[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.