[dpark]

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? <— you

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 you to just not be online anymore, cool. But it’s not trivial for many people to make this change.

[lrvick]

I have an active social life, spent years as a sysadmin, co-run two tech companies, have a family, all without a phone.

This is not some crazy sci-fi lifestyle experiment I am running for the first time. I just live mostly like all industrialized humans did before 2009.

[dpark]

This is still not an answer to the comment chain. The real answer is “if you want to live this way, you give up a bunch of conveniences and have to deal with it.” It’s less convenient with schools, with childcare, with work, and everything else that assumes always online.

> No one gets to decide your lifestyle but you. Make them adapt.

Make them adapt is some nonsense. You’ve made multiple comments that through sheer force of will you can make other people align with your choices. You’ve posted zero evidence, or even claimed, that you have succeeded in doing this yourself.

[lrvick]

Everything I "give up" gives me so much more back.

Now on the outside looking in, it feels like everyone criticizing me for not letting robots lift weights for me at the gym, because everyone else does it that way. I choose what to think about most of the time instead of letting a pocket rectangle decide for me. Plenty of evidence suggests this is good for our brains. Everyone else seems as absurd to me as I probably seem to them. If anything I feel like I am having to constantly accommodate phone addicts that have incredibly short attention spans.

Few in my social or professional life can keep up with my productivity, which I largely attribute to having the ability to focus and think without distraction for hours at a time which most people struggle to do these days without reaching for a phone. I can never even get through a meal with most friends without them checking social media several times.

With more than a few world firsts in engineering under my belt in the years since I gave up my phone, people tend to accept my "unusual" lifestyle choice of not being reachable every second of every day.

Not everyone aligns, and that is fine, just as not every restaurant provides vegan options.

Sometimes I have to go to a different restaurant that has paper menus and accepts cash, or a different clinic because I lack a Google or Apple account, but their loss of business and not a big deal for me given all the major privacy and productivity gains I get.

There are -always- alternatives and I have never been unable to accomplish a goal or do something I wanted to do because of not having a smartphone.

By all means give me a gotcha. I have heard them all and navigated around them without too much trouble.

[testing22321]

For context I also have no phone.

> The real answer is “if you want to live this way, you give up a bunch of conveniences and have to deal with it.” It’s less convenient with schools, with childcare, with work, and everything else that assumes always online

Without a doubt, there are times where having a phone would be more convenient.

But I don’t want a more convenient life. I want a richer, happier, more rewarding and more fulfilling life. A phone won’t get me those things, and based on how often people tell me they wish they could throw away their phone and how much happier they’d be without it, I’m pretty sure a phone would make my life worse.

[autoexec]

> “if you want to live this way, you give up a bunch of conveniences and have to deal with it.”

You would give up conveniences, but you'd be giving up inconveniences as well. It's a trade off that works extremely well for some people who are often surprised by how little effort it takes and how much happier and healthier they are. I doubt it's for everybody, but even then there are a lot of half-measures people can take to reduce the amount harm their cell phones are causing them and improve their lives.

[autoexec]

> 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/daycare know your email address/landline phone number. Some people's work is much less flexible, but everything else should be accommodating people without cell phones.

[dpark]

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, 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.

[autoexec]

> though certainly I’ve had pizza delivery people text me because they couldn’t find my house.

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.

[gsinclair]

So let’s agree that removing smartphones from one’s life is beneficial.

Why not a dumb (mobile) phone, then? Why the passion for a landline? You can still exercise full control over when/where you answer it, but you gain a lot of useful convenience as well.

[autoexec]

A dumb phone seems like a pretty good compromise to me. Especially in situations where you're traveling. You'll get tracked and still have to deal with interruptions from texts, but you can always turn it off and that should keep it from disrupting you when you want to be focused on where you are/what you're doing/who you're with.

[lrvick]

Any device connected to cell towers is constantly having its location tracked via triangulation, which is sold to endless surveillance capitalism organizations and governments to monitor where we shop, and where we protest, to optimally manipulate us.

I am specifically opting out of cellular networks for this reason, though open hardware/software wifi and meshtastic solutions I am always open to.

Also whenever possible I do not want to be reachable or distracted, say when having dinner out with my family, at a concert, or just standing in line in the post office. I make the decision when to open a laptop, it cannot summon me, and it takes more intention to use.

[lrvick]

Most VOIP services will route SMS to email or a messenger of your choice. I get SMS just fine on my wifi devices, which I monitor when I am expecting a delivery.

[ryandrake]

I don't think anyone said it's trivial, but they are saying it is 1. possible, and 2. overall a positive change. But merely that has upset people in this thread.

[dpark]

No one is actually upset by this. “oMG why are you so triggered?!”

My point was that the person I replied to ignored the entire chain to reply as if they were actually answering the question, which they were not.

I agree this is not actually impossible. Is it an overall positive change? That’s debatable.

[ryandrake]

I've also posted in the past about the joys and benefits of either leaving your phone uncharged in your drawer, or at least turning on DND mode 24/7 and turning off all calls and notifications, and for whatever reason, a lot of people here have this visceral reaction to the mere suggestion that it's possible and enjoyable to operate this way. People throw all the predictable excuses up as reasons why it's unmanageable: Kids, daycare, school, the office... all things they imagine are totally unworkable offline.

I think if you toss off the shackles and just try it for a week, you might find that things kind of take care of themselves, the world still turns and life finds a way. Nobody REALLY expects you to be online and reachable 24/7--we just have this weird phone FOMO that makes us think there is this expectation.