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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

#331

Post by jrs235 »

ryandrake wrote: post #125
dorkwood wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I used to value a random encounter with a stranger. Now, the median person is likely to be 1. Disturbed, 2. Obsessed with politics, 3. Belligerent for no reason, 4. Ready to whip out their phone camera looking for “content” or 5. Generally offended/Scared of the idea of talking to a random stranger. The last 3 or so years have turned America into a giant mental asylum and it’s starting to be not worth it to talk to a…

I loathe air pods/wireless ear buds more than phones...

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#332

Post by jncfhnb »

rideontime wrote: post #326
jncfhnb wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you’d like to share them then? Side note… I find it kind of ridiculous that my comment got flagged. There are many similarities here. Higher level entity controlling your existence, world entirely dictated by that entity, “true self” just temporarily existing in the provided world but it’s not the “primary” plane of existence. I really struggle to see how this is problematic to discuss.

it's just a very Reddit Atheist thing to post

Man that’s an irritating response but you do you.

It is far less intellectually lazy as pointing to the matrix as an attempt at strawmanning against phones, imo.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#333

Post by lrvick »

A run a B2B tech company in Silicon Valley and have been without any mobile phone for 3 years.

Started as an experiment but at this point I enjoy my increased privacy and renewed attention span too much to have an interest in going back.

I have enough internet access on laptops and desktops. I do not also need to be online every second between access to those devices.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#334

Post by II2II »

Aurornis wrote: post #250
II2II wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the age group that is just old enough to remember adult life before everyone had cellphones. And yes, it wasn't an idyllic ago. People my age were constantly texting on the phone, mashing the alphanumeric buttons multiple times simply to get a single character. Before that teens used to hang out at home on the phone (or, in my case, tying up the phone line with the modem) chatting with friends. I think this di…

> As for people projecting their own solutions on everyone else, I have mixed feelings about that. Ideally people would be able to curb their smartphone usage independent of the world around them. Yet that is easier said than done. You're going to have a challenging time curbing your smartphone usage if the social expectations of your friends or expectations of your employer depend upon using a smartphone. To use you…

> You’re suggesting that because one person struggles with smartphone addiction, all of their friends and professional acquaintances should also give up their smartphones and not use them for social or professional interactions?

To an extent, I suppose so. That is not to say that everyone should abstain from smartphone use, but they should show some consideration in how they use it. For example, should they be using a social networking app for communication when a voice call or SMS will do? Likewise, should that staff meeting be held in a bar when it could be done on the business's premises?

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#335

Post by batch12 »

geokon wrote: post #226
batch12 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sms, email, web browsing, messaging apps, wireless networks with other infected devices, or physical access to the device, for starters.

Are you trolling? Please show me an SMS I can send to someone with an Android 11 phone that will give me access to it

I can't tell the future, but you can find examples from the past. Are you trolling?

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#336

Post by Tagbert »

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…

I have never allowed anyone to expect that kind of responsiveness from me, especially 24x7. The closest you get would be phone calls from my spouse and even then, if I’m in meetings I may not respond an hour or so and that’s not a cause for concern. At work, I have all notifications turned off except for badges or meeting notices. Even then I only check things like Slack or email at most once an hour.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#337

Post by seam_carver »

mzs wrote: post #247
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.

Thanks, I'm intrigued. How do you read books on it? I don't want to watch video reviews. Do you just copy PDFs to it over USB?

I load EPUBs via the Kindle app or KOREADER. Typically download them from browser.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#338

Post by iszomer »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #153
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…

My smartphone has replaced things that I used to carry. It is a tool. And as a bonus, I can pass time while waiting - doctors office, etc - which makes me more pleasant. My smartphone functions as a watch, notetaking device, and communication device. I rarely get lost now that I almost always have a map. It is a music device, which is really helpful considering I walk and take busses for most of my transportation. Th…

I've taken a more subtle approach:

- In my daily commutes, I dedicate my smartphone screen time to creating art and short animations.

- If I ever do feel the urge to read news, I'll pull up HN via the Harmonic app. If I stumble upon an interesting post with healthy comments threads, I'll bookmark it to read on a properly sized screen when I return home.

- My monthly data plan is purposefully capped at 4GB. I use an app firewall to whitelist the most essential apps while everything else is blocked by default from accessing cellular data.

- I don't use streaming services at all but I do occasionally pre-fetch longform podcasts for later consumption. I also disable all phone notifications and wear a "smartwatch" to tell time, track my step counter and monitor barometric pressure in that order.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#339

Post by MattRix »

dinkleberg wrote: post #32
MattRix wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ignores the fact that many of the apps people use are designed and A/B tested to maximize time spent/wasted. The fact that it happens to not work on you does not mean it works for everyone. Sometimes an addiction really is because something is designed to be incredibly addictive, not because of some underlying psychological issue with the user.

Uninstalling the apps is a good first step.

The problem is that most of these apps have good and bad stuff on them. I get a lot of value out of high quality content on youtube, but I also have to try really hard to not get sucked into watching an endless stream of garbage youtube shorts.

Also even if you delete the apps, most people are in social groups with people who still use them and send links to content on them. It’s hard to avoid them entirely.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#340

Post by goosejuice »

15457345234 wrote: post #135
goosejuice wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many making money using manipulation and I certainly don't condone that. Hopefully we can push for regulations where it makes sense. Even still there will always be obstacles in life to overcome. CBT has been helpful for many so it may be a place to start. CBT can help one understand the underlying issue and replace the vice with a healthier coping mechanism.

I think this focus on their being an 'underlying issue' is problematic; many times there is no underlying issue, these are just normal humans with normal brains being totally normally affected by a product that's designed to be addictive. They don't need therapy because there's nothing wrong with them, in fact if there was something wrong with them they'd be less likely to become addicted. They just need to remove th…

It sounds to me that we are in agreement on outcome, only that you feel that everyone can get there on their own. In fact you're almost describing CBT without naming it.
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