[HN Gopher] My experiment in phonelessness was a failure, and it...
___________________________________________________________________
My experiment in phonelessness was a failure, and it also changed
my life
Author : marban
Score : 184 points
Date : 2024-02-07 10:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > "Do you want to be my girlfriend?" I ask Almond one day. "I
| already am. That's what this is"
|
| Spot on. Sometimes that's all it takes, someone from the real
| world to remind you that you're OK, that _this_ is living, that
| it's good enough. After that the unreality at the inside of
| digital perdition starts to unravel and dissolve. The mind starts
| to wander back to that most highly addictive of all things,
| reality.
| isometricid wrote:
| ``` Thief of my life? No one gets to steal my life.
|
| Unfortunately, I am now addicted to sugar.
|
| ```
| ghaff wrote:
| It seems there are some distinct modes of phone use that are
| pretty different:
|
| - Social media/news/etc. scrolling
|
| - Contact with friends you're meeting or otherwise being
| reachable
|
| - Utility apps for parking, travel, GPS, etc.
|
| - Camera
|
| - Music/podcasts
|
| Probably others.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| The distinction between social media and communicating with
| friends is a interesting, but important one. I have some Signal
| groups that at times have huge bursts of activity and I haven't
| met everyone in them in person. Yet it's totally different from
| "social media" like Facebook. This seems obvious, but 2008
| Facebook was closer to my Signal groups than current Facebook
| or Twitter. I want to say it's the news feed that made Facebook
| problematic, but maybe it's the volume and that there always is
| something new?
| ghaff wrote:
| I have Facebook and have a fair variety of people on it but
| it's mostly dip in/dip out/here are photos of my trip. Mostly
| use email/SMS/iMessage if it's arranging a get-together with
| a closer overall group.
|
| With Facebook, I think it is partly the feed but it's also
| that I've accumulated a fair number of mostly professional
| colleagues and friends-of-friends over time. Some classmates
| I've stayed in various degrees of touch with.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The one I am loving in recent years is searching if an item is
| in stock at a store nearby and in many cases, seeing the
| location of the item in the store itself. Not to mention being
| able to compare prices and see reviews or other details.
| csdvrx wrote:
| My quirk is being phoneless. I have an android phone, but unless
| I'm flying, it stays at home, in a drawer.
|
| It's certainly not for everyone, as apps are used for almost
| everything, but I've found it helps me achieve deep focus by
| introducing just a little bit of friction, and forcing me to be
| more "in the present".
| hot_gril wrote:
| I carry a phone everywhere, but all the apps companies want you
| to install seem to add more friction if anything. Like, I have
| a credit card, why the heck would I use Apple Pay, let alone
| some store-specific payment app? Even if there's some fancy
| digital restaurant line system, that works via SMS, I'm not
| installing the Olive Garden app.
| k__ wrote:
| I tend to use media (games, chats, dating apps, social media,
| etc.) excessively (for 4-8h a day)
|
| However, since I never miss them when I have better things to do,
| it never fits the definition of addiction.
|
| On the other hand, I also don't drink, smoke, or consumer caffein
| without a purpose, so maybe I just don't tend to get addicted.
| blueflow wrote:
| Theory (open for discussion): With ADHD you don't get addicted,
| the excesses are mostly to fill the boredom between the better
| things.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| This is just plain wrong. People with ADHD are much more
| likely to develop addiction than people who don't. Most of
| the addicts I know, including myself, have it.
| mordae wrote:
| My experience is the opposite. I don't get addicted.
| Obsessed with a topic for a while? Sure! Compulsively
| repeating some behaviors, like checking HN? That's me! But
| once I get distracted by something interesting, it's like
| those never existed. They just lose their appeal.
| findyourexit wrote:
| ADHD is a pretty broad brush. While I've no doubt that some
| instances fuel a predisposition for addiction, I've seen
| exactly the opposite tendencies exhibited also.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I'm not saying there aren't people with ADHD who don't
| get addicted, but the statistics are unambiguous. Just
| google ADHD and addiction and you'll find plenty of
| studies.
| k__ wrote:
| 21% of men with ADHD and 13% of women with ADHD
|
| VS
|
| 9% of men without ADHD and 5% of women without ADHD
|
| Fair enough, more than double. However, not the majority
| of the people with ADHD, so it could still be a ADHD-
| relates boredom problem and less a typical addiction
| issue. (Which doesn't make the results less dangerous,
| but the mechanisms that cause it different)
|
| Sources:
|
| https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/adhd/
|
| https://americanaddictioncenters.org/addiction-statistics
| bradleyishungry wrote:
| Smoking is twice as common in people with ADHD. ADHD
| specifically affects impulse control which means you're much
| more likely to get addicted because bad habits are harder to
| stop doing.
| k__ wrote:
| I'm diagnosed with ADHD and never had the impulse to take
| drugs.
|
| I even forget to take my meds sometimes.
| alan-hn wrote:
| Addiction is uncontrolled and damaging repetition of the
| behavior after initiation not the initial initiation
| itself
| 4ec0755f5522 wrote:
| Nicotine is a stimulant: ADHD'ers are self-medicating and
| probably before they even know they have ADHD. It's not
| (primarily) because of a lack of impulse control.
| bradleyishungry wrote:
| Nicotine does stimulate the prefrontal cortex like
| adderall so self-medicating can play a role, but a lot of
| people with ADHD don't get addicted to their medication.
| From what i've experienced, its the behavior that's hard
| to quit. Not saying you're wrong, just that I think the
| higher number of smokers is more due to the fact that
| quitting is harder because of the action of smoking, not
| because it acts similar to medication in some ways.
| emptyfile wrote:
| 100% utterly wrong, people with ADHD are A LOT more likely to
| get addicted and stay addicted.
|
| This is clinical data NOT open for discussion.
|
| Blows my mind that people think medical data is a topic for
| discussion where your opinion matters.
| k__ wrote:
| At least it feels like that for me.
|
| I tend to eat more unhealthy food when I'm bored or
| depressed, but the moment I have an interesting task, I
| forget to eat the whole day.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I tend to use media ... for 4-8h a day...I never miss them
| when I have better things to do
|
| Would it be reasonable to restate this as - media is the ~best
| thing available to you, 4-8h/day?
|
| And by 'Available' I mean like 'readily reachable' and not like
| 'available if you reorder your life'. No wrong answer; just me
| wondering.
| k__ wrote:
| I'm a writer, musician, software engineer, etc.
|
| I have all these vocations and avocations available at my
| fingertips, they just don't always feel interesting.
| bilsbie wrote:
| You raise a great point. But that identifies a bigger problem.
| Why is it so hard to find better things to do?
| k__ wrote:
| No idea.
|
| It seems to me that neurotypical people don't have that
| issue.
|
| Then again, I don't think I'm close enough to any
| neurotypical person to judge that.
| vonjuice wrote:
| A trait of an addiction is that it significantly alters the
| way you perceive rewards and pleasure. It's not that it's
| hard to find better things to do, or that the other things
| aren't better, it's just they're not _that_. It 's like it
| lowers the brightness on the rest of life.
