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You can do wifi calling in airplane mode. Left ours in this mode by default for months at first and then realized we could just cancel the cell phone plan entirely to save money. Wifi is everywhere when you need it.
What about using your phone for navigation?
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This is just circular arguing. > it’s not manageable to be offline all the time here > it is if you’re all offline together > but everyone doesn’t want to be offline with me > just be offline by yourself; what’s the big deal? The big deal is all the stuff called out above. My kids school, child care, my work, pizza delivery, everyone has built up infrastructure that assumes virtually always online. If it works for yo…
> My kids school, child care, my work, pizza delivery, everyone has built up infrastructure that assumes virtually always online. Is there actually a pizza place that refuses to bring a pizza to someone without a cell phone app being involved? Like they have no phone number you can call from a landline or a website where you could place an order? Odds are good that you could get by just fine letting your kids school/…
Part of my problem with the claims that cell phones are the problem is that the answer often seems to be a landline that you’re still available on. If you replace one phone with another, what’s the difference? This isn’t a sarcastic question, either. The differences are key.
No one worried about the impact of dumb cell phones on our kids. Maybe the texting was a bit annoying but that’s all. What really changed is smart phones, the Internet in your hand all the time. The doomscrolling Instagram or TikTok and completely disconnecting from the real world most of the time. The Facebook-type sites that enable anonymous bullying.
It’s important to understand what the actual problems are because abstaining from phones entirely is just not realistic. Possible? Yes. Realistic? No.
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There’s no reasonable amount of sugar, unless there’s fibre to go with it. Sugar by itself (ie refined sugar) is a poison.
What kind of content are you looking at to believe nonsense like that?
Gary Taubes, who became widely known for researching tons of studies on diet and coining the saying "eat food, not too much, mostly plants". Food meaning unprocessed stuff your (great great) grandma would recognise as food, wrote an NY Times article agreeing with it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
[2] https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/1...
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The actual article (not the blog post) does mention it as likely partial cause.
This thesis contradicts the chart though. Why would older people be much less affected and the generation 70+ even show a negative trend if these people were far more likely to experience a more severe disease progression? You would expect them to be hit at least as hard (if not harder) as young people from those long term memory effects. The trend for the youngest age group also starts well before 2019.
Second, old people were more likely to die on covid. Kids were getting covid too, just not dying and long term covid consequences were observed in then. It can easily be that where old person died, young ended up with long term consequence.
There is no reason to assume the effect would be uniform accross generations.
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Either way, cell phone obsession and "rewiring of biology" claims are wven further from anything shown in the article. They are both purely what HN and the blogger want it to be.
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> My kids school, child care, my work, pizza delivery, everyone has built up infrastructure that assumes virtually always online. Is there actually a pizza place that refuses to bring a pizza to someone without a cell phone app being involved? Like they have no phone number you can call from a landline or a website where you could place an order? Odds are good that you could get by just fine letting your kids school/…
You can surely get pizza delivered, though certainly I’ve had pizza delivery people text me because they couldn’t find my house. So having a cell phone is valuable even then. Part of my problem with the claims that cell phones are the problem is that the answer often seems to be a landline that you’re still available on. If you replace one phone with another, what’s the difference? This isn’t a sarcastic question, ei…
When you have a landline that still happens, but they call you instead of texting. It works great!
> the answer often seems to be a landline that you’re still available on. If you replace one phone with another, what’s the difference?
There are huge differences. Most of the problems with smart phones aren't "You can call people or get calls". A landline still allows you to make and take calls but avoids every other evil cell phones introduce into our lives. When you're available on a landline it's on your own terms, in a very specific place. Even having both a desktop PC/laptop and a landline, meaning you can take calls and look something up on the internet, is vastly less abusive and harmful than a smart phone.
What changed with the smart phone wasn't that you could go online, it's that the device itself is designed to collect every scrap of personal information it can and then funnel it to other people. It's designed to be as addictive, intrusive, and demanding of your attention as possible. It follows you everywhere, all of the time. It cuts us off from the places we are and the people we are with. Being away from a smartphone fills people with a level of anxiety that never existed with laptops and landlines and that isn't by accident.
abstaining from phones entirely or even setting boundaries and limits to reduce the harms they cause is realistic as evidenced by the people who do it successfully in reality. That doesn't make it easy, or even ideal in some situations, but it might be worth trying just to see where the pain points are and how they can be managed. You might be surprised at how much more capable you are at functioning without one than you thought.
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You can do wifi calling in airplane mode. Left ours in this mode by default for months at first and then realized we could just cancel the cell phone plan entirely to save money. Wifi is everywhere when you need it.
What about using your phone for navigation?
Regularly relying on a GPS in general provably makes your brain weaker:
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ALL studies I have seen seem to support the idea that constant connectivity leads to worse mental health outcomes on average. To get to specific proof though, clinically in the way we could with other addictions like smoking, we would need to look at how individual applications that allow us to outsource various cognitive functions specifically impact our brains. GPS is a well studied example. Humans that rely on GPS…
You seem to be arguing about avoiding constant connectivity. This is very different than not owning a smartphone. I think the conversation has gone off the rails, as I was critiquing your desire to impose a no smartphone lifestyle on others.
I gave a specific example that is well studied that could allow us to make pretty good guesses about other apps that do our thinking for us, which could explain the types of results we get in these studies.
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I am near a landline 90% of the time, am reachable by internet during working hours on weekdays, and go to my desk to check emails and chats multiple times a day on weekends. It turns out you do not need to be reachable or online every second of every day to do virtually anything in the modern world including raising kids.
Oh, this sounds like you work from home and can just substitute your landline and PC for 90% of contact, this wouldn't nearly work like this for most people. Envy you a bit, though.
Just set expectations with others and it works just fine either way. Only thing in the way is cognitive dissonance for most people.
In my case people absolutely forgive not being able to reach me every second of every day because I am a productivity machine due to being able to actually focus.
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We managed these problems before everyone had a mobile phone.
Yes but back then people also didn't expect you to have one. Society wasn't built around it.
When they see you working circles around everyone else because your brain can finally focus, they will generally back off.
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ALL studies I have seen seem to support the idea that constant connectivity leads to worse mental health outcomes on average. To get to specific proof though, clinically in the way we could with other addictions like smoking, we would need to look at how individual applications that allow us to outsource various cognitive functions specifically impact our brains. GPS is a well studied example. Humans that rely on GPS…
You seem to be arguing about avoiding constant connectivity. This is very different than not owning a smartphone. I think the conversation has gone off the rails, as I was critiquing your desire to impose a no smartphone lifestyle on others.
Second, you claim it shows a "provably weaker hippocampus". But the study doesn't show that at all. It shows less activity in the hippocampus, which would be entirely expected, much like if we offloaded translation to a computer, we wouldn't see the same level of activity in the language centers of the brain.
The researchers themselves only conclude this from their study:
> These results help shape models of how hippocampal and prefrontal regions support navigation, planning and future simulation.
That's it.