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My greatest aspiration in life (yes, hyperbole) is to retire and get rid of my smartphone, and I can imagine it’s just going to be harder and harder as time goes on. I went into a restaurant recently and asked for a menu and they looked at me like I was from another planet.

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Agreed. After 27 years of working in IT and having to carry a mobile device (first a pager, then a flip phone, & now a smartphone) for on-call duties, carrying a mobile device has always felt like a punishment to me. The days when I can walk around device-free are the happiest, most stress-free times of my life. But the tech companies are making it harder and harder to do.

I went on a trip without any tech. No smartphone.

I made it five days but could have gone for longer. It was interesting to see how the system worked from without, and how people reacted to requests that would have been banal in the nineties. For the most part, it went well. Very few things were unavailable. I only remember hotel phones being missing or broken. However it was impossible to handle things back home and my life would have started falling apart after a few weeks of ignoring emails.

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