|
| If you manage to stay away from it for a period of time you
| start to see that it was just a lie, a skewed perspective.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I tend to use media (games, chats, dating apps, social media,
| etc.) excessively (for 4-8h a day)
|
| I would do (and have done) genealogy for that kind of time. I
| think I can best describe it as _overlap between it and
| addiction behavior_. I base it on:
|
| ..how people close to me feel about it
|
| ..how often it squeezes out other worthwhile and important uses
| of my time
|
| ..that I keep justifications at the ready and think about
| others who do the same
|
| I have no declaration to make about it other than I need to be
| mindful.
| k__ wrote:
| _"..how people close to me feel about it "_
|
| People I care are usually one of the reasons, I forget about
| excessively using media. So, they don't suffer from it.
|
| _"..how often it squeezes out other worthwhile and important
| uses of my time "_
|
| Theoretically? More often than not!
|
| Practically, as I have ADHD it's not easy to define
| worthwhile consistently.
|
| _"..that I keep justifications at the ready and think about
| others who do the same "_
|
| Usually, I don't think explicitly about it. I don't justify
| it, I just do it for a while (more or less excessively) and
| when I deem other task more worthwhile (for whatever reason),
| I forget about them completely.
| Liquix wrote:
| > I don't justify it
|
| _spends five minutes composing thoughtfully formatted post
| justifying it_
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I tend to use media (games, chats, dating apps, social media,
| etc.) excessively (for 4-8h a day)
|
| This statement alone could be enough to qualify your habit as
| an addiction, FYI. If you compulsively fill your free time with
| a behavior that you describe as "excessive", then that's a sign
| that this is not a healthy behavior.
|
| Perhaps it's more important to realize that something doesn't
| need to fit the exact definition of "addiction" in a textbook
| for it to be an u healthy behavior.
|
| > However, since I never miss them when I have better things to
| do, it never fits the definition of addiction.
|
| This doesn't actually disqualify you from addiction like you
| think.
|
| For example, an alcoholic might drink excessively when they
| find themselves in a situation or location that triggers their
| excessive behavior (going to a bar, driving past a liquor store
| on their way home, attending a sports event that serves
| alcohol). Part of their treatment would include modifying their
| behavior to avoid those triggers. For you, the trigger could be
| as simple as having large amounts of unplanned free time.
|
| > On the other hand, I also don't drink, smoke, or consumer
| caffein without a purpose, so maybe I just don't tend to get
| addicted.
|
| I had a friend who was in the addiction treatment and recovery
| industry for a while. He said it was actually very common for
| people to end up in rehab because they believed themselves to
| be immune to addiction or to "not have an addictive
| personality". This created an opening for a lot of denial and
| rationalization, which led to deeper and more protracted
| problems before they did something about it.
|
| A common example is a functional alcoholic: They can go for
| years denying that their use of alcohol is a problem because
| they're holding down a job and they may skip days of drinking
| under certain conditions (something better to do) without going
| into full on classic withdrawal. However, they still have a
| problem and still default to drinking excessively during bouts
| of idle time. Excessively is the key word in this situation,
| and it's the key word in your own post.
|
| To be honest, the fact that you described an undesirable habit
| as "excessive" with 8 hours of use per day and then two
| sentences later tried to rationalize yourself as someone who
| doesn't get addicted would be a major red flag that this
| behavior is problematic. Addicts tend to go through phases of
| rationalizing away their problem before they accept it.
| k__ wrote:
| All good points, thank you.
|
| However, isn't psychological or physic strain also a part of
| addiction?
|
| I don't feel bad while doing it and I don't feel bad while
| not doing it (just bored).
| vonjuice wrote:
| A big part of addiction is that it's an escape from
| something else.
|
| The way you describe it, it sounds like through the day,
| when you have something better to do you don't engage with
| devices.
|
| But how about longer periods? Like a full week? That can be
| a test to see if it causes you stress.
| Triphibian wrote:
| I am over a year in to using a Light Phone II as my daily driver.
| There are many inconveniences, but the change in my life has been
| worth it.
| thisischarbs wrote:
| What's THE biggest inconvenience would you say? And do you find
| yourself using more of your laptop/computer to stay on top of
| things?
| Triphibian wrote:
| The biggest inconvenience are businesses that insist on an
| app. I bought tickets to a hockey game and couldn't attend
| because the venue doesn't honor printed tickets. When I have
| to Zelle my mechanic I do it from my laptop at home before I
| leave the house -- good thing I trust him.
|
| I "keep up" on news via my laptop -- which I keep open on my
| desk. I check my papers and Hackernews, etc throughout the
| day. I have a print subscription to the New Yorker.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| > The biggest inconvenience are businesses that insist on
| an app. I bought tickets to a hockey game and couldn't
| attend because the venue doesn't honor printed tickets.
|
| That kind of thing is my biggest concern with going
| smartphoneless. It seems like more and more businesses
| assume a smartphone as a prerequisite. I would really love
| for there to be a "you have to allow customers without a
| smart phone" law.
|
| I don't want to be excluded from society because the $1,000
| chunk of incredibly advanced electronics I bought a few
| years ago stopped getting updates.
|
| I hope you at least got a refund on the tickets.
|
| > When I have to Zelle my mechanic I do it from my laptop
| at home before I leave the house -- good thing I trust him.
|
| Cash?
| Triphibian wrote:
| The incident really made me double down on my commitment
| to using a dumb phone. And yeah, cash is always an
| option, but he did an engine replacement for me. That was
| a lot of dough to be walking around with.
|
| Another places that punishes me for not having a phone is
| Whole Foods, I never get my discount for having Prime.
| They say I can use my phone number but it never works. I
| refuse to put more effort into it.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| I really wanted the Light Phone II, but I need my phone to play
| music and podcasts. How did you get over the absolutely
| boneheaded way audio files are handled?
| Triphibian wrote:
| I listen to CDs in the car. I have been considering getting a
| cheap mp3 player.
| izzydata wrote:
| Do you regular carry some other single purpose electronics to
| compensate the lack of function? I want to get a simple phone
| such as the Light Phone, but I wonder if I'd also want to bring
| around some kind of small camera or mp3 player.
| Triphibian wrote:
| I carry no other electronics. I just deal with it.
| forgotmypw100 wrote:
| Reading this makes me realise I have a healthy relationship with
| my phone. I don't have any "social" apps installed, or "scroller"
| apps (Insta, TikTok, and things like that). I don't pick up my
| phone during the day while working, and in the evening it sits
| next to my keys by the door. Being present is easy.
|
| On my tablet, I have my RSS reader which produces about 30
| entries per day, of which I read 2 or 3 articles, and then I'm
| done for the day. If I put down the tablet to do something else,
| I have zero experience of "FOMO" because blog articles are
| experienced at a glacial time scale.
|
| But also on my work laptop, we have Slack and Email and such on
| my laptop (only, no hand-held devices), and none of them have
| notifications enabled. Also, once I've read my mail to inbox
| zero, I close that tab. Then I'll open Slack (not both at once),
| and once I've caught up I close it. Then I do some productive
| work. I'll open them later when it's convenient for me.
