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A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

nytimes.com

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Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#91

Post by vel0city »

BeetleB wrote: post #80
vel0city wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but in a similar place for the phone somewhat dominating on the go stuff. Its just incredibly freeing leaving the house with only my phone. These days it can handle payment most places. It is my library card. My bus pass. My car key. My camera. My paperback novel. My guide. My gym pass. It lets me know when my bus or train is running late. It lets me know when that store is going to close, or if its even open…

And what do you do if you run out of batteries? Or lose the phone? Or it gets wet and won't turn on? You can't even drive your car? My phones have failed me on multiple occasions over the years.

It doesn't really run out of batteries. I'm not talking about going to the moon, I'm talking about going across town. It charges pretty quick, and it can charge in the car, so I'm rarely out and about with it less than 50% charged. Which is good enough for at least 8 hours of active usage with its current battery health and age, a good bit more if I bother stretching it.

What happens if I lose my wallet? What happens if I lose my car keys? Its not like these other things are immune to "what if it gets lost?" Sure, there's a bit of risk tying it all to one thing, but in the end I'm not talking about being more than a few hours walk to home or a friend's house. And like I said, I usually carry enough cash in my shoe to cover a half day fare.

At least for my car, I do have a backup code I can type in and access it.

My phone is waterproof. Its durable enough, its fallen out of my pocket while riding my bike before and been fine. I did have a problem of breaking phones in the past, but since waterproof phones and far more durable screens have been a thing I haven't really lost any to damage since. The last time I broke a phone was 2012. It seems like if I managed to break my phone I'm likely to be picked up by an ambulance anyways.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#92

Post by Syonyk »

0x38B wrote: post #70
seam_carver wrote: post #36

I have an e ink smartphone, specifically a Hisense A9. It has the same screen as a Kindle. It is wonderful for productive stuff like reading, messaging is passable, and videos are pretty much unusable. It's wonderful, I've read so many books now.

I considered the Hisense but talked myself out of it because of Android and lack of updates. Part of me thinks I should just go for it, because I read a lot on my smartphone and miss Android’s Moon+ Reader - with Goldendict for Startdict/Lingvo dictionaries, it made a killer combo for reading foreign language texts with many new words. Videos being unusable would be a fantastic QoL feature.

Get a dedicated e-ink reader device.

I've tried reading on phones, reading on tablets, etc, and the problem is that there's always so much else to do - or, at least, things that interrupt you (SMS messages and such on a phone).

I moved... oh, 10+ years ago, I think, to a Kobo (e-ink reader, not Kindle, far more hackable and open, swallows everything except some DRM which I strip on a desktop). I now have several, as they're just such good devices for reading text. I've also moved a lot of my "web reading" to them via Pocket, in which I send a link to Pocket and get the article, on my device, as long form text without any of the nonsense that's in most web articles (most images work, but not all).

It's far better than trying to have a combo device. And my 10+ year old Kobo Auras still work just fine for reading.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#93

Post by kmstout »

davesmylie wrote: post #73
hilux wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this too. Of course, the companies fight back, e.g. Facebook messaging isn't (last I checked) available through the Facebook-in-the-browser; it requires the Messenger app.

https://mbasic.facebook.com - at least for now a cut down version that still allows messenger designed for those with low bandwidth. I would be curious to hear your experience - it's been functional for me for quite some time, but just recently it's had a banner declaring that it was going away....

It also provides easy access to the "poke" functionality.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#94

Post by girvo »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #47
seam_carver wrote: post #36

I have an e ink smartphone, specifically a Hisense A9. It has the same screen as a Kindle. It is wonderful for productive stuff like reading, messaging is passable, and videos are pretty much unusable. It's wonderful, I've read so many books now.

It has Android 11 as of today; with no information of upgradability. I would not ever recommend anyone to use such an outdated OS in today's world even on their secondary phone. It's just unsafe. If it is to be used as a "reader" device then, well, whatever. But in that case why not just use a "reader device" then.

> But in that case why not just use a "reader device" then.

Which there are much cheaper options in the same form factor! The InkPalm 5 is 1/3rd the cost. Neat little gadget too.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#96

Post by phs318u »

XorNot wrote: post #25
darth_avocado wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t want to quit smartphones, they want to quit what’s in them and that can be hard. Sometimes you just have apps that are a time sink. You can obviously delete them and call it a day, but sometimes you want to keep it around for a small use case, but then want to limit your usage to a minimum, which can be hard because these apps are literally designed to make you spend as much time on them as possible.

