I have a phone but it is always on silent. I've decided that it is not acceptable to remotely hijack my attention. No notification on my phone sent by some corporation is ever urgent and basically never requires my immediate attention.
I stop hanging out with these types of people. If online bullshit is more important than actual real life, what is even the point?
I leave on notifications for calls and calendar events. That’s it. Texts are silenced but appear on the lock screen. Everything else is a red dot only.
My friends point out how weird this is. But when I see multiple stacks of unread notifications on their lock screens, it seems exhausting.
It's a natural reaction, but these people are actually suffering from an addiction and for at least some of them (those who can take remarks and act on them) it's better to tell them in a friendly way that you are having a discussion.
Most people are aware that cutting off a discussion is impolite and undesirable, they just don't realise they're doing it.
That phone is more engaging to them than the conversation they're in, and if you try to tell them about it, they use all the same excuses that other addicts use, plus a few more.
Almost all phone calls I receive are "actual" phone calls though. And SMS still gets plenty of use as the lowest common denominator for new recipients, but in practice over 95% of my received SMS are from computers now
In some places the switch to these apps took longer (like France, because SMS had been free for a long time) but there is a fundamental asymmetry since SMS is free only for part of the users (so the others will never use it) while the apps are free for everyone. In the end, everyone ends up mostly using these apps.
Even I am guilty of that for both SMS and calls, having a single featureful app with contacts ordered by the most recent discussions descending (as in my country SMS is largely replaced by Whatsapp) leads to less friction than having to scroll through my actual phone's contact.
Seems messed up. What's the psychology with that?
Is it a FOMO thing? Should we feel insulted?
It's all stacked against you.
Usually people use someone looking at their phone as an excuse to pull theirs out and start playing with it. Think refusing to do that yourself and just waiting for them to stop messing with it sends enough of a message.
Same here, the only time it'll make noise is if my gf calls twice in a row or if there is a national nuclear war alert