|
| I think that's an attitude I developed at some point in the past
| few years. All modern Internet-based tech wants your engagement,
| full of dark patterns (like making things disappear if you see it
| once or lift your finger), and you have to protect yourself from
| that. Choose devices, apps, services that keep you in control.
| Discard the ones that don't.
| notyourwork wrote:
| These are all great tips. Especially closing slack/email and
| disabling notifications.
|
| I struggled with these for awhile, growing up during the IRC,
| ICQ, AIM era, messaging always felt like a requirement of using
| a computer. Putting them away for focus time is critical.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm similar to you where my phone is bare bones, often not
| within reach. I do take it with me wherever I go -- often it is
| my wallet. Maps, Camera, Notes and Messages are about the only
| four apps I use on it (yeah, Health and Weather and the
| aforementioned Wallet -- Apple Pay, actually - from time to
| time). When I find myself out and about, standing in line or
| otherwise bored, I don't pull out my phone as I see so many
| others do -- there is nothing interesting to me on the phone.
|
| But I also turn 60 this year so, for me, my laptop is my
| "phone". It stays at home of course (except on trips) but it is
| where I do all my browsing, coding, image editing, etc. And to
| divorce myself from my laptop would be a hard task.
|
| A remote friend of mine checks email/messages only in the
| morning when he gets up. Sometimes I have been up when he texts
| me and I reply within seconds -- only to get his reply to mine
| the following morning -- like playing chess by mail. (Sometimes
| he never responds at all ... I think he finds connectivity to
| be bad for his mental health and I respect that.)
|
| I would like to be more like him -- limit my browsing to the
| morning; essentially turn off the WiFi by 9:00 AM so to speak.
| Unfortunately when I am finishing a task (perhaps an hour out
| in the garage building a virtual pinball machine) I use the
| break time (perhaps a cup of tea) to open the laptop and see
| what insanity the US politicians are up to this hour of the
| day....
| bigie35 wrote:
| Bob Iger?
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| The only social app I have is Discord, I'm 15 and it's like the
| MS Teams of my generation. Nobody likes it, it's designed like
| crap and we hate the developers but everyone uses it so we just
| kind of have to. There's really nothing better I can think of,
| and my friends aren't as much of a nerd as I am (They still
| think the nerdy stuff is cool though, they love my Pentium III
| + Voodoo3 retro PC) to use anything like Matrix clients or
| Revolt.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Is there a blog post or somesuch about this P3 of yours? I'm
| twice your age, P3 was my first CPU so I'd love to hear more
| about it!
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| You know, I actually should start a blog. I hope you don't
| mind if I just talk about the PC here.
|
| Wanted a retro build for mid to late 90s games, did almost
| an entire year of research and after a failed attempt
| involving Socket 939 I finally found some guy on Facebook
| Marketplace of all places who was selling a "Retro Pentium
| 3 PC". I was shocked because I live in central Alabama and
| cool stuff is never sold here, me and my brother went to
| meet him and paid for it. I already knew the specs from
| messaging him but it had a 733MHz Coppermine P3, an odd
| 320MB of PC100 RAM, a Netgear GA311 (which I already had
| like 3 of) and a Voodoo3 3000 AGP. I cleaned it out, put it
| in a brand new ATX Cooler Master case, gave it a SATA hard
| drive with a SATA to IDE adapter, repasted the CPU, put in
| a new PSU, installed a Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS, got Windows
| 98 SE set up with Photoshop 7, Office XP and a crap load of
| games and it's been one of my favorite pieces of technology
| I've ever owned. Beat Deus Ex for my first time on there
| and my life was changed, my vision is now augmented.
|
| YouTube (mostly PhilsComputerLab) and VOGONS taught me how
| to work on all this retro stuff, and when I was a kid I
| would make XP and 98 virtual machines for fun so I got
| really used to both of them. (I still like 2000 the most)
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| I'm wishing for a serious UX-driven attempt to create a
| discord replacement built on top of Matrix.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| I long for one that isn't a glorified web browser as well
| Arathorn wrote:
| honestly the next gen of matrix clients built on matrix-
| rust-sdk should all qualify for this - whether Element X
| on iOS/macOS or Android, or Fractal on GTK, or iamb for
| TUI with vim bindings (or weechat-matrix-rs when it's
| ready). nary a web browser in sight.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| What do y'all find issue with in Discord? Compared to
| literally everything else in a vaguely related space (whether
| on the org management side of things, Slack, Teams, etc., or
| on the broader video/voip/messaging side of things), Discord
| has pretty fantastic user experience, at least to my tastes.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| 1. Been through 6 accounts, A slightly edgy joke will get
| you banned and appeals are not accepted nor are they
| replied to anymore.
|
| 2. The "app" is literally just Electron and somehow they
| still screwed it up, it's laggy, always being overhauled,
| and almost always has a new useless feature only for nitro
| that increased it's size several hundred megabytes.
|
| 3. Used to be fast and pleasant to use on mobile until a
| major redesign I had to revert from that put everything in
| tabs and made it look like every modern mobile chat
| application.
|
| 4. Nobody really cares about this anymore, but the people
| on their platform-wide moderation team were caught back
| then having very egregious double standards, allowing
| content that was on the border of being CP because of
| "artistic interpretation", look up discord cub controversey
| for more information
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Where are you posting enough offensive content to catch
| multiple, platform-level bans? I get the impression we
| use Discord very differently.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| To be fair I got banned trolling like twice and I could
| kind of recall what got me banned, but at the same time
| I'm still not too sure because the process is the
| opposite of transparent and you aren't alerted to what
| got you banned, nor are you allowed to save your data
| from your account.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| >All modern Internet-based tech wants your engagement, full of
| dark patterns
|
| I cant prove it... but I have noticed that my phone when I
| leave it alone does not do much if any notifications. But if I
| pick it up for a few mins and fiddle with it. Suddenly there
| are 2-3 notifications from applications that havent made a peep
| since yesterday but only after I turn the screen back off.
| Usually to tell me something _very_ trivial. I suspect there is
| a background timeout that waits 1-2 mins after I set the phone
| down. Trying to get me to re-engage with the thing.
| fifteen1506 wrote:
| All apps on Android have Sensor Access permission,
| permanently [I think] and by default. GrapheneOS also allows
| that by default but has a toggle to change the default to
| deny.
|
| LinkedIn app is one of the apps which tries to access
| Sensors.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| For almost a decade I worked with mobile devices; their
| certification, R&D, testing. At any given time I would have a
| dozen devices on me to test out in the field or demo units prior
| to sale.
|
| Now that I no longer do this for a living, I seldom if ever carry
| a phone with me. I don't do social media, I don't watch movies on
| a phone, navigation I just look up where I want to go on a map
| and just drive there. The only connectivity I have outside the
| home is my Apple Watch Cellular for those random "pick up bread"
| messages, weather, and to tell the time.
|
| It is so liberating.
| Loughla wrote:
| >navigation I just look up where I want to go on a map and just
| drive there.
|
| This is one of the two reasons I believe I cannot get rid of a
| phone. After getting lost in a not great neighborhood in the
| 1990's and getting jumped, I have pretty severe anxiety about
| travel to places that I am unfamiliar with. GPS has been a
| godsend.
|
| And pictures of my kids. There is no more convenient way to
| take constant pictures and videos of my kids than with my
| phone. I don't remember entire years of my life, and therefore
| their lives. But I have pictures and videos to remind me!
| syntheticnature wrote:
| From my observations, people's innate ability to relate a map
| to the world varies. There are some studies attempting to tie
| this to gender, but my experience is that is not a hard line
| at all. I'm sure training is a component, of course, but some
| folks do not tie the abstraction to the real world well at
| all.
|
| I seem to be good at it, but no one in my wife's family is,
| so during family get-togethers on that side I'm usually
| driving or navigating. The fact I can retrace a path I took
| two years prior from memory is an astonishing feat to them.
