[i_c_b]

Back in the late 90s, when I first entered the video game industry to work (when it was quite scruffy, countercultural, and populated by some pretty odd people), one of the first things I encountered was a new co-worker who, next to his giant tower of used Mountain Dew cans, had a black and white TV in his cubicle. This struck me as very odd at that moment in time - as I understood things, obviously the point of work was supposed to be that it was a place where you worked, not a place where you watched TV. (Now, granted, everyone else was playing the recently released Diablo on their work PCs during lunch in network mode, and we were a game studio after all, so my reaction wasn't totally coherent). Still, no one else had a TV, and that guy was young and single with no work-life balance, he was a recent transplant, and it still seemed unusual at the time.

Fast forward 28 years later, and now everyone has an amazing TV in their pocket at all times when they commute, sit in their work space, go out for coffee or lunch, or go sit down in the bathroom, all with a near infinite collection of video via youtube, netflix, and even massive amounts of porn. How little did I know. And that's to say nothing of texting and twitter and reddit and instant messaging and discord and ...

Several years ago, I was working on a college campus, and there were giant corporate-flavored murals beside some of the city blocks students walked, full of happy multicultural clip art people and exciting innovative technological innovation, and adorned with the message, "Imagine a borderless world!" Clearly that message was meant to be rhetorical, not a call to reflection, critique, or reevaluation. There did not seem to be the suggestion that one might imagine the borderless world and then, having done so, decide it was a problem to be corrected.

I wonder a lot, these days, if we're not deep into a Chesterton's Fence situation, where we have to rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors, communities, and communication pathways to facilitate all sorts of important activities that simply don't happen otherwise - something like borders and boundaries as a crucial social technology, specifically about directing attention productively. Phones and tablets are, in their own Turing complete way, portals to a borderless world that pierces the older intentional classroom boundaries.

[RegW]

In my first job out of university in the 80s, I spent all one night playing Knight Lore on the Spectrum with friends. I failed to get up the next morning. My boss drove across Leeds and to bang on the door to see if I was alright. I needed that job so I stopped playing computer games.

In the 90s a later boss called me out for spending my days attached to the Slashdot firehose. I had sort-of known that it was a wasteful time sink, so I resolved to completely stop using the social media of its time, and have avoided most incarnations of it ever since (but here I am).

As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves. I know that some simply won't finish school without strong guidance, but delaying exposure to this might just be worse in the long term.

[Aurornis]

> As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules.

In my experience with mentoring juniors and college students, it’s common to have some wake-up call moment(s) where they realize their phone use is something that needs to be moderated. For some it comes from getting bad grades in a class (college in the age range I worked with) and realizing they could have avoided it by paying attention in lectures instead of using their phone. I’ve also seen it happen in relationships where they realize one day that their social life has disappeared or, in extreme cases, get dumped for being too into their phone. For others it shows up in their first job when someone doesn’t hold back in chewing them out for excessive or inappropriate phone use.

In the context of high school students, I don’t see this happening as much. A big component of high school social structure is forcing students a little bit out of their comfort zone so they can discover friends and build relationships. The default for many is to hide, withdraw, and avoid anything slightly uncomfortable. For a lot of them, slightly uncomfortable might be as simple as having to make casual conversation with people around them. A phone is the perfect tool to withdraw and appear busy, which feels like a free license to exist in a space alone without looking awkward.

So while agree that most people come to terms with the problem themselves as adults, I do also think that middle and high schools deserve some extra boundaries to get the ball rolling on learning how to exist without a phone. The students I’ve worked with who came from high schools that banned phones (private, usually, at least in the past) are so much better equipped to socialize and moderate their phone use. Before anyone claims socioeconomic factors, private high schools generally have sliding scale tuition and a large percentage of students attend for free due to their parents’ income, so it’s not just wealthy kids from wealthy families that I’m talking about.

[testing22321]

> I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves

That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies.

What makes you think this is different?

[lmm]

> That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies.

Children raised in cultures where alcohol is soft- rather than hard-banned for young people, and gradually introduced to it with parents around (think European teenagers having a glass of wine with lunch), tend to have healthier relationships with alcohol in later life than those raised in hard-ban-until-18/21 cultures. I think exactly the same will prove true of phones.

[inglor_cz]

There may be a massive confounding factor in the type of alcohol consumed.

