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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

#241

Post by bittercynic »

bayindirh wrote: post #228
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can pass time while waiting - doctors office, etc - which makes me more pleasant. If you need to suppress your thoughts by using a tool while being alone and not doing something (to be pleasant), maybe you should do something about these thoughts rather than suppress them?

It's not always running from your thoughts. Sometimes it's just nice to be occupied with something pleasant while you're waiting.

Also, sometimes when you're waiting at the doctor's office you're waiting for important news that would trigger anxiety in the healthiest among us, and distracting yourself is a great strategy in those moments.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#242

Post by chias »

jskherman wrote: post #28
chias wrote: post #19

I was never in the "heavy smartphone users" category, but one thing I found that nonetheless shrank my usage significantly was switching to the "Niagara" launcher app (Android). If you are somebody that doesn't want to keep getting "sucked" into your phone, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I also switched to Niagara Launcher, and it's great especially with the new icons update (everything looks so consistent)! It decreased my usage as well but I still find myself going back to old habits whenever stress mounts, despite having Niagara Pro, enabling Morning mode, and Notification summaries. Any tips you could share that have helped you further decrease your usage?

Do not put the apps you want to reduce usage of in your favorites. The act of pulling them out of the alphabetized list or searching for them when you want to use them adds just enough (for me) friction that it becomes a necessarily deliberate action.

Make your homescreen boring.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#243

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

Affric wrote: post #182
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You complain about people being friendly. You complain about having to actually learn a language. It sounds like your phone is preventing you from the very normal human interactions that made society pleasant. There’s no amount of asserting that others are uninteresting that can convince me that a society is better when strangers only interact transactionally.

If I'm going for a two weeks vacation and know I will never return - is it a reason to learn that country's language, further than hello/thank you/bye?

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#244

Post by threetonesun »

bayindirh wrote: post #228
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can pass time while waiting - doctors office, etc - which makes me more pleasant. If you need to suppress your thoughts by using a tool while being alone and not doing something (to be pleasant), maybe you should do something about these thoughts rather than suppress them?

I tend to read books on mine in such situations. I can sit alone in the woods quietly without any issues, but reading something I brought seems preferable to flipping through the magazine stacks or staring a gray wall.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#246

Post by bayindirh »

threetonesun wrote: post #244
bayindirh wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can pass time while waiting - doctors office, etc - which makes me more pleasant. If you need to suppress your thoughts by using a tool while being alone and not doing something (to be pleasant), maybe you should do something about these thoughts rather than suppress them?

I tend to read books on mine in such situations. I can sit alone in the woods quietly without any issues, but reading something I brought seems preferable to flipping through the magazine stacks or staring a gray wall.

Reading books is somewhat different than scrolling through endless feeds and numbing yourself, though.

I also prefer to read books in these situations, or face with the thing which makes me uncomfortable. I don't like to have a puddle of thoughts which fester and attack at the most inconvenient times, making my life harder than it should be.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#247

Post by mzs »

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?

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#248

Post by j4yav »

wholinator2 wrote: post #215
j4yav wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The videos coming out of people walking around, driving, on the subway, or otherwise in public places with Vision Pros interacting with invisible computers I hope is a shocking enough image that we don’t go down that road but I guess it’s just going to become what people see as normal. If nothing else it makes it obvious who is trying to plug themselves into the matrix so you can stay away.

I'm not convinced it's not just a viral marketing stunt with each of those videos being "paid" actors. It's heavily in apple's profit interest if people stop thinking of those things as cringey to be seen with. But honestly I'm not convinced anyone other than the ubiquitous 'clout chasers' and 'scamfluencers' actually thinks it's acceptable to wear one of those in public.

People wore Google glass in public (hence glasshole), not sure why this would be different.

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#249

Post by speff »

Aurornis wrote: post #168
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumbphones have cameras, so if you can't or don't want to remember a map, you can take its photo. My short term memory if good enough for that. Random installable apps are really the only edge smartphones have.

This kind of compromise probably sounds reasonable to someone trying to break an intractable smartphone addiction. But as someone who has never really had a problem with my smartphone, taking photos of a map and trying to pan around on a dumb phone sounds like pure torture. I can’t imagine it working well for any of the locations I actually need to pull up a map for, which are almost exclusively far away and require…

I guess the idea is that over time you'd learn to navigate without needing the turn by turn instructions that a smartphone spits out - like how people used to do it. It wouldn't just be to break smartphone dependence, but to gain a sense of direction if that makes sense?

Though your point about the phone/map telling you if the shop is open or not is a pretty strong advantage

Re: A practical guide to quitting your smartphone

#250

Post by Aurornis »

II2II wrote: post #239
Aurornis wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The results are solidly in: They're an utter disaster for most people, and for society at large. In no particular order, they ruin social interactions in public situations (think "talking to people in the grocery line" - though I've seen fewer people on their phones lately and can get some conversations going), I’m in the age group that is just old enough to remember adult life before everyone had smartphones. Hone…

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 your alcohol analogy, it would be like an alcoholic trying to give up the bottle when their friends and colleagues meet up at the bar every night. It's not so much a case that everyone needs to stop drinking. It is a case of the people around them needing to respect that alcohol should not be a fundamental tool for social or professional interactions.

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?

The alcohol analogy is apt, because I’ve had a couple friends struggle with alcohol addiction and recover. One of them tried to push complete alcohol abstinence on everyone else, insisting that it couldn’t possibly be used responsibly.

Yet the rest of us did use it responsibly. They didn’t understand how we could simply choose not to drink most nights (or weeks, or even months if we wanted) and how we can choose to drink only a single drink and then be done. They insisted that the entire concept of drinking was flawed and uncontrollable and that we all needed to acknowledge that it’s not working out for anyone. That we need to give up completely, hard stop.

And that’s exactly what some of these extremist anti-smartphone arguments are suggesting: That everyone’s consumption is uncontrollable and negative, that nobody can control themselves, and that the only possible solution is to go back to dumb phones. It’s a severe failure to imagine that anyone else’s behavior might differ from their own, or a failure to accept that maybe their own problems don’t extend to everyone else in the world. It’s certainly comforting to believe that your own problems aren’t a personal failing but rather a feature of being human, but the truth is that many of us do use smartphones with moderation just fine.

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