[techsupporter]

> ... I'm old ... you can live life without holding a cellphone all the time. It's not as hard as you think.

I'm in my 50s and I don't know where this stance comes from. Sure, you physically can in the same sense that anywhere can be walked to if you're willing to walk long enough. But so many businesses and services have gone "mobile-first" or "mobile-only" to the point that if you're traveling for leisure you're doing extra work on your vacation, and if you're traveling for business you're wasting time that could be used doing your job. Just as a first order, the denizens of every airline subreddit will tell you that the most useful tool during a trip is the airline's mobile app and that's either tied with or just above or below the Flighty app if anything goes wrong.

Combine that with QR codes for everything from menus to parking, public transit tickets and fare cards that can be easily loaded into a phone instead of using a ticket machine made when we were kids, or paper maps increasingly hard to find if they're available at all, and you're looking at a real challenge. How are you going to talk to and plan with your travel partner or colleagues with payphones removed?

It's also not incumbent upon us to make the government's life easier by making our lives harder. "Just leave your phone at home" is ludicrous behavior to expect when it's the government being the intrusive jerks.

[kwanbix]

And google translate or google maps if you are traveling are very nice to have.

Sure, you can do without them, but it will be much more difficult.

[testing22321]

I don’t have a phone

Sure it’s inconvenient sometimes, but on the whole I’d say my life is better than those I see glued to their phones.

This belief is reinforced whenever people ask for my number (dentist, doctor, whatever) The gusto which they invariably reply “OMG I WISH I could get rid of my phone!”

[haspok]

Because only those two extremes exist: you either don't have a phone, or your are glued to it?

[testing22321]

Of course not, I said nothing of the sort.

I said I’d prefer to not have a phone than be like people who are glued to their phones. I said nothing about all the people in the middle.

[GTP]

So do you give to your doctor your landline's nuber, and this is why they're surprised, or you don't even have that?

[triceratops]

They're probably being nice and think you're a weirdo.

I don't btw. I admire you sticking to your principles.

[testing22321]

In all fairness, I am a weirdo and wouldn’t have it any other way.

[raw_anon_1111]

How often do you travel outside of the country or even outside of your state?

[testing22321]

I’m not American. I travel a lot. It’s how I make money.

[raw_anon_1111]

Then tge question still remains - how do you catch an Uber or communicate with people when you don’t speak their language?

[testing22321]

Smiles, hand signals, learn basic words.

Exactly the same way I did when I drove across dozens of countries before the iPhone was invented.

[raw_anon_1111]

I assure you your experience was a lot less deep than mine now that I’m in a country where I don’t speak the language well for six weeks.

And how are you getting around without Uber now that taxis are basically dead.

And why be a Luddite when it comes to phones and not computers? Cars?

[adampunk]

What kind of phone does your grownup have?

[testing22321]

Zing.

We’ve both been exploring the world since long before smartphones were invented. So we still do everything we want the same as always.