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Comment by nvy | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it difficult to exist in modern society without one?

Getting a mainstream email account is now impossible without one!

How far we’ve fallen since the days when usernames were opaque numbers and anonymity was prized.

I’m aware that Google and some others require phone number verification for account creation these days, but do they actually require a smartphone?

Also you really don’t need a Google account to live correctly, especially if you don’t even own a smartphone.

Honestly if you were able to live without a phone until now, living without Gmail (or what you call a mainstream email) is pretty easy.

There are still plenty of email providers left and right that will allows you to subscribe without a phone number. You’ll probably have to pay though. What may be harder in this precise use case is getting a domain name (which is not mandatory but really helpful if you want to be able to switch providers easily) but I’m pretty sure you can still register domains with a landline number.

I've been maintaining my own mail server for almost 20 years. The thing though, I found that sometimes I end up needing to use one of the bigger email providers like gmail, apple mail, etc because otherwise my mail is classified as spam.

Probably depends on how digitized things are where they live and how much of that they interact with.

Where I live, going without a phone would be incredibly tedious, as it handles bus and train tickets, tracking for hourly busses, no ATMs within walking distance and it's basically standard for local events to do "sign in" by having you scan a QR code and so on.

Not having a phone would mean budgeting much more time for going anywhere and having to carry change for the bus.

But if you have a car, you get to bypass most of that, no need to worry about tickets or tracking, ATMs don't need to be very local either. Then if you don't really care about attending local events, you get to avoid everything.

If on top of that, if your job is accomodating, you could conceivably go without a phone entirely. My job would crawl to a near stop if my coworkers had to wait for me to be in front of a laptop/desktop to respond to them.

only if you don't have everything you need already

The NUMBER 1 most annoying thing about not having a phone in the modern day is ticketing services / events. The second is Uber/Lyft/etc (though less of an issue in cities with public transit).

Thanksfully in many cities in the world regular taxis do still operate. In my city they aren't necessarily more expensive than Uber. It depends of the kind of route and time of the day/night. Sometimes you pay more, sometimes you pay less.

Can't you print the tickets?

Even here in Denmark that's still an option.

Here in Germany, the "Deutschlandticket", a country-wide public transportation ticket, is currently valid only via smartphone or "Chipkarte" (smart card). Unfortunately that smart card isn't available everywhere and won't be before early next year. It seems rather like a policy snafu then intended though [1].

[1] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/Deutschlandtick...

It is intended. The goal by all governments is to "encourage" smartphone usage. That ticket situation is both carrot and stick.

I’ve been seeing more and more events that only have digital tickets. They say it almost like it’s a point of pride… all the paper they’re saving, or something.

Only because people like you keep repeating that lie.

What I'm doing is asking a question, as denoted by the "?" glyph at the end of my comment.

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