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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

#111

Post by vonjuice »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #104
SoftTalker wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did people manage before smartphones? GPS: Garmin, or use a map. Payments: use a card, or cash. Car keys: use the keys that came with the car. House keys: Carry them with you, or get a keypad lock. Lights: use the switch on the wall Health tracker: notebook and pencil

Don't forget that technology has a ratchet effect. It's gonna get worse over time. > Payments: use a card, or cash. The card part ends up requiring phone confirmation as a second factor, often online, occasionally offline. > Health tracker: notebook and pencil Convenience matters - notebook and pencil method cuts down people benefiting from health tracking by a couple orders of magnitude.

> Convenience matters - notebook and pencil method cuts down people benefiting from health tracking by a couple orders of magnitude.

How?

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#112

Post by dorkwood »

deely3 wrote: post #108
Syonyk wrote: post #83

I am so glad to see this backlash. It's been a long time coming. We've tried smartphones out for the past... oh, decade and change. They've been around longer, but were niche enough that they didn't dominate society, and even around the start of the iPhone era, "Crackberry" and such were common enough terms (with "Put all your devices in the center, whoever picks theirs up first buys the next round" being a fun game…

> they ruin social interactions in public situations (think "talking to people in the grocery line" I DONT WANT TO TALK to people in grocery line, especially when I don't have a phone. I perfectly ok to just stand quietly. > they're utterly toxic for teenagers sometimes, and still we have to be sure that its a phone and not society.

> I DONT WANT TO TALK to people in grocery line, especially when I don't have a phone. I perfectly ok to just stand quietly.

I do! My day is almost always made better by a random encounter with a stranger. I wish I was confident enough to start those interactions myself, but I always inevitably think back to messages such as yours, and my anxiety gets the better of me.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#113

Post by vonjuice »

XorNot wrote: post #46
lethologica wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying to addicts “Just stop smoking crack”. Everyone knows smoking crack is bad for you. A lot of people want to quit but are unable to no matter how much “self discipline” they have. And app developers have teams of people dedicated to making sure you stay on these apps longer and longer. Now imagine your dealer is in your pocket 24/7.

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…

Who would win:

billions of dollars invested into behavior manipulation algorithms using billions of terabytes of data gathered through constant surveillance

vs

just don't use it lol

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#114

Post by skydhash »

Syonyk wrote: post #92
0x38B wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Same. I have a Kobo Libra (I bough a Kindle Basic before this and it's so locked down I switched). I put Koreader on it (easy process) and I used it more than my phone. The current book is at most a button press away. It's lighter and more ergonomic than the phone too.

I also have a dedicated audio player (Shanling M0). Great for listening to an album before sleeping or for focus sessions.

I prefer having dedicated devices. The phone is only for communication, taking photos, and quick browsing. And some of the desktop apps I use have their mobile counterparts so I can do a quick tasks without getting the laptop. And I think that suits its main purpose for me, a PDA.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#115

Post by kccqzy »

wincy wrote: post #34
darth_avocado wrote: post #6

It is unfortunate that the phone hardware companies have an interest in you using their phone more, otherwise they'd make it easier to manage your phone usage better. The screentime app in iPhone for example is so easy to bypass as a user even when you were the one who limited certain apps usage. I want an app that strictly locks away my access to an app and also suppresses notifications. Is that so hard to build? It…

My wife and I both have iPhones and MacBooks as our primary computing devices, and have setup blocks for each other’s phones. So we voluntarily (I have to stress, this is something we both are 100% on board with, don’t be a creep) set a passcode, and from midnight to 8pm our browsers are locked down, we can only use a few apps, and we’re focused on the kids or work. The only problem with this is overriding it require…

I've been doing the same thing with my wife for a few years now.

The only unexpected bit is that you two need to be together when replacing the phone (such as erasing it, transferring contents, or similar).

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#116

Post by vonjuice »

XorNot wrote: post #99
darth_avocado wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"…

Technological problems are environmental problems.

The US army officially considers cyberspace to be a dimension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Dimension_Operations

If a factory is polluting the air, the water, if you can't sleep because it makes loud noises at night, you don't tell people they should get air masks, or water filters, or take melatonin, or to just move somewhere else.

If you live in an area that a corporation is about to deforest, you don't just tell individuals to just plant a tree.

If you live in an area where traffic lights don't work, the streets are full of pot holes, you don't tell people to just drive better and get a jeep, or to just walk places.

The internet is a shared space, and you have to consider who you're siding with and why. You initially said this "triggers your learn self discipline" response. Did you stop and ponder why you have that trigger and why you feel so strongly about shifting the onus from powerful corporations towards individuals?

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#117

Post by vonjuice »

skidd0 wrote: post #50
lethologica wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying to addicts “Just stop smoking crack”. Everyone knows smoking crack is bad for you. A lot of people want to quit but are unable to no matter how much “self discipline” they have. And app developers have teams of people dedicated to making sure you stay on these apps longer and longer. Now imagine your dealer is in your pocket 24/7.

Except crack and other drugs form physical dependencies which leads to withdrawal. Smart phone addicts have a more psychological battle. That's the willpower/self-discipline part. How do you build discipline? Practice! So, yeah, it can be as simple as telling yourself "just stop using the apps" as often as you can to build up the skill.

If you think addiction is about chemical dependence you need to deepen and broaden your knowledge on the subject.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#118

Post by vonjuice »

karaterobot wrote: post #7

I just checked the Screen Time statistics, and my average daily screen time last week was 18 minutes, the week before that was 22 minutes. I've never been in danger of becoming addicted to smart phones, just like I've never been in danger of being addicted to alcohol or gambling: none of them really appeal to me that much. But there are plenty of things I know I am addicted to, and I'm pretty sure the way to treat th…

How do you get to the underlying issues?

An addiction is a layer of defense. It keeps you distracted from those underlying issues. If you remove part of it, you're not "fixing the problem and patting yourself on the back", you're getting a break from it in order to better look at those underlying issues from a distance.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#119

Post by vonjuice »

15457345234 wrote: post #38
karaterobot wrote: post #7

I just checked the Screen Time statistics, and my average daily screen time last week was 18 minutes, the week before that was 22 minutes. I've never been in danger of becoming addicted to smart phones, just like I've never been in danger of being addicted to alcohol or gambling: none of them really appeal to me that much. But there are plenty of things I know I am addicted to, and I'm pretty sure the way to treat th…

> the way to treat that addiction is to address the underlying issue Given that a very very large number of people are _visibly_ addicted to their phones, what would that look like, what action would you propose, what resources would be deployable? Are you saying that a majority of the population have an 'underlying issue' that needs to be addressed? What is that issue?

The issues can be as varied as the individuals.

I think one action is this, talking about it, raising awareness. To some it might be obvious that being glued to a tiny screen to the point that you need to constantly look at it while you're driving is a problem, but in some circles it's normalized.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#120

Post by vonjuice »

tayo42 wrote: post #9

Last year I got all into trying to, idk what to call it, "un-tech" my life. I started excitedly telling my wife I was going to get a one of these dumb phones and start using it. The next day a broken car on an incline rolled back into my car damaging it. I had to pull out my smartphone document the whole thing with pictures. I got a whole "what would you do with your dumb phone" and dropped the whole thing. There is…

How many times has your car been damaged since then?
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