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| When I'm inside the house (any house, but including my
| own), I often point to a direction when talking about a
| nearby place. People laugh and correct me because the place
| I'm talking about is to the north, not to the south as I
| point out with my finger. I can't go back to a place I was
| last week without asking for directions. I walk and turn
| the wrong corner in familiar environments, etc.
|
| I love GPS now.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| > I love GPS now.
|
| The dependence of GPS has made people lose their spatial
| awareness.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| " When I was seven years old, my daddy caught me smoking a
| cigar. Locked me in a broom closet for two days and two nights
| with nothing more than a box of cigars and a book of matches.
| No food, Brewster. No water, just those god damn cigars.
| Wouldn't let me out till I finished every last one of them.
| Taught me one HELL of a lesson!"
|
| I think you and I got the Brewster's Millions treatment.
|
| Around 2010 I was at the heart of the Shoreditch startup scene
| and we had boxes and boxes of iPhones sent to us by Apple. I
| literally had 4 or 5 iPods and iPhones on my work bench for
| messing about with. All the time I kept a Nokia as my actual
| phone and adopted the drug dealer's creed of "Never use the
| product". Something just clicked inside. I could see these
| things as very useful palm sized tablets. Cute. Probably "the
| future" , but I didn't actually have a _use_ for them. Somehow
| that stuck.
| slothtrop wrote:
| At least as devs/tech people go, the fixation on phones seems a
| bit off the mark as we're always on our machines. I use my phone
| for menial phone-stuff in addition to reminders/lists, but on my
| machine I can fall into a bad habit of too much reddit or HN (I
| never use fb or twitter).
|
| I guess the phone issue makes sense for those who have dedicated
| work machines that aren't used for any personal use whatsoever.
| bsder wrote:
| Dude found a girlfriend--now spends _way_ less time online.
|
| Isn't that kind of ... normal?
|
| Most guys I've known generally cut down their "find a girlfriend"
| activities dramatically once they actually find one.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| I managed to make my phone boring in the past few months and it's
| delightful.
|
| I removed all apps that need my engagement to make money.
|
| It took time for me to realise why I was picking my phone up and
| then wondering why.
|
| My brain was reflexively reaching for my phone as it was bored
| (or anticipating becoming bored?) but then when I concisely
| looked at my phone I thought "well there's nothing to do here why
| did I pick it up?"
|
| It's taken a couple of months but now I rarely find my phone in
| my hand without a conscious reason to have it there.
| nytesky wrote:
| It's not just the apps. I know I have a problem with checking
| Hacker News and another very low tech discussion site (local to
| my area, basically a 2003 website).
|
| The discussions are very pertinent to my daily life,
| unvarnished, and the clientele of note (kind of like Hacker
| News I guess).
|
| For me it's because I think I have very little time for real
| friends as a working parent; I text old friends from college
| and such, but my daily life is lonely outside my family, and
| logistics and chores consume a lot of that time. More free
| wheeling discussion like with a circle of friends is what these
| discussion groups fill for me, and that's hard to quit.
| chii wrote:
| I dont see a problem with HN in of it self. The problem is
| only when you spend disproportionate amount of time on HN (or
| twitter), vs other activities.
| macNchz wrote:
| > More free wheeling discussion like with a circle of friends
| is what these discussion groups fill for me, and that's hard
| to quit.
|
| I've enjoyed discussion boards long before smartphones, but
| have been spending more time scrolling them on my phone than
| I'd like since 2020. This point, along with the author's
| discussion of "the desire underneath the desire" is making me
| think that I'm actually just missing the types of
| conversations I'd have with coworkers at lunch or over happy
| hour beers before I started to work from home full time. Most
| of my close friends are not programmers or involved in
| startups, so this sort of makes sense to me as a missing
| social outlet.
| DHPersonal wrote:
| > For me it's because I think I have very little time for
| real friends as a working parent; I text old friends from
| college and such, but my daily life is lonely outside my
| family, and logistics and chores consume a lot of that time.
| More free wheeling discussion like with a circle of friends
| is what these discussion groups fill for me, and that's hard
| to quit.
|
| It's the same for me, too. The people around me have few
| common interests, and conversations with them are awkward and
| sparse, and I've changed enough in my life that the
| communities I once was a part of are no longer feeling as
| welcome to me anymore. I've found the online communities to
| be both the best and worst outlet in my life, because they
| are directly tailored to my interests but are also not
| actually in my proximity.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >but are also not actually in my proximity.
|
| I think this a benefit, not a negative.
| DHPersonal wrote:
| Could you please explain more? Finding people online and
| discovering they live hundreds of miles away generally
| feels isolating to me, even potentially increasing the
| sense of isolation I feel from just the failed local
| friendships.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Sure. I think this is simply an idiosyncratic aspect of
| our personalities. While you find those online people who
| might be friends but live far away feels isolating, I
| find that getting to know the people who read and comment
| on my blog over months and years (sometimes we email back
| and forth) creates a real bond, much like like the
| epistolary friendships of the nineteenth century
| conducted only by mail between people who never actually
| met IRL. Some of my daily readers have been commenting
| for 15-20 years!
| actionfromafar wrote:
| So very hard.
| rollcat wrote:
| I really enjoyed participating in Solene%'s Old Computer
| Challenge 2022: <https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2022-07-01-oldco
| mputerchalleng...>
|
| I adjusted my rules a bit to make them fit into my setup (WFH,
| Homekit lights, etc), the main challenge being that rather than
| accounting for time spent online and trying to limit it to 1h,
| I just wouldn't go online at all (unless for work). It was a
| wonderful week, and even one week can start to make a long-term
| impact!
|
| Another thing worth trying is to leave your phone at home, and
| attend to your "digital needs" from a smartwatch. The screen is
| too small and the input too quirky to be efficient at wasting
| attention, but you can still get directions, pay for stuff,
| reply to a message, etc. (I actually don't have mobile data on
| my watch so I need the phone to keep the watch online, but I'm
| mindful of when I'm in "no phone mode". You can also seize the
| opportunity and just go offline, without giving up on things
| such as checking the time or playing music.)
| worldsayshi wrote:
| >then when I concisely looked at my phone I was thought "well
| there's nothing to do here why did I pick it up?"
|
| I think of this as a possibly universal psychological trick
| that can allow you to slowly adjust your behaviour.
|
| I.e:
|
| - To do less of something, think of how useless the impulse is
| when it happens. I.e. dull the impulse.
|
| - (To do more of something, be on the lookout for and amplify
| any impulse that drives towards that behaviour.)