The more permissive cultures tend to be beer- or wine-centric. I have never been deeply interested in addictology, but the few (older) works on alcoholism I have read mentioned that beer and wine drinkers tend to develop a different sort of relationship with alcohol than hard drink consuments, in the sense that they have a hard time abstaining entirely, but fewer of them develop into the full-blown "gin zombie" type.

[mghackerlady]

I disagree. You see less depictions of beer or wine addicts despite them (at least from my experience) making up the majority of high-functioning alcoholics. I don't know for sure why they're depicted less, but my running theory is a combination of not being tragic enough for drama focused on alcoholism and being played for jokes with things like the "wine mom" stereotype. They also tend to be a lot better at hiding their alcoholism due to their type of drinking being more accepted. They have a different relationship with alcohol, but not necessarily a better one (arguably a more dangerous one due to the relative societal acceptance of their type of alcoholism).

[inglor_cz]

"high-functioning alcoholics"

That's the crux of the situation, though; on hard liquor, the slippery road to becoming a non-functional alcoholic is much steeper.

There also might be a gender difference. In my experience, men who drink wine, mostly drink with friends and self-limit. The sort of men who are prone to alcoholism won't be satisfied by mere wine and will proceed to hard drinks quick. On the other hand, women often drink wine alone and might develop a daily habit that degrades into full-blown alcoholism even without resorting to hard drinks.

FYI, I barely drink at all and I dislike sloshed people (incl. myself when I rarely get intoxicated; it is an unpleasant state to be in). But even hell has layers.

[AngryData]

In my midwest area it seems like you can tell who are the alcoholics right away because they buy and drink cheap beers 90% of the time. Maybe to make themselves feel less like an alcoholic because they aren't drinking hard liquor, and it seems someone is more likely to say something if they see someone down a half+ bottle of vodka themselves, but nobody ever says anything seeing someone down 10+ beers.

[lmm]

I suspect that's not so much a confounder as one of the mechanisms.

[broken-kebab]

These things are not comparable. Alcohol is so old a thing we not only built plenty of stable cultural norms around it but we even developed genetic adaptations.

And speaking of culture, as an Eastern European I would argue our rules regarding alcohol are not soft. Yes, we drink, even expected to drink on some ritualized occasions. But contrary to Hollywood depictions, it's not cool to be a non-functional alco in our lands. When society decides you can't manage yourself, it builds harsh zone of exclusion around you. Imagine you have an uncle Jim who is constantly doomscrolling and for that he has no chances with a good reliable woman, his job opportunities are limited to something non-prestigious, people talk about him like he's a dimwit, even kids look down at him. He's recognized as a failure of a man and parents don't miss a chance to remind about the bad example to their kids. That would be "not-hard" rules EE style.

[Muromec]

That approach works more often than it doesn’t — outside of certain spiraling situations most people don’t became alcoholics and drug addicts.

Some however do, which is why drugs and alcohol are controlled to some degree.

[somenameforme]

They weren't always. In fact it took many centuries for this to happen. The history of cocaine in the US is quite interesting. It was being used everywhere and by everybody. Factory owners were giving it to their laborers to increase productivity, it was used in endless tonics, medicines, and drinks (most famously now Coca-Cola = cocaine + kola nut), and so on. You had everybody from Thomas Edison to popes to Ulysses S Grant and endles others testify to the benefits of Vin Mariani [1] which was a wine loaded with cocaine, that served as the inspiration for Coca-Cola.

So probably part of the reason it was so difficult to realize there is a problem is because everybody was coked out of their minds, so it all seemed normal. And I think the exact same is true of phones today. Watch a session of Congress or anything and half the guys there are playing on their phones; more than a few have been caught watching porn during session, to say nothing of the endless amount that haven't been caught! I can't help but find it hilarious, but objectively it's extremely inappropriate behavior, probably driven by addiction and impaired impulse controls which phones (and other digital tech) are certainly contributing heavily to.

I find it difficult to imagine a world in the future in which phones and similar tech aren't treated somewhat similarly to controlled substances. You can already see the makings of that happening today with ever more regions moving to age restrict social media.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani

[Aurornis]

> The history of cocaine in the US is quite interesting. It was being used everywhere and by everybody.

Be careful with that comparison. The cocaine infused drinks of the past are not comparable to modern cocaine use for several reasons.

The route of administration and dose matter a lot. Oral bioavailability is low and peak concentrations are much lower when drinking it in a liquid as opposed to someone insufflating (snorting) 50mg or more of powder.

