Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal

My advice: get a watch. A nice Seiko, Citizen, etc dumb watch.

I found myself always pulling my phone out to check the time, then getting sucked in by notifications.

Now, I only use my watch to check the time, and find myself pulling my phone out way, way less in public.

No alternatives and here's the Councils announcement: https://www.richmond.gov.uk/services/parking/parking_machine...

Some have extended to non-residential areas. One of the biggest parking apps says this:

Q: "I have no network coverage and need to park?"

A: "Move quickly to an area with better network coverage and complete your parking transaction with PayByPhone... Pay for your parking via other methods such as PayPoint or via the Pay & Display machine where available"

Reference: https://support.paybyphone.co.uk/hc/en-gb/articles/360010478...

FYI 'Pay and Display' are the parking meters being removed, 'PayPoint' might be in SOME convenience stores/shops. But if you know London these can be 20-30 mins walk or none there are all at your parking destination. Good luck attending an appointment during work lunch times!

It's a radio I can use to summon help. Why would I _ever_ want to be without that?

Turn the notifications off, or get something like Tasker that can turn them off and on for you on a schedule. Otherwise, keep it in your pocket. This device has no control over you that you don't allow it to have.

25 years ago there was a pay phone in every gas station, and in denser areas in every corner market, bus terminal, grocery store, hotel, ..., not mentioning those installed directly along the street.

I don't think it's healthy or normal to feel uncomfortable without a communications device. It's a sign of dependency. One should be able to put it out of mind and focus on deep tasks, leisure, interpersonal commitments and general real-life living without a neurotic impulse to check and inhabit a digital world.

I don't have a smartphone (prefer a landline but keep an old Nokia around too), so my life is more organised around emails and desktop based communication. I recognised back in the 90s that it used to take me hours to "decompress" from tech immersion. I would ruminate on what messages I might be missing, and think through communications in my mind in a quite obsessive way.

That was over 20 years ago. These days I'll go for a couple of days without thinking about the internet. I can happily live without a phone for a week or more no worries, and frequently do.

It's a long journey and there are constant pressures and temptations to over-use again. I wrote a book about coping with that.

It probably sounds as if I'm talking like a cognitive behavioural therapist. That's because I truly believe that smartphone use is fully congruent with addictive behaviours - not just for a few people, as was common thinking a few years ago, but for everybody, and as mounting scientific evidence supports there are numerous genuine harms both individual and societal [1]. In 2022 I no longer feel alone or unusual in this regard, because I see the world is waking up to it.

The question then is how we raise awareness of this emerging threat to mental wellbeing, and how we deal with it. Mobile technology certainly has its uses, but we must balance that with social/technological structures that give people ample space to control their own technology, make space and abstain from it as desired. A truly advanced technological society would meet this need. At present the gushing convergence on smartphones as "necessary" panacea is pathological in the extreme, and I am sure, simply fuelled by the profits of the tech industry rather than any underlying "need". Technology is becoming what is being _done_ to us.

[1] No I won't. Please have the good manners to Google for yourself (or go back through my many well refernced posts here).