|
| It seems kind of obvious but sometimes we amplify bad behaviour
| by punishing ourselves and end up amplifying the impulse.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| I think an electric shock would go a long way.
|
| Years back I tried to make a phone case that would shock me
| at random while using it. The idea was to replace the
| dopamine hit you get from checking your phone with a twinge
| of anxiety and dread.
|
| I never finished the project. Turns out generating high
| voltages requires tall inductors, which generally make a
| phone case unacceptably thick.
| enobrev wrote:
| The addiction is real and strange.
|
| A couple years ago, I removed most social media out of my life;
| anything on my phone with a public "friends" or "follows" list.
|
| I can't put my finger on it, but overall I found myself more at
| peace.
|
| I did eventually end up back on Twitter and adjusting the
| social app "rule" to "strangers-only" apps. And I found that
| worked out well as I could still get up-to-the-moment industry
| things (I've since switched to threads).
|
| Recently I needed to sell an old couch and craigslist wasn't
| getting the job done, so I installed Facebook, fired up the old
| profile, and made my listings.
|
| And now I'll just randomly catch myself browsing Facebook. It's
| without purpose, and I don't care much about what I'm seeing. I
| just randomly end up there scrolling. It's the weirdest thing.
|
| The couch is still unsold and I've had two scam attempts on
| Facebook (none on CL). So I'm very much looking forward to
| getting rid of both on garbage day
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Maybe just donate the couch and the payment is getting to
| remove FB from your phone again?
| enobrev wrote:
| The bigger issue is that I don't have a means to transport
| it. If I can find someone to pay me to come get it, it's a
| win-win. But every day the price drops. And if it's not
| gone by this afternoon, it's going to the alley with a
| "buy-nothing" post. Pretty sure it'll be gone within an
| hour after that.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| You could put the couch outside on the curb and instantly
| solve both problems. Plus making someone very happy with
| their new couch.
| zabzonk wrote:
| this is the equivalent of fly-tipping. please don't do it.
| bombcar wrote:
| Putting your own furniture on your own property is
| usually quite legal.
|
| You do need to have a plan to dispose of it if nobody
| snags it, however.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| It will be gone in less than 15 minutes if you're in NYC
| enobrev wrote:
| Very true. This process went much faster in Brooklyn. But
| also there were more people willing to pay for decent-
| quality things. It hasn't been bad in Chicago, but
| definitely slower and the prices have to be lower for
| used things.
| datameta wrote:
| Yeah stooping culture blew up during covid. My apartment
| is furnished with two couches that I picked up for free
| (both within my building actually). I'm going to estimate
| having stooped up to 10K worth of stuff since 2020
| (almost all of it in astonishingly good shape), including
| plants, kitchen appliances, kitchen table and chairs,
| dressers, coat racks, a door sized painting (it might
| actually be a door as a canvas), etc. I have also given
| away things like my TV and living room console, one of
| those couches, medium fridge, plants, etc.
|
| It's a pleasure to give and receive. It prevents
| perfectly good, clean, functioning things from meeting an
| early end at the landfill simply because selling it ends
| up being more of a challenge than expected.
|
| Never imagined such a communal barter system to spring up
| in the modern day.
| zabzonk wrote:
| at least in the uk, the kerbside isn't your property
| enobrev wrote:
| Same in Chicago. We can generally put things in the alley
| if it's not blocking anyone.
| bombcar wrote:
| Furniture is basically worthless once used, so the curb is
| the easiest usually.
|
| Just make sure you plop it out there when it's not going to
| rain.
| enobrev wrote:
| That's basically what's happening this evening, although I
| will be putting out a post about the free couch in the
| alley - and if nobody gets it on time, Chicago's garbage
| trucks pretty much take _anything_.
| walthamstow wrote:
| I tried the same and ended up becoming an expert in the Met
| Office weather app. Breaking the habit of picking up my phone
| and doing something, anything, was really hard.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Assuming you are British I feel you get a pass, just opening
| that app and hoping for sun is character building
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It transcends checking the weather or spending time and
| becomes a religious activity.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| I remember remarking here years ago how I annoying I found it
| to have to use my phone to read QR codes while watching TV,
| only to learn that almost every HN reader/user ALWAYS has their
| phone on their person/within reach. Mine is rarely on my
| person/within reach.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Why do you read QR codes while watching TV?
| bookofjoe wrote:
| They often appear out of nowhere during commercials.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Haven't seen commercials in many years so I didn't know
| commercials had QR codes in them. What is the reason to
| engage with them? Discount codes?
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Yes, among other things; also more information about the
| product being advertised.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I'll find myself closing my browser because of boredom, then
| within 5 seconds feeling bored and reflexively reopening it to
| the same site. This can happen a few times before I become
| aware.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| > I removed all apps that need my engagement to make money
|
| This is the heart of the issue right here. Nicely out in one
| sentence.
|
| Now if we could just get members of society to apply the same
| principle to their newsfeeds. I walked into a room discussion
| yesterday where a few were extolling how they "read both
| sides." I congratulated them on subsidizing not one, but two
| circuses.
| isolli wrote:
| For a while I was tempted to get a minimalist phone like the
| Punkt MP02 [0] or Mudita Pure [1], but in the end I could not
| give up on:
|
| - A camera (to snap pictures of our kids)
|
| - A map for navigation
|
| - Authentication apps for banking
|
| There seem to be a few success stories in the comments. I'd be
| curious to hear how they made up for the missing features I
| listed...
|
| [0] https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/ [1]
| https://mudita.com/products/phones/mudita-pure/
| pdxandi wrote:
| These are precisely the reasons I want a smarter phone. Taking
| pictures of my kids and navigating around town. We also listen
| to children's stories in the car using Spotify so that too.
| Banking I could probably work around but it's possible I'm just
| not realizing how much I use my phone for these types of
| things. That said, I have zero social media or scroller apps,
| outside of HN.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I've adopted a different approach. Going fully offline makes
| life really difficult, so I decided to basically
| compartmentalize my online life.
|
| I have different user accounts for different tasks, with
| privoxy set up to block irrelevant network traffic . Admittedly
| I mostly use a desktop computer for my online life so it's
| tailored toward that, but I did configure my phone to use a
| proxy as well it's been working pretty well.
|
| Means I can cut back on "mindless" social media use without
| having to cut back on intentional use. I did a write-up here:
| https://www.marginalia.nu/log/99_context/
| vundercind wrote:
| It's a document scanner, a document-signing device (we did
| basically the entire house search, offer, _and closing_ process
| all on our phones, last time), flashlight (I use this daily),
| camera that can do "live photos" (they're magical, I have zero
| interest in a camera that doesn't do that), a check-depositing
| terminal, a tape measure or level (in a pinch), a note-taking
| device, and so much more. Music player. Alarm clock. A credit
| card.
|
| My phone is without a doubt the single most-useful electronic
| gadget in my house, and it's not a close call. My desktop
| machine and laptop are nothing but toys _unless_ I'm building
| stuff _for computers_. (My tablet is the _second_ most-useful,
| and again, it's not a close call)
| dallasg3 wrote:
| Almond?
