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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

#301

Post by anotherevan »

I sometimes wonder if better management of notifications would improve people's lives.

I don't have any audible notification for email and a range of other things. I'm pretty ruthless about turning off notifications that come with some games and other apps that I just don't care about.

> I realized how our phone has become a real integral part of our bodies.

Counter-example. Having only just recently had the ability to do payments with my phone, I now often go out without my wallet in my pocket. The feeling of not having my wallet made me realise how my wallet was an integral part of my body - so to speak.

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

#302

Post by Terry_Roll »

Haven't had a mobile phone in years as I value my privacy because a number of online services exist which will geolocate any mobile phone number from anywhere in the world and its a completely legal form of stalking! Besides I noticed I get brain fog if I use a mobile so I need to keep my wits about me as there is alot of organised crime in the world especially those running countries!

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

#303

Post by tsimionescu »

pessimizer wrote: post #280
dale_glass wrote: post #155

Personally I find modern technology to be very liberating. When I was a child, even going around my own city was a stressful thing. What if I get lost? What if I run out of money for the train? How do I know I got the bus in the right direction? (the darn things didn't announce stops at all). The first times I traveled involved printing a stack of papers including names, addresses, and maps. Getting to a hotel in a c…

This must be like when in threads about Uber, people describe taxis as a traumatizing hellscape. When I was a child, I figured out how my city was shaped, and figured out how to get around. Knowing how to get around one's own city is a skill worth learning, and is less of a time investment than fishing around for a phone to spend minutes futzing around with for the rest of your life. > The first times I traveled invo…

> When I was a child, I figured out how my city was shaped, and figured out how to get around.

You either live in a pretty small city, or an exceptionally well-laid one. I have lived in the same city all my life, and while I have a pretty good idea of where major points of interest are, and can probably walk or drive home from anywhere in the city, I definitely don't have any chance of finding a random address someone gave me, or finding a bus&tram route there.

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

#304

Post by vecter »

panaffa wrote: post #72

I'm part of the new generation and I think the opposite. I am obsessed with my phone and the Internet. And I don't think it's bad. It's extremely stimulating in a way real life is orders of magnitude worse at. Point of reference, born around 2000. There's no going back for me. I want my phone at all times to have access to billions of possible thoughts, pictures, memes. It's literally a god like power.

There is a cost to this, and that is your ability to do deep thinking and deep work. You can’t do that if you need a dopamine spike every 30s. Boredom has value and letting your mind wander is important for problem solving and the creative process.

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

#305

Post by eternityforest »

I live in Montana where jobs are almost impossible to find. Without phones, my life would be a lot worse. I would have no opportunities but Burger King, or I would have to always stay in front of a computer, because my response time expectations are about 10 minutes at the most, for around 12 hours a day.

But beyond that, phones give me access to things you normally have to be born with, or spend years learning with specialists. I can go for a walk, wander down a side street if there's something I'd like to see, all in full confidence that I won't get seriously lost.

Thanks to phones, I have access to reliable memories without having to carry pen and paper, and either manually back it up or risk losing everything if the paper is gone. I can make plans for a week from now, and access those plans without needing to be at home with a datebook.

I also have Tile tracking on my keys and wallet, which has saved me several times.

Which is why I hate the Kacynzsky types so much, and why I don't want privacy absolutism to take over tech, without being balanced by some effort to make sure we don't have to go back to getting lost without keys, directions, or memories.

They are horrifically addictive, to the point of most of my hobbies having since turned into "Everyone look at a phone clubs", and it being very very hard to read books or focus on anything at all, for pretty much everyone, but it sure seems a lot more fun than being constantly lost and unable to keep up with society, endlessly screamed at for forgetting things.

Something must be done about it, before we have no culture, no friendships, and even pets become disposable Instagram props, but to go back to having no phones at all would really cause trouble for a lot of people, who are currently elevated far beyond their true base level of functionality by this tech.

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

#306

Post by [deleted] »

Adraghast wrote: post #73
CommanderData wrote: post #5

Being forced to pay for council parking in the UK using a mobile app is completely astonishing to me, and leaving home without your mobile, or no data or a broken phone can cause you a world of difficulties. I didn't agree to wanting to normalise the removal of parking meters and mandatory app usage just to park your car in a park or highsteet. I'm not sure where this motivation started.

Similarly, I went out to dinner Friday and could not scan the QR code to view the menu because I decided to leave my phone in the car. I asked for a a physical menu and was told they literally do not have them anymore. Had to hunch over my friend's phone instead.

[deleted]

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

#307

Post by teilo »

Replace the word “phone” with “car” and see if this article still makes sense.

Sorry, but what is considered “essential” is subject to change. History has seen these shifts in every generation, and clinging to the previous generation’s notions of what is considered essential is just romanticism.

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

#308

Post by eternityforest »

beefield wrote: post #91
akira2501 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's a radio I can use to summon help. Why would I _ever_ want to be without that? I think it's good for you to occasionally to know that you are on your own. Completely responsible on what you do. Be it on the nearby forest or in some more extreme situation. I am not sure the direction of (illusion of) ultrasafety where our society has been going is all good. Occasionally it's good to have the red pill instead of…

On the other hand, people who don't have the "illusion of ultrasafety" seem to develop a habit of just accepting danger as part of life, to the point of actively speaking out against things like automatic detection for kids left in hot cars.

I think the "Blue pill" mindset is more useful overall. The red pill generally does nothing to build a safer world.

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

#309

Post by kennywinker »

feanaro wrote: post #244
kennywinker wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Afaik unhealthy diet increases gluten sensitivity I don't want to argue with your overall point at all, because I assume that whatever this sentence specifically means to you is true for you - but given that there is no actually objective definition of what a healthy diet is - it's hard to agree with the statement in general. I would feel like I was eating unhealthily if I had a can of coke every day, but that does…

> You would almost definitely feel unhealthy if you were eating bread every day, but as long as it was whole-wheat and had some good sandwich fixins in it, I'd feel pretty good about that. Eating bread every day is actually pretty common in some cultures and people don't even stop to think it's unhealthy because it's so commonplace, so even that varies.

The poster I was replying to said they had a gluten sensitivity, which is why I was saying he would probably find it an unhealthy part of his diet. I did not mean to imply that I think eating bread every day is unhealthy :)

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

#310

Post by eternityforest »

com2kid wrote: post #46
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).…

Survivorship bias, it is totally a thing! There are mountain tops that have cell service now days (great line of sight!). People get lost in the woods pretty often. Heck just having a compass + map that works offline can get people unstuck. How many lost person stories used to end with "and he died just a few miles from the nearest town"? Of course that sentence is now relegated to history because because almost ever…

I think the government should really make a big deal out of satellite messengers being cheap and available for all hikers.

What if they subsidized them so that you could make emergency calls with no monthly fee? I wonder how many lives they would save if it was so readily available people didn't think of leaving cell range without one?

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