So you not have extended family or friends in your daily social setting?
Like this sounds awesome but being offline for 23 hours in the day is unmanageable here, unless you live a very solitary life.
Like this sounds awesome but being offline for 23 hours in the day is unmanageable here, unless you live a very solitary life.
I have tons of friends and a very active social life - in person.
I bump into friends in town, at the ski hill, at the bar and grocery store.
I ask people for the time, directions and how their day is going. I’ll never have a phone.
People expect to be able to reach you…
Envy you a bit, though.
Just set expectations with others and it works just fine either way. Only thing in the way is cognitive dissonance for most people.
In my case people absolutely forgive not being able to reach me every second of every day because I am a productivity machine due to being able to actually focus.
And if your kid needed to go home and sleep in bed, you had to take the day off instead of home office. There was price to that.
Oh, and back then school did not expected parents and kids to have phones, now it does. Information about schedule changes, homework, what needs to be paid and such is broadcasted with the assumption that everyone has a phone.
One clinic denied me for not having a Google or Apple account, so I took my business to one that would accommodate me.
Rolling over and doing what the majority of people want you do to is not how change happens.
SoftTalker: "We managed healthcare before antibiotics, antiseptics, germ theory, sterilisation. Hah, gotcha."
When they see you working circles around everyone else because your brain can finally focus, they will generally back off.
If it’s a real emergency Call 911. They’re better trained than me.
When people ask for my number and I say I don’t have a phone, 99% of all people say very passionately “omg, I wish I could get rid of this thing”. Most people don’t like their phone, which confirms my belief it won’t make my life better.
Except when you are offline together.
You can get landlines (via a VOIP conversion box or otherwise), and beyond that what do you really need if you are honest?
> it’s not manageable to be offline all the time here
> it is if you’re all offline together
> but everyone doesn’t want to be offline with me
> just be offline by yourself; what’s the big deal? <— you
The big deal is all the stuff called out above. My kids school, child care, my work, pizza delivery, everyone has built up infrastructure that assumes virtually always online.
If it works for you to just not be online anymore, cool. But it’s not trivial for many people to make this change.
This is not some crazy sci-fi lifestyle experiment I am running for the first time. I just live mostly like all industrialized humans did before 2009.
> No one gets to decide your lifestyle but you. Make them adapt.
Make them adapt is some nonsense. You’ve made multiple comments that through sheer force of will you can make other people align with your choices. You’ve posted zero evidence, or even claimed, that you have succeeded in doing this yourself.
Now on the outside looking in, it feels like everyone criticizing me for not letting robots lift weights for me at the gym, because everyone else does it that way. I choose what to think about most of the time instead of letting a pocket rectangle decide for me. Plenty of evidence suggests this is good for our brains. Everyone else seems as absurd to me as I probably seem to them. If anything I feel like I am having to constantly accommodate phone addicts that have incredibly short attention spans.
Few in my social or professional life can keep up with my productivity, which I largely attribute to having the ability to focus and think without distraction for hours at a time which most people struggle to do these days without reaching for a phone. I can never even get through a meal with most friends without them checking social media several times.
With more than a few world firsts in engineering under my belt in the years since I gave up my phone, people tend to accept my "unusual" lifestyle choice of not being reachable every second of every day.
Not everyone aligns, and that is fine, just as not every restaurant provides vegan options.
Sometimes I have to go to a different restaurant that has paper menus and accepts cash, or a different clinic because I lack a Google or Apple account, but their loss of business and not a big deal for me given all the major privacy and productivity gains I get.
There are -always- alternatives and I have never been unable to accomplish a goal or do something I wanted to do because of not having a smartphone.
By all means give me a gotcha. I have heard them all and navigated around them without too much trouble.
> The real answer is “if you want to live this way, you give up a bunch of conveniences and have to deal with it.” It’s less convenient with schools, with childcare, with work, and everything else that assumes always online
Without a doubt, there are times where having a phone would be more convenient.
But I don’t want a more convenient life. I want a richer, happier, more rewarding and more fulfilling life. A phone won’t get me those things, and based on how often people tell me they wish they could throw away their phone and how much happier they’d be without it, I’m pretty sure a phone would make my life worse.
You would give up conveniences, but you'd be giving up inconveniences as well. It's a trade off that works extremely well for some people who are often surprised by how little effort it takes and how much happier and healthier they are. I doubt it's for everybody, but even then there are a lot of half-measures people can take to reduce the amount harm their cell phones are causing them and improve their lives.
Is there actually a pizza place that refuses to bring a pizza to someone without a cell phone app being involved? Like they have no phone number you can call from a landline or a website where you could place an order? Odds are good that you could get by just fine letting your kids school/daycare know your email address/landline phone number. Some people's work is much less flexible, but everything else should be accommodating people without cell phones.
Part of my problem with the claims that cell phones are the problem is that the answer often seems to be a landline that you’re still available on. If you replace one phone with another, what’s the difference? This isn’t a sarcastic question, either. The differences are key.
No one worried about the impact of dumb cell phones on our kids. Maybe the texting was a bit annoying but that’s all. What really changed is smart phones, the Internet in your hand all the time. The doomscrolling Instagram or TikTok and completely disconnecting from the real world most of the time. The Facebook-type sites that enable anonymous bullying.
It’s important to understand what the actual problems are because abstaining from phones entirely is just not realistic. Possible? Yes. Realistic? No.
When you have a landline that still happens, but they call you instead of texting. It works great!
> the answer often seems to be a landline that you’re still available on. If you replace one phone with another, what’s the difference?
There are huge differences. Most of the problems with smart phones aren't "You can call people or get calls". A landline still allows you to make and take calls but avoids every other evil cell phones introduce into our lives. When you're available on a landline it's on your own terms, in a very specific place. Even having both a desktop PC/laptop and a landline, meaning you can take calls and look something up on the internet, is vastly less abusive and harmful than a smart phone.
What changed with the smart phone wasn't that you could go online, it's that the device itself is designed to collect every scrap of personal information it can and then funnel it to other people. It's designed to be as addictive, intrusive, and demanding of your attention as possible. It follows you everywhere, all of the time. It cuts us off from the places we are and the people we are with. Being away from a smartphone fills people with a level of anxiety that never existed with laptops and landlines and that isn't by accident.
abstaining from phones entirely or even setting boundaries and limits to reduce the harms they cause is realistic as evidenced by the people who do it successfully in reality. That doesn't make it easy, or even ideal in some situations, but it might be worth trying just to see where the pain points are and how they can be managed. You might be surprised at how much more capable you are at functioning without one than you thought.
Why not a dumb (mobile) phone, then? Why the passion for a landline? You can still exercise full control over when/where you answer it, but you gain a lot of useful convenience as well.
I am specifically opting out of cellular networks for this reason, though open hardware/software wifi and meshtastic solutions I am always open to.
Also whenever possible I do not want to be reachable or distracted, say when having dinner out with my family, at a concert, or just standing in line in the post office. I make the decision when to open a laptop, it cannot summon me, and it takes more intention to use.
My point was that the person I replied to ignored the entire chain to reply as if they were actually answering the question, which they were not.
I agree this is not actually impossible. Is it an overall positive change? That’s debatable.
I think if you toss off the shackles and just try it for a week, you might find that things kind of take care of themselves, the world still turns and life finds a way. Nobody REALLY expects you to be online and reachable 24/7--we just have this weird phone FOMO that makes us think there is this expectation.
As has already been pointed out to you here before, these social moves you fear are awkward or impossible were EASILY handled by generations before you... and all without cellphones. Go figure.
People did all of these things before smartphones and all those methods still work just fine today.