| weinzierl wrote:
| I have a similar experience. I lived almost three years without
| Google and Amazon[1] before a global pandemic changed my life in
| a way that did not make this sustainable anymore.
|
| Admittedly I considered ending the experiment even before the
| pandemic hit and it is very likely I would have done so. Also I
| deliberately did not pick up the abstinence again.
|
| Despite all that, I would never call that phase a failure. It
| gave me a lot of confidence that life without these services is
| well possible and that it was not much of a sacrifice for myself.
| What it thought me, however, is that it very well was a nuisance
| for others sometimes[2]. And that is the reason I ultimately
| decided not to continue, but I believe I use the services of both
| companies much more deliberately than before.
|
| [1] Why these two of all things? In 2015 or 2016 I sat down and
| classified all the services I was using by how much valuable data
| they collected about me and how much value they provided in
| return. These were the two services that lost. It might seem
| strange at first but the data Amazon has about me is a ton more
| valuable than the data Facebook has. I decide what I put on my
| profile there, which friends I add and if I want to use
| messenger. I feel I do not have that choice with Amazon - I order
| what I need, but that still paints a pretty accurate picture of
| me. I'm not sure if my analysis today would come to the same
| conclusion, but that was my thinking back then.
|
| [2] This is even more true for WhatsApp, but there I'm still
| steady.
| mofeien wrote:
| For one month now I have mobile data turned off on my phone. I
| have started reading much more on the subway since the main
| distraction is gone, and there are surprisingly few drawbacks. Of
| course, YMMV.
|
| What started as a one week experiment quickly turned into a month
| and now I'm thinking about getting a cheaper data plan, since
| I'll only be using it for emergencies.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yes, the only thing I can think of needing mobile data for is
| navigation, and that's not too hard to solve either.
| webdoodle wrote:
| How long was he in 'phone detox'? From what I gather, only 2
| months, which isn't nearly long enough. I've been 100% phone free
| for 4 years now, and was 95% free 2 years prior to that (only
| powering it on for work). I can personally say that anything less
| than a year is probably not long enough to even dent the
| addiction, and anything less that 2 won't teach you the
| discipline to stay phone free.
| barbarr wrote:
| Seconding this. I was phone free for an entire year, only to
| get re-addicted a few months later.
| runamuck wrote:
| I recommend turning off _all_ notifications and then configuring
| the phone to allow texts / calls from "Favorite Contacts Only."
| msluyter wrote:
| A lot of articles on reducing phone use coming out at the moment.
| For example (older, but recently updated:
| https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/break-up-with-you...)
| I think a lot about the fact that we carry on our persons the
| most addictive device ever created.
|
| I've recently adopted the grey scale trick -- set your phone to
| grey scale display mode. It works pretty well! Of course, I can
| always disable it if severely tempted, but it creates another
| hoop to jump through. I also have one of the phone safes, which I
| use sporadically. Ironically, having an Apple watch makes the
| phone safe more effective, because I can lock up the phone but
| still answer critical calls if necessary.
|
| Weird that in the 23rd century, a lot of us are replaying
| Oddyseus, collectively tying ourselves to the mast.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Cellular smartwatch (Pixel watch in my case) is great for
| minimizing distractions while retaining basics: calendar, note-
| taking, basic messaging, phone calls, maps, music (via
| Bluetooth) and payments. But WITHOUT the very distracting web
| browser and YouTube. Battery life can be pretty poor though if
| the phone is turned off, you really can't listen to music all
| day for instance.
|
| I also use greyscale mode on phone, can set a keyboard
| shortcut. Some apps are also just far too colourful - e.g.
| Duolingo - and look better in greyscale I think.
|
| Phone can be a productivity machine too though with a Bluetooth
| keyboard, phone stand. Can have full desktop environment with a
| keyboard and mouse and VNC client.
| the_snooze wrote:
| Seconding smartwatches. There's no reason to habitually check
| my phone (and risk getting distracted) when my watch tells me
| if I have notifications. My watch is basically a read-only
| beeper for high-priority notifications, so there's no fear of
| missing out on something important.
|
| I don't even need a cellular watch. Just having the phone
| inconveniently nearby (e.g., in a backpack, or on the
| bathroom counter instead of a nightstand) adds enough
| friction to eliminate mindless phone use.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Seconding smartwatches. There's no reason to habitually
| check my phone (and risk getting distracted) when my watch
| tells me if I have notifications.
|
| I don't get it. This functionality is so basic that it's
| always been part of the phone itself. What's the watch
| doing?
| msluyter wrote:
| It allows you to separate certain essentials (getting
| possibly important notifications, calls) from temptations
| that you want to avoid (twitter/X, instagram, tic tok,
| etc...)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Yes, that functionality is so basic that it has always
| been part of the phone itself. If I get an unimportant
| notification, my phone plays a quiet beeping sound. If I
| get a wechat message, my phone plays a louder ringing
| sound. I can tell the difference from across the room. I
| can tell the difference while the phone remains in my
| pocket. So could you. Distinguishing sounds that were
| never similar to begin with is not a difficult task.
|
| What is the watch adding? Were you having trouble
| distinguishing calls from notifications before?
| HPsquared wrote:
| Not all notifications from the same source, have the same
| importance. Not only the content can vary, but also the
| context.
| the_snooze wrote:
| The watch isn't "adding" anything, and that's the point.
| It's taking away unnecessary capabilities and only giving
| me what's important.
|
| If I get a message in the middle of a meeting, I can
| figure out if it's just my mechanic saying my car is
| ready to be picked up. Or if it's a severe medical
| emergency. All this without bothering anyone else with
| audible alerts or getting distracted by any number of
| things on my phone.
|
| If you have your own system, that's fine. I'm not saying
| this solution is for everyone. All I'm saying is that
| it's a useful solution for at least one person in this
| world.
| wrs wrote:
| The watch is doing "not having social media apps or a web
| browser to lose an hour with after you check the
| notification".
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It's definitely not doing that; once you get something
| important, you need to handle it by using your phone.
| petsfed wrote:
| The problem a lot of people have with doom scrolling is
| that there's basically no barrier to doing so except
| shear will power. Making the process more inconvenient,
| even if just by having to stand up and walk over to the
| phone, can make a substantial difference. If the
| notification is not worth the walk over to the phone,
| then the notification ceases to be a prompt to go doom
| scroll.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Hence you do not have carry your phone with you. The
| watch lets you be reachable in case of emergencies or
| basic communications, such as audio calls.
| acedTrex wrote:
| Yep this is the primary benefit of my apple watch, i no
| longer feel the need to incessantly check my phone for
| notifications. i just glance at my watch
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| +1 for grey scale.
|
| Other things that were hugely helpful for me:
|
| - Turn off tap to wake on your phone. It sounds funny but
| having to press a button to turn on your screen will make you
| do it less.
|
| - Remove social media apps from your phone. (duh). If you have
| to use them, use them in browser which generally sucks and will
| prevent you from using them for a really long time.
|
| - Take apps off your home screen. My phone is a lot less
| appealing when there isnt a shiny bright a/b tested to death
| app icon telling begging me to click it. It takes seconds to
| search for and pull up apps.
|
| - Turn off notifications for everything but calls/texts. (duh).