You could give a modern cocaine user a glass of Vin Mariani and they probably would not believe you that it had any cocaine in it. The amount, absorption, and onset are so extremely different.

> So probably part of the reason it was so difficult to realize there is a problem is because everybody was coked out of their minds

That’s an exaggeration. To be “coked out” in the modern sense they’d have to be consuming an insane amount of alcohol as well. We’re talking bottle after bottle of the wine.

Be careful with these old anecdotes. Yes, it was weird and there were stimulant effects, but it’s not comparable to modern ideas of the drug abuse. It’s like comparing someone taking the lowest dose of Adderall by mouth to someone who crushes up a dozen pills and snorts them. Entirely different outcomes.

[somenameforme]

Vin Mariani was 7+mg/oz with a relatively low alcohol content which would have been further mitigated by the stimulant effect of the cocaine in any case. And then of course other concotions (including Coca-Cola) had no alcohol at all - Vin Mariani is just a fun example because of the endless famous names attached to it.

Obviously you're right that the absorption is going to be different and a modern coke head with high tolerance likely wouldn't even notice it had anything in it. But give it to a normal person, and they're indeed going to be coked out - in very much the same way that small doses of adderall to non-users can have a very significant effect. The obvious example there being college kids buying pills around around finals.

[master-lincoln]

> Some however do, which is why drugs and alcohol are controlled to some degree.

Following your argument shouldn't anything that can induce addiction be controlled? Seems that is not the case e.g. looking at sugar.

[Muromec]

>Following your argument shouldn't anything that can induce addiction be controlled?

Depending on a risk profile -- totally. There are talks of taxing sugar drinks and not selling "energy drinks", which are coffeine + sugar, to kids for this very reason.

I also mean controlled in the broad definition, not as in the "controlled substance". The culture of consumption prescribed by society is a way of regulation too, more effective than laws even.

[wisty]

I don't have time to search for a credible source, but it is claimed addicts often seek treatment after hitting "rock bottom".

There's obvious reasons why it's not encouraged to wait that long though.

[kergonath]

> it is claimed addicts often seek treatment after hitting "rock bottom".

From my experience it is often too late at that point. And actually hitting rock bottom is difficult and destructive, and leaves scars. As they say, preventing is better than curing.

[melagonster]

Maybe we can make school harder so they will go there earlier.

[achikin]

Because it is proven that phone usage is not an addiction like drugs or alcohol. People put phones away easily if they have a reason to do so.

[mghackerlady]

They aren't physically addictive like alcohol or opiates but it's very clear that many people have a psychological dependency on them. Whether or not a psychological dependency counts as an addiction is up to debate (personally, I believe they are due to my experiences with self harm, which many people including myself were or are psychologically dependant on) but the differences are mostly semantic if they end up functionally the same

[rossjudson]

I have no idea what you are talking about. It walks and quacks exactly like drugs and alcohol.

Thousands of deaths every year are caused by drivers on cell phones. You'd think they'd have a reason to put them away.

[achikin]

There are a lot of reasons for distraction while driving, but we don’t call all of them addiction on that premise. If a driver was not looking at his phone - maybe he’d be looking at something else. The phone is not the reason - it’s just a very suitable object.

[skeeter2020]

this is thoroughly debunked with hard data from distracted driving laws that focus on phone use while driving. We have the luxury of both before and after data and across different jurisidictions.

[emil-lp]

Citation needed

[achikin]

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6174603/

The main idea here is that overuse not equals addiction.

[justinclift]

The first part of the Results section says:

    [...] the majority of research in the field declares that smartphones are addictive

Though that section continues on to disagree with that majority, "the majority" declaring smartphones are addictive is certainly supportive of them being so.

[nkrisc]

I mean, it does work for most people. Most people can drink responsibly. The alcoholics are the ones who can’t do it on their own.

[sapientiae3]

The main challenge is that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control and other things, only fully develops around age 25.

The problem with that is without some explicit instruction or guidance or invention before they have full control of their impulses, not everyone tames the beast unscathed.

[Aurornis]

> The main challenge is that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control and other things, only fully develops around age 25.

This factoid has been repeated for decades but it’s essentially a myth.

Brain development continues into your 20s, but there isn’t a threshold at age 25 where someone goes from having poor impulse control to being capable of good impulse control.

18-25 year olds are not children and are fully capable of having impulse control. That can continue to develop as they age, but it doesn’t mean age 25 is when it happens.

