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

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

#61

Post by evilduck »

aiisjustanif wrote: post #18
sysadm1n wrote: post #11

Well not that I live in a bad neighborhood or anything like that, but you really don't know what could happen at any given moment, and need to phone emergency services. This is not paranoia (well maybe it is), but paranoia doesn't work retroactively, you have to be proactively paranoid. If you're concerned about privacy buy one of those cheap Nokia dumbphones that old people use. Keep your smartphone at home, and swa…

> but you really don't know what could happen at any given moment, and need to phone emergency services. This is not paranoia (well maybe it is), but paranoia doesn't work retroactively, you have to be proactively paranoid. It would be nice to not live that way sometimes you know? There are places where people aren’t conditioned to feel that way.

You make it sound sinister like you’re expecting to be mugged, but I’ve called 911 on behalf of others by being the first to come across their roadside accident 2 different times in my life, and the first one wouldn’t have been able to call themselves due to injuries. Not having a phone would have meant leaving the scenes, driving to the next exit and finding a gas station or house, explaining there was an accident and pleading to use the phone, drawing out their time sitting injured on the roadside by several minutes before emergency services were even notified.

I’ve also been the first to report tree limbs blocking roads and a water main that burst to non-emergency lines, again expediting services to fix them and reducing inconvenience overall.

I’ve never felt like this was some conditioning of paranoia, only that I was enabled to help in ways that I wasn’t able to 20 years ago.

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

#63

Post by Jhsto »

I have found smartwatches a good for this purposes. With cellular connectivity you have emergency services, calls, certain notifications, maps, and NFC payments. You cant procrastinate on it as easily as with a phone.

Many in this thread suggest a feature phone. Anecdotally, a friend of mine went this route, but people became suspicious of him. Especially when meeting new people. His dates thought he was cheating on his (non-existent) wife, or that he was hiding something in more general sense. He returned to having a smartphone after a year or so with a feature phone.

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

#64

Post by b112 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #50
cnelsenmilt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People also didn’t live under the expectation of being reachable 24/7. Similarly, people used paper maps while driving which were cumbersome, but didn’t live under the expectation or the opportunity of traveling to new locations regularly.

I find it nicer to look at a huge map, when visiting a city.

Maybe a 100" TV would be about the same.

But sadly, it is harder to get paper maps now, for obvious reasons.

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

#65

Post by id »

aiisjustanif wrote: post #18
sysadm1n wrote: post #11

Well not that I live in a bad neighborhood or anything like that, but you really don't know what could happen at any given moment, and need to phone emergency services. This is not paranoia (well maybe it is), but paranoia doesn't work retroactively, you have to be proactively paranoid. If you're concerned about privacy buy one of those cheap Nokia dumbphones that old people use. Keep your smartphone at home, and swa…

> but you really don't know what could happen at any given moment, and need to phone emergency services. This is not paranoia (well maybe it is), but paranoia doesn't work retroactively, you have to be proactively paranoid. It would be nice to not live that way sometimes you know? There are places where people aren’t conditioned to feel that way.

You know, medical emergencies are a thing. You could always come across someone that needs help.

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

#66

Post by dboreham »

My solution to this problem (anxiety at potentially missing some very important incoming message) is to wear a watch that has wide area connectivity and syncs with the important message streams (voice, signal, work slack, sms, email, not social media). The watch has a good enough UX to receive and act upon messages, but sufficiently crappy that you want to ignore it unless it's indicating some hair-on-fire situation.

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

#67

Post by whimsicalism »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #30
dsr_ wrote: post #14

"Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another. A terminal, in the shape of a ring, button, bracelet or pen or whatever, was your link with everybody and e…

So I had a feeling "without a terminal" was a typo and I wanted to look up the exact quote. I googled the sentence and expected the right quote to be at the top, but all Google gave me was results for helping people with terminal cancer cope with their coming death. It was only after I appended "Ian M Banks" that I got the result I was looking for. I'm honestly surprised Google failed that search so hard.

..but it was a typo, yeah?

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

#68

Post by b112 »

SnowHill9902 wrote: post #39
b112 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really blaming you here, this attidue is very normal these days, but a mere 25 years ago, most people had no cell phone, no mobile phone, and never, ever suffered mishap as a result. (Inconvenience is not what I call a mishap) I grew up in the country, and a few times had to walk 20 miles home, due to a dead car. Being a rural area, after 10pm, I might see 1 or 2 cars the entire walk home (4 hours and a bit).…

Nobody is unhappy for not having what he doesn’t know that he can have.

Yes I don't not disagree also, not with this.
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