| I don't need any push notifications. Once you stop getting them
| you will stop looking at your phone expecting them to be there.
| graphe wrote:
| I've done grayscale but the truth is that I'd disable it with
| muscle memory over time. I got efficient.
|
| At the end of the day I had no life and I didn't spend it on
| anything worthwhile so the phone it was. Once I did worthwhile
| things I naturally used my phone less. I'm glad you k kw your
| limits and it works for you, but beware your brains searches
| for efficiency!
| NoraCodes wrote:
| > I think a lot about the fact that we carry on our persons the
| most addictive device ever created.
|
| The device is not addictive. Some applications of the device
| are addictive. It may seem pedantic but I think it's an
| important distinction; it's the difference between, for
| instance, parents limiting "screen time" and parents engaging
| deeply with what their kids are _doing_ on their "screens",
| which can range from learning programming to interacting with
| real-life friends to, yes, mindlessly scrolling Instagram or
| getting radicalized.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I mainly use my phone to "waste time", somehow I've gotten into a
| lifestyle where I end up waiting for other people a lot to do
| something - codependency, woo - and tend to browse Reddit while
| doing so. It's fine if it's a few minutes, up to half an hour,
| but after that I start to think wtf I'm doing with my time.
|
| Mind you, I'm not alone, the other two people living here do the
| same, the joys of ADHD I suppose.
| captainclam wrote:
| I've never used social media or had a "problem" with my phone. So
| I used to read articles like this a little smugly, but I'm
| growing increasingly discomfited by the notion that I'm...out of
| touch..?
|
| Yeah, it's probably overall a positive thing that I've never been
| hooked on instagram, but it's also a language/shared experience
| with which I have no point of contact. I'm a little worried that
| not having a social media presence /at all/ is going to turn or
| has turned from mildly admirable (such restraint!) to...weird.
|
| And it's great to be weird! I just hope that it doesn't impact
| potential connections in the future.
| thfuran wrote:
| >I'm a little worried that not having a social media presence
| /at all/ is going to turn or has turned from mildly admirable
| (such restraint!) to...weird.
|
| Well, I have some good news: here you are, on social media,
| having a presence. Admittedly, it's a bit more niche than
| Instagram.
| captainclam wrote:
| Haha, good point. I'm not a hopeless case after all.
| browningstreet wrote:
| National borders and most romantic dates won't ask for your
| HN profile but they will ask for all the other major social
| networks. Not everything with an account and a comment system
| is a Social Network to lay-people and first encounter
| authorities.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Before the abused and tired notion of "social media" was
| coined, this was called... a forum. Nothing "media" about it.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I think it still is. A discussion forum like this lacks a
| number of features we'd commonly associate with social
| media.
| vundercind wrote:
| No personalized feed or "watch next"? Not "social media".
| dimask wrote:
| These are not necessary for social media, you can be in
| social media without these (it sometimes requires browser
| extensions but not necessarily).
| vundercind wrote:
| The term doesn't have to mean what the literal words on
| their own do, or apply to everything that the individual
| words might, taken in their own.
|
| [edit] and in this case the term is far more useful if it
| is _not_ as expansive as you suggest. We'd just need
| another term, then, to describe the kind of thing people
| usually mean by "social media".
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| I think the disctintion should be:
|
| Is the person (their face, their personality) more
| important, or the content of what they say is more
| important?
|
| HN falls much closer to the "content" end of the
| spectrum.
| vundercind wrote:
| Yeah, there are lots of other little aspects that push
| something closer to or farther from being the kind of
| thing we usual mean by "social media" ("so it's a fuzzy
| category?" yes, like approximately all other categories
| and labels). Downplaying personal or account identity
| (which HN does to a more extreme degree than even most
| forums et c) definitely counts as moving something toward
| the "not social media" side.
| dnissley wrote:
| It has the most important (and most addictive) feature
| though: an endless feed
| krrrh wrote:
| Link aggregators was what site like this, digg, and reddit
| were called when they started. They introduced a social
| aspect for upvoting content into a dynamic feed. It's
| something more than a forum, and something less than what
| later became social media.
| Vrondi wrote:
| But before that, forums existed that let you subscribe to
| threads in your forum account. It's just that the mundane
| masses used them a little less than the geeky folk. All
| Reddit added was stealing the upvote/downvote thing from
| Slashdot and Digg.
| tempestn wrote:
| And combining all topics under a single umbrella, so you
| interact with them all as the same persona.
| jacamera wrote:
| Hypermedia?
| zogrodea wrote:
| I don't agree. I made friends and noticed other cliques of
| friends on forums like GBATemp over a decade ago.
|
| Regular visitors knew each other after seeing the other
| users' posts, there are in-jokes, and it's not so
| different. I would say HN is less self-centered (we don't
| have unique avatars or signatures) than many old-school
| forums were. Friendships are less likely to be formed here.
| dgfitz wrote:
| > I don't agree. I made friends and noticed other cliques
| of friends on forums like GBATemp over a decade ago.
|
| And I ran a forum, over a decade ago, in which people
| from all locations/walks of life participated, and I met
| more than a handful of them in real life. I don't
| understand what point you're trying to make.
| zogrodea wrote:
| I should have specified that, to me personally (but
| apparently not for you), those old forums were very much
| like social media. I don't see a categorical difference
| between them because the same behaviour is displayed on
| both of them.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| While both have been coined "social media", I think there's a
| huge difference between content aggregation/discussion sites,
| and content creation sites. I think, deep down, everyone
| knows HN and its ilk are not "social media". It's a merely
| discussion forum at most.
| iwontberude wrote:
| This is media (web) that we are social on (discussion).
| It's these folks own definition of social media that needs
| fixing so they don't feel isolated. I don't use instagram
| not bc I'm weird but because it's a shit experience.
| nxkeksbfbe wrote:
| this is just a cope. sites like this are still social and
| still addictive, if you don't believe me then try to stop
| coming here for a while.
|
| in fact try to stop going to all "slot machine" sites where
| you can constantly refresh and get new interesting things
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| It's really not the same by matter of extremity. Hacker
| news has maybe a small fraction of the addictive
| mechanics at play in instagram or twitter. Personally, I
| only come back to this site because I don't have other,
| far more addictive social media to scroll when bored.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| I thi k one if the damaging things about social media
| sites like Instagram, Facebook etc is that everyone
| displays their best life on it. You visit these sites and
| see these photo that make you feel bad because you ask
| "Why is my life not exciting? Why don't I have those
| things?"
|
| Hackernews and other forums don't really hit that nerve
| with me. Yes, it's easy to just keep scrolling and
| reading more but at least I don't feel like shit
| afterwards. It's addictive but only but for me in that I
| waste time on it when I could be doing other stuff. It
| doesn't make me depressed though.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| A decade or slightly less so ago, maybe because this site
| was smaller and close-knit and interest rates were lower,
| you could get a similar effect from seeing Show HN
| threads about this person launching some amazing
| technical project or impressive startup. In this
| uncertain economy not so much. Also, blogs are
| increasingly less fashionable so you don't see nearly as
| many "wow what a trenchant and witty thinkpiece" posts
| from devs playing thought leader.
