post #29
tboyd47 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always go back, any time! Get a dumb phone. It's great. Engage with others more authentically, more meaningfully, and more consistently.

You can't go back though, not really. Like if you got lost pre-smartphones you would find a gas station and the person there would rattle off a series of turns you had to memorize on the spot or would pull out an atlas and walk you through directions - this was normal. Now, they would look at you like an alien. There was a culture of nudging people along to the right place. Even as a kid you would be asked for direct…

As a side effect of being a big city, I'm constantly asked for directions that could easily be found by opening a smartphone. Hell, I do it myself sometimes, especially about things like bus or subway lines I'm not familiar with.

Re: Life before smartphones (2020)

#107

Post by JanMa »

About 2.5 years ago I struggled a bit with smartphone addiction. All the screen time limitation apps didn't work out for me and I decided the smartphone had to go. Instead I bought the then newly released Nokia 8110 4G, which is a so-called featurephone. This phone really worked out well for me.

It had great battery life of up to a week, WiFi, 4G and supported Whatsapp. You could take an occasional snapshot with it's 2MP camera and if you really wanted to, browse the internet on a tiny 2.45" screen. Also you could connect it with you Google account to sync contacts and email.

With these features it allowed me to do the beneficial things you use an internet connected phone for, like staying in touch with my peers and looking for directions. But I was no longer able to mindlessly scroll the internet for hours each day because it was just not possible.

So if you're also not happy with your smartphone usage, I can really recommend you to give a featurephone a try. At ~60€ it is cheap enough to try it for 2 weeks and put it in some drawer if it doesn't work out.

Disclaimer: 1,5 years later I started using a smartphone again because I had a kid and wanted to be able to take better pictures.

[0]: https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_int/nokia-8110-4g/specs

Re: Life before smartphones (2020)

#108

Post by enriquto »

gilbetron wrote: post #92
legrande wrote: post #40

You can still live like what's described in this article. Get yourself a dumbphone and a paper atlas, only pay with cash, avoid loyalty cards, read paper books, newspapers, etc Now and then I do that, just to switch off from our hyper-connected world. Switching off is the new peace of mind.

You can sell your car, get a horse, and travel around like it is the 19th century. Of course, nothing around you will be like the 19th century. Not that it isn't worth doing for other reasons, but moving your tech backwards doesn't move the world around you backwards.

> moving your tech backwards doesn't move the world around you backwards.

The OP point doesn't seem to be about moving anything backwards, but moving yourself forward by selectively disengaging from certain things.

My PhD advisor once went to a beach resort with his family. Fifteen days in a remote venue without wifi nor cellphone network. He was the kind of person who replies a saturday midnight mail with an absurdly technical and detailed answer, within less than one hour. I thought it would be torture to him. When he came back he told me that it was the most productive two weeks on his life. He wrote two nearly complete paper drafts and proved several theorems. Some things that he couldn't check on the literature were carefully noted.

After that he realised how absurd and unproductive it is to spend your whole life connected to the email and subject to excessive social pressure. I guess having email-free days, or even mornings, would be a productivity boost to many intellectual jobs (unless your job consists in actually replying to mails).

Re: Life before smartphones (2020)

#109

Post by asoneth »

chadlavi wrote: post #99
ladyattis wrote: post #94

>I assumed the police were telling the truth. I gotta laugh at this. Being someone that's from a working town and being from a working class family, cops weren't to be trusted. Cops lied even back then. Life wasn't better back then. The fact he seems to mock gender fluidity and polyamory really shows how much has changed for the better. People who didn't fit in with the gender constructs then were out of luck. Either…

See also "being elite was good" and "I wasn't polyamorous." It's a whole article of "I only knew how to be a vanilla white guy. And that was a good thing!"

> And that was a good thing!"

Interesting, I came away with the impression that the author was implying that some of these changes (i.e. better understanding of toxicity, therapy, wage gaps, redlining, gerrymandering) to be positive changes to provide more nuance in their post than just a list of raw nostalgia.

Re: Life before smartphones (2020)

#110

Post by ladyattis »

d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #103
ladyattis wrote: post #94

>I assumed the police were telling the truth. I gotta laugh at this. Being someone that's from a working town and being from a working class family, cops weren't to be trusted. Cops lied even back then. Life wasn't better back then. The fact he seems to mock gender fluidity and polyamory really shows how much has changed for the better. People who didn't fit in with the gender constructs then were out of luck. Either…

Why is polyamory good?

Why is polyamory bad?
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