I would agree that actual children need some more explicit boundaries, which is also why we don’t allow children to do a lot of things that people over 18 can do.

[kelnos]

I don't think anyone is saying impulse control goes from 0% to 100% on everyone's 25th birthday, like flicking a switch. But is it not reasonable to say that a 25-year-old will have significantly better impulse control than they had when they were 18? (And that their 30-year-old self probably has a similar level of impulse control as when they were 25?)

[assimpleaspossi]

I owned a string of fast food restaurants. I had the ability to not hire anyone under age 20 if I didn't have to. When I did, the requirement was that they be in college but, in every case, I found that these kids, who returned for summer work every year, did a lot of growing up between the ages of 18 and 20.

[skeeter2020]

I think this persists because in most studies, 25 - and other specific ages for further stages - comes from plotting a distribution of the traits being analyzed and pulling averages from that. We like precision and fixate on the numbers but they really mean "the majority of the observed change under study appears to occurr within a specific range" but that does not make catchy headlines for the public.

[bigC5560]

As someone who graduated from high school in 2025 I completely agree with this. I am glad I had to work it out on my own, and I don't think this is a place that a school should take control. If I had to figure this out along with the stress of college, I don't know if I would be able to handle it. I also think that it has helped with my overall time management skills and prioritizing my time.

I know not everyone will have the same experience as me, but I just feel like learning to manage it on my own was overall beneficial for me in the end.

[kelnos]

I think the problem is that most students, (as this study shows) are not figuring it out on their own, at least not in high school. It feels like you're one of the outliers, not the common case.

Having rules about what you can and can't bring into school is nothing new. I went to high school in the 90s, and there were plenty of things we weren't allowed to bring with us into class; back then, the closest analogue to smartphones would have been pagers, probably.

It seems entirely reasonable to ban smartphones (and dumb phones, even) from schools. Frankly, I think it's absolutely insane that they were ever allowed.

And sure, maybe these students who go to high schools where smartphones are banned will get to university and go nuts, sitting in lecture halls with their phones out all the time. They'll learn very quickly that their grades will suffer, and will clean up their acts or fail out of school. But this is like everything else: the first year of university is the big year of independence, of being away from parents for the first time, and college students do plenty of dumb things in the name of that independence. That's always been the case; I'm no stranger to that phenomenon myself. They either work it out on their own, or they fail out.

[mghackerlady]

Similar situation as you, I switched to a flip phone and now use my old iPhone as a glorified youtube machine when I'm too lazy to go to my desk or don't feel like dealing with my tablets poor wifi range

[AuthorizedCust]

> As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually…

Fellow Scouter here. Lots of Scout units in the USA have cell phone bans. That’s such an obsolete policy. We need to help the Scouts model good choices, and that doesn’t happen when decision opportunities are removed.

Also, if they are buried in their phones, take that as feedback on how much fun they are[n’t] having in your Scout unit.

[emil-lp]

> Also, if they are buried in their phones, take that as feedback on how much fun they are[n’t] having in your Scout unit.

You are misunderstanding the addiction part here. It's not about not having fun.

There are tech companies spending literally trillions of dollars on one goal: ensuring that kids keep looking at their phones.

Your framing this as a question of boredom is really naive.

[AuthorizedCust]

I speak from experience. They aren’t on their phones when they are doing adventures.

[emil-lp]

Of course, but they can't be on adventures 24/7, that's the point.

Kids aren't supposed to have fun 24/7. It's impossible.

The problem is what happens the moment the "fun" stops. If everybody reaches for their phones, then that's an issue that cannot be fixed by your "just have more fun" mindset.

These kids are set up to fail.

[lo_zamoyski]

Part of the lesson is understanding how we got here.

The answer is, of course, liberal hyperindividualism. By that I don't mean "liberal institutions" or respect for the individual person especially in the face of collectivism, but an ideology of antisocial atomization of the self that thrusts the self into subjective godhood. Paradoxically, this makes people more susceptible to control in practice.

Now, ideological and political programs don't fully realize the consequences of their premises instantly. It can take years, decades, centuries for all the nasty errors to manifest and become so conspicuous that they cannot be ignored. The Enlightenment program in our case. And so, in this hyperindividualism, the social order - its layers, its concentric circles, its various rights and demands on the individual that precede the consent of the individual - is all reduced progressively to not only the consensual, but also the transactional. Social bonds and structures evaporate or become fluid and contingent merely on the transactional; commitment and duty are a prison. Consent as the highest and only moral law leads us to relativism, because if all that is needed is consent to make an act moral and good, then naturally what is morally good will vary from person to person, and even minute to minute for a given person. On top of that, consent can be attained through manipulation and power, and so now individuals joust for power to manufacture consent in order to bless their exploitation of others.