This triggers my "learn some self-discipline" instinct. It's such a learned helplessness statement "oh no, I can't possibly not open the reddit app 30 times a day. Save me from myself." Like, I get it, it's not easy but it's also a pretty basic part of being an adult. Like brushing your teeth, eating healthily or doing exercise (which is to say: if you think "I have problems with those too" then the problem really is…

It's now well known and accepted knowledge that "addictions" have heritable elements (specifically in the transition from initial to problematic use). This has been proven by repeated studies of families and twins.

The preponderance of substance abuse addicts in recovery that "swap the witch for the bitch" and adopt behavioural addictions also support the genetic basis for addictability (my word).

I am a behavioural addict in recovery (4442 days today) and when I consider my siblings, parents, their siblings and their children (my first cousins), there's a >50% incidence of addiction to either smoking (>2 packs/day), alcohol, sex, food, gambling, or drug use. Half of that cohort have more than one addiction and among those almost all share a substance addiction with a behavioural addiction.

I appreciate that this is just one family and is statistically irrelevant. However because I've been around people dealing with their addictions for so long and spoken to so many, this is not an uncommon familial pattern among addicts.

I'd also add that in my clan there are many instances where one sibling is an addict and another isn't. This is not learned behaviour (though the introduction to addictive pathways/behaviours etc is often as a result of environmental and psycho-social factors).

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#97

Post by gnicholas »

I've considered trying to reduce my smartphone usage by getting a cellular AW. I need to be reachable in emergences, want to be trackable by family, and want to be able to navigate and take an Uber if needed. But not having an easily-scrollable app interface would help me cut down on mindless internet consumption.

Has anyone tried this?

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#98

Post by anonzzzies »

I use my smartphone mostly like a computer for work; research or look up stuff I want to implement. I don’t have dead-scroll social media apps installed and I don’t call; people can send text via different chat apps because that’s async so no chance of distracting me. It’s always on dnd or sleep. Done this for almost a decade now; works well.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#99

Post by XorNot »

darth_avocado wrote: post #72
XorNot wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your smartphone is in absolutely no way like smoking a physically addictive hard narcotic. Again: learned helplessness. You've picked a comparison to ensure that you have maximally separated any notion of your own culpability. Drug addicts who get clean start by recognizing that they made the choice to start, and need to be mindful of the choice to quit, outside the physical addictions which drive it. The answer for…

Addiction to smartphones, porn, shopping, eating, coffee, gambling etc. all work on the same neurological pathways. While it’s not the same as a drug addiction, “just don’t do it” isn’t that straightforward. People have to go to therapy and rehab to get rid of some of these, but somehow when it comes to smartphones, the opinion is that “it’s not that hard”.

People can go to therapy and rehab for being addicted to their smartphones, but all of those things are voluntary activities. You have to choose that you want to get better.

Externalizing the locus of your problems is itself a pathology: "I receive too many notifications from social media apps" in a normal person leads to "so I just silenced them all" or "that's why I don't install social media apps, who needs that?".

The first thing anyone does in this topic though is externalize the problem: it's not a problem with them, it's a problem with the broadest possible generalization of a thing. They're not incapable of having a smartphone, everyone is.

People fail therapy and rehab all the time because of that expectation mismatch: you don't go in and "they fix you", you go in and put in the work to fix yourself, with some assistance.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#100

Post by XorNot »

madaxe_again wrote: post #24
Tagbert wrote: post #17

Do people really want to quit their smartphone? I certainly don’t. It connects me to people, provides information, and lets me capture information when I want to. I do not feel overwhelmed by it. I do restrict notifications to specific apps and people. The rest, I check on a couple of times a day. Why would I want to quit?

I think a more accurate statement of the need is that people want their lives back, and the smartphone is a clear symbol of the ever-connected world, where not noticing a message for 15 minutes can turn into disaster, where you are expected to Always. Be. Available. That’s what people want out of, in my observations. We talk about habituated phone users - people who sit there refreshing their social feed for 14 hours…

In which case there actual issue would be worker's rights, and once again a bunch of people have run off to fight the wrong battle because they're scared or can't even conceive of the real one.

Meanwhile in France: https://www.upworthy.com/under-french-law-businesses-cant-em...

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