The self cannot be limited in any way according to this program, and any residual limits are the lingering chains of some ancient past.

Perhaps most amusing is how so-called "countercultural" movements are anything but. These are typically just advancing the ideological program, not rejecting it. Contradictions between such movements and the status quo often come in the form of a tension between residual cultural features of an earlier age and the greater faithfulness to the trajectory of the program among the countercultural. Typically, conflicts are over power, not belief. And sometimes, the internal contradictions of the program lead to diverging programs that come into conflict.

[silisili]

Leaving out the word liberal as I don't really understand its context here, individualism was at one time a boon for the nation/economy. People move out of their family homes early, start their own family, chart their own path. Good for capitalism. And good for lots of things, really, a lot of America's success can be traced back to it.

But man, social media and the internet age have really exploited it to an unhealthy and unproductive point.

I remember going to college for the first time in 2000, and having an absolute blast meeting the people I was by circumstance forced to be around. Went back in 2004 and it was completely different, everyone was on their phone, maintaining their personal bubble in what should have been an age of exploration. That made me rather sad.

Today it's even worse, but at the risk of being an old man yelling at clouds, I won't drone on. I mostly wish my own children could experience the upbringing I had, as I find this one rather dystopian and depressing.

[lo_zamoyski]

> Leaving out the word liberal as I don't really understand its context here

I mean "liberal" in the philosophical sense, not the ill-defined, often pejorative partisan sense (in a philosophical sense, both major US political parties are liberal parties; we live in a liberal political order). One can support liberal institutions while rejecting the ideology along with its false anthropology, presupposed metaphysics and thus ethics.

The basic failure of liberalism lies in its definition of "freedom" which boils down to the ability to do whatever you choose, an absence of any restraint or constraint. Compare this with the classical definition of freedom as the ability to do what is objectively good. True freedom only exists in being able to exercise your nature as a human being. That's what flourishing means. The heart of such freedom is virtue and thus morality. The ability to do drugs or watch porn or sleep around or whatever is contrary to the good of the person doing those things. They do not make a person free. Immoral acts imprison and cripple the person committing them in the very act of committing them.

> individualism was at one time a boon for the nation/economy

I'm not talking about economic freedom. Economic freedom is always subject to various constraints. Some (good) regulation is necessary to protect the common good on which we all depend.

I'm talking about an anthropology that conceives of human beings in a way that denies or misrepresents their social nature and denies their obligations and duties toward others, and misunderstands freedom.

> People move out of their family homes early, start their own family, chart their own path.

I'm also not talking about having the liberty to make all sorts of life choices. What would the alternative be? And people today aren't moving out of the house. They're living with mom and dad into their 30s, maybe longer. Yet liberalism marches on.

And that's perhaps part of the lesson. If we draw out the conclusions of liberal premises and cross them with human nature and the human condition, we find that liberalism's inner contradictions cause it to implode on itself, producing what might appear to be paradoxical results. After all, shouldn't liberalism have given us a freer, better world? This is the part where its defenders will blame external factors, which raises all sorts of new questions about how that is possible.

[kragen]

The older wisdom was that you worked on the farm with your husband and children for your entire life, breastfeeding while you peeled the potatoes, putting down your spindle to comfort a crying child. Millers lived in the mill; even blacksmiths lived at their smithies. Except for rituals, separate spheres with separate hard constraints was a novelty of the Satanic mills where the Victorian proletariat toiled.

[Ferret7446]

They still had clear boundaries. They slept in the sleeping place and at the sleeping time, they worked at the working place and at the working time. See, they didn't have smartphones to fiddle with in bed.

[rootusrootus]

> they didn't have smartphones to fiddle with in bed

This is solvable for people who want to. We have a dedicated charging station in our house for all electronic devices. Before bed, all of those devices get put there. Including me and my wife's phones.

[krferriter]

This definitely is the way to do it. I have started keeping my phone in my living room at night instead of my bedroom, but am still bad about doing this every night. Phones are addictive and it is mentally hard to break out of the addiction. It is essentially a "you just have to do it" situation, but "just do it", while technically simple, is still difficult if you're addicted.

[rTX5CMRXIfFG]

How can you be contacted in case of an emergency in the middle of the night?

[walthamstow]

I've made my peace with the tiny, tiny chance that I might miss my father's last moments because I didn't hear about his heart attack til the morning, for example.

Living as if it might happen any time and I must be available for it is not healthy IMO.

[rootusrootus]

I figure it's a legitimate concern. One of my older brothers keeps his phone away from his room, but not close enough to hear it ring. About 10 years ago my little brother died unexpectedly in the middle of the night and all I could do was leave my older brother a message about it. He was beating himself up about it the next morning when he got the voicemail. Not that it would have changed anything, by the time I was notified it had already happened, there was no final moments to miss. But I suspect my brother doesn't keep his phone so far from his bed now.

[rootusrootus]

The phone is still close enough to hear if it rings.

[kragen]

https://www.ou.org/holidays/the_thirty_nine_categories_of_sa... outlines those "clear boundaries" in detail from a pre-medieval or early medieval perspective.

[nicbou]

I'm trying, but it's so hard!

I put my phone in a drawer. Everything's in silent mode. I have a fully disconnected, distraction-free iPad for reading and writing. Work only happens on the computer. There are no emails on the phone.

Yet, I can't fully disconnect. Every device, every account, every app mixes work stuff and personal life stuff. And software is so sticky! I can't just check one thing without my attention getting stuck on a notification badge, an email, a feed or some other thing that I should not pay attention to right now.

How do you people handle it?

[ben_w]

I also struggle with this, but I have found some metaphorical band-aids that help a bit.

My phone's SIM no longer has any credit on it. I actively cannot browse mindlessly in a lot of places. Doesn't work perfectly, half of public transport around here has free WiFi, as do some shops, but it helps.

I have three laptops. One with the games on (Steam, Windows and nothing much else, no passwords installed except Steam… oh and Discord but I don't actually log in because the content was never interesting enough to get addicted to in the first place); one as a work machine (mac with Xcode, claude etc. installed); and one as a down-time machine (also a mac, but only co-incidentally).

Facebook itself isn't installed anywhere, though the Messenger app is for family I otherwise can't reach; various time-hungry sites (including FB, X, here*, reddit, several news sites) are blocked as best as I can block them (harder than it should be: on iPhones the "time limit" tool doesn't allow "zero" and reflexes to tap "ignore limit" are too quick to form, on desktop it's increasing ignoring my hosts file).

YouTube has so many ads, it's no longer possible for me to habit-form with it. Well, that and the home suggestions are consistently 90% bad, and the remaining 10% includes items in my watch-later playlist that I don't get around to watching.

* see my comment history for how well that attempt at self-control is actually working.

[mghackerlady]

I started by just turning off notifications for anything that isn't needed for important people (eg: friends and family) to reach me. I got rid of most social media[0] a little while after that. Another thing I did when I still used a smartphone was remove all the apps from my home screen. At least on iOS, notification badges don't appear in their slide-out app tray thing. For quick access to essentials I used an app that provides a widget for hyperlink like launching of apps

[0]HN, Reddit, and Tumblr are the exceptions for me. I have notifications off and those platforms tend to invite more nuanced discussions and be less distracting over all

[dfxm12]

The first step is to understand why you can't disconnect. Ways to handle it will be different based on that.

One reason might be some kind of physical/psychological addiction (either to apps themselves or the act of looking at your phone). One reason might be that what you're doing is more boring than what you normally do on your phone.

[matthewaveryusa]

Honestly, I don't. I go through phases. I have a tampermonkey script that blank-screens sites and that's been very effective. Reddit is a tough one because there's a ton of useful information on there, but once you're on it it's easy to start scrolling. You could be extreme and get a device just for work, perhaps with google voice and wifi only to save on a membership fee

Here's my script: https://gist.github.com/matthewaveryusa/8257de0083abdecc612c...

[Aldipower]

I learned to hate smartphones, so I threw it literally away. People can write me an email or call me on my landline. On the desktop I am using Debian with WindowMaker. This is enjoyably distraction free. I am a free man.

[mghackerlady]

One of these days I'm going to get an old thinkpad, install OpenBSD on it, and switch the majority of my computing to TUI programs. Lynx renders websites remarkably well and keeps me away from the seedy stripmall the internet of today is. Perhaps I'll start posting on Usenet, I hear there are at least a few people still there

[rootusrootus]

I had an early experience with a Palm III and a cell modem strapped to it. It was intoxicating. I still find the pull of the phone to be very strong sometimes. It's an ongoing battle to maintain a healthy relationship with it. Such a useful tool, but also a massive time suck if you let it.

[oasisbob]

Ooh, I remember the Palm + modem + mail sync combination for sure. Was absolutely engrossing.

[ChrisArchitect]

Your Phone Isn't a Drug. It's a Portal to the Otherworld. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46115659

[gulfofamerica]

Great article. Probably not cynical enough for this crowd though.

[greg_V]

We were promised a borderless world and instead got one without boundaries.

[Cthulhu_]

And now we're clamouring to reinstate them. Not just digitally (in the form of e.g. limitations and boundaries on attention demanding apps and activities), but politically / internationally as well, if you lean that way.

[aa-jv]

I've always had a TV or screen of some sort, devoted to background music or light films, just to fill in the void between lines of code. For some, having such light stuff going on is a productivity booster. I once got a dev team that had been struggling to get things finished, well and truly over the finish line, by putting a fat TV in the room, and giving folks the ability to line up their playlists for the day, as long as it wasn't too violent/inappropriate for the workplace.

We side-watched a ton of stuff together as a team - it was great for morale - and we actually shipped stuff, too. Of course the TV eventually became a console for the build server, but it was always available to anyone to put something on in the background, if they wanted to. Definitely a nice way to get a team to be a bit more coherent - as long as whats being played isn't too crazy.

[throwawaylaptop]

I work in construction saas of a certain kind, and when I visit customers there is a very very clear difference in quality/size/revenue in companies that allow headphones and those that don't.

I'll let you decide which ones you think are doing better.

[IAmBroom]

That is an amazingly vague post. You've convinced me!

[throwawaylaptop]

Hah. When I write concrete statements someone always comes by and says that's wrong, or a bigoted view. So Ive been trying to see if letting people figure out the obvious answer themselves works better.

Obviously the place without headphones do way better.

[agumonkey]

You could even argue that society is incapable of not running into these cycles of building wisdom and losing it. Our minds are differential.. things that are here have less value, we seek newness no matter what.

[georgeecollins]

I am also older and I see that my kids don't have certain things that I perceived as disadvantages at the time but may have helped develop useful habits. These things include quiet and boredom, which helped with focus; lack of ready answers or information, which may have helped imagination or generative reasoning.

I think we can recreate these things if and when we need to, but that recreation may be for the elites. I heard an interview with a professor who said he had to reintroduce Socratic exams to get around chat bots and the fact that kids now have very poor handwriting. At an elite school you can do that.

[somenameforme]

I don't think this is something just for elites at all, because so much of this happens at the home. So for instance I completely agree on the boredom and have factored into how I raise my children. Similarly, I also agree on the importance of not having answers simply handed to you. Another one as well is realizing that not everything you're told is true, which is a big part of the reason that I ultimately decided that Santa exists for them. And it makes me wonder if that wasn't the point all along, because it doesn't feel right to lie to your kids for years.

[patcon]

> rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors

This is something I also believe. Thanks for saying it.

I've been thinking and reflecting a lot on what I've been calling for myself "generative constraint". It's sure as heck not something that is the same for everyone, but I think we all have a set of them that might help us be our best person.

We've universalized constraints and expansivenesses in a way that seems really poor judgement. And yes, there is a capitalist critique in this too, as any good theory should have :)

[cal_dent]

I think of it as "introducing friction". There's a lot things that we do now which is largely as a result of frictionless ease of doing it. Smartphones and social media are the obvious one, but it applies to many technology/digital driven behaviour (pay with face id/touch and people end up consuming more for instance). And it's no surprise to me that what works for a lot of people is putting their phone somewhere else in their house. Essentially introducing artificial friction.

My slightly cynical view is for many of us we're more often lazy than not and default to doing the most frictionless thing. Introduce friction and very quickly I find it forces you to think about what you're actually doing

[imgabe]

For certain tasks for me, having a movie running while I'm working is more productive. It gives something to take your attention when you have to wait for something without getting sucked in to endless scrolling.

[protocolture]

"What if coworker I disapproved of but society"

[calderwoodra]

Article about smartphones being bad? Right to the top.

Generic comment that would fit in the comment section of any of those articles? Right to the top.

I get baited into reading these posts and comments every day - why can't I stop? Probably for the same reason these posts and comments get up votes.