| jwagenet wrote:
| There is still a similar vein of productivity and
| hustling. Ask HNs are often about side project,
| productivity hacks, and income streams. Show HNs and
| blogs are the same topics, but actualized. It's the same
| treadmill, but instead you feel bad about not being hyper
| productive, elite haxxor skills, or cashing out.
| evandale wrote:
| I think a big thing about social media is having people
| or personalities that you follow. I don't use HN in a way
| where I notice who is commenting or posting and there's
| nobody I "follow" on this site. Every story and comment
| is like a new anonymous person to me.
|
| When I was heavily into Reddit I'd use RES and get to
| know people so it felt more like social media. Now that
| I've deleted my account and sporadically read Reddit it
| doesn't feel like social media or something I'm addicted
| to.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's same problem as social media. It's why this site has
| a noprocrast
| jacquesm wrote:
| People that tend to procrastinate do not need a reason to
| do so, and the things they get addicted to are not
| necessarily engineered to be so. Social media is strongly
| engineered to be addictive, HN is engineered _not_ to be
| addictive (though it still is, as I should definitely be
| aware by now).
| Apocryphon wrote:
| HN might not have the built-in quality to be addictive,
| but it certainly has the quantity. Infinite content
| produces infinite ways to be addictive.
| Goronmon wrote:
| _I think there 's a huge difference between content
| aggregation/discussion sites, and content creation sites._
|
| Are comments and discussions separate from "content
| creation"?
| jacquesm wrote:
| A movie you made, a book you wrote, an article you wrote
| -> content.
|
| A comment you wrote, or a link you posted -> meta-
| content.
| andoando wrote:
| I think hacker news is way better, but Reddit is very much
| like social media
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| HN isn't technically social media, but it's close. The little
| vote buttons, the karma, the constant feed of "hot" articles,
| are designed to fuel the dopamine push that creates addictive
| engagement.
|
| What it lacks to be true "social media" is engagement around
| a social network. There are certainly "social networks" at
| work on HN, but most of the users don't know each other and
| aren't focused on each other's statuses, pictures, videos,
| relationship statuses. Instead they're mostly focused on
| intellectual competition via comments. (when you're not
| allowed to compete for jokes, like folks do on Reddit, you
| compete for whatever else defines your identity, which on HN
| is intelligence).
|
| Ironically, HN's always _wanted_ to be a social network, in
| that they want to build "a community of users" where the
| users all recognize each other (they claim that's necessary
| in order to build a community). Once HN introduces personal
| blogs or tweet-like status updates, it will 100% be a social
| network, with all the same health concerns.
| exitb wrote:
| Note that there's an anti-social element right in the
| algorithm. Stories that have more comments than upvotes are
| actively pushed off the front page.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Probably has the unintended side effect of always keeping
| new stuff on the front page like other social media does.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Forum participation is a bit different than social media in
| that it is first and foremost about the discussion and not so
| much about 'you' which seems to be the main focus for social
| media, furthermore you can't follow people and there are no
| push notifications so it is impossible to create 'an
| audience' other than whoever is there.
|
| Those are distinguishing factors that are strong enough to
| differentiate otherwise the BBS I used to hang out on would
| have been social media and IRC would be as well. I don't buy
| that broad categorization. Facebook, TikTok, Youtube,
| Instagram, Twitter -> social media. Reddit not and HN
| definitely not.
|
| Though the quantity of 'meme' content may have to factor in
| there somewhere and then we have a continuum of online
| participation with on one end personal messaging and on the
| extreme other IG, TT, FB etc.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| Personally, I don't use tech to interact with people. I use it
| to interact with information, data, etc. I can live without it,
| but prefer having it because there is always something I want
| to know more about.
|
| When I was a kid, the source was an over-priced encyclopedia.
| Now, it's a search and to me, that's the magic.
|
| Also, you can't Ctrl-F search paper, and that's a huge
| downside, imo.
|
| YMMV.
| kaashif wrote:
| > Personally, I don't use tech to interact with people.
|
| I am a person. You have interacted with me using tech.
|
| How are you defining "tech" exactly? I use messaging apps all
| the time to organise things with friends or talk to distant
| family members. There's no better way to do it, I can't meet
| everyone in person and if plans change, it's better to know
| sooner.
| reidjs wrote:
| Maybe they meant to interact with people they know*
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| Not quite.
|
| I have 2 accounts that anyone could argue are social
| media and this is one of them. The other is so
| specialized that I'm fairly sure no one here uses it and
| I mainly use it for reference. An account was needed to
| search. Since I have an account, I will occasionally
| provide an answer to someone that has a question that
| I've had in the past, but even that's rare.
|
| Otherwise, I use Teams at work, but that's not social
| media.
| codingdave wrote:
| > How are you defining "tech" exactly?
|
| The better question may be: How are you defining an
| interaction?
|
| This may be a hot take, but I don't consider HN to be
| personal interaction. We post content individually. We read
| it individually. Replies are about the content, not about
| the person. I am replying to something you wrote, but know
| nothing about you as a person, so it is hard to claim we
| have a personal interaction together just because of this
| comment.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| This is what most interactions are like.
|
| I've seen on many long-term forums, or even sub-reddits
| on Reddit, people really get to know each other.
| kaashif wrote:
| I never claimed we had a personal interaction, I only
| claimed you interacted with me, a person. I define it the
| same way any dictionary defines it: you acted and it has
| an effect on me.
|
| I agree that personal interactions are hard to come by
| online, but this is different to interacting with people
| at a surface level online.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| User ID you're responding to is not the same user ID you
| first responded to.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| I never said I _never_ interact with people, but it 's
| definitely much, much less than I interact with data and
| really, it's incidental and not the point of me and the
| tech.
| sircastor wrote:
| I think you're the 21st century equivalent of the people who
| "don't own a television."
|
| It depends on what your social circles are like. Given that
| you're not attached to social networks, it seems likely your
| associates aren't super connected either. So you might miss out
| on a few inside jokes, but those are fleeting in the moment
| anyway. Probably nothing truly long lasting. Because of the
| broadness of the social network experience, it's not the same
| as missing Dallas or Game of Thrones in prior decades. And you
| might not have a water-cooler to talk at anyway...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > it's not the same as missing Dallas
|
| tell me how old you are without telling me how old you are :)
| TehShrike wrote:
| I installed TikTok for a couple weeks to try it out. It wasn't
| as interesting as people acted like. I don't think you're
| missing much.
| petsfed wrote:
| My experience with Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts and
| Facebook stories (and all the other things that compete with
| TikTok) is that it can still get its hooks in, but you have
| to invite it in. That is, if it doesn't immediately grab you,
| its not enough to open TikTok and idly doom scroll for 2
| minutes. You have to consciously watch for 15 minutes before
| it starts to alter your brain chemistry.
| TehShrike wrote:
| I did that (scrolled for 15+ minutes) around a dozen times.
| I kept waiting for the algorithm to serve me that really
| great addictive content, but I only found a couple actually
| good creators.
|
| Most of the best videos I saw were Vine compilations
| bitfilped wrote:
| No worries, the line near the top of the article about needing
| a phone in the search of a partner is so absolutely foreign to
| me I had to stop and reread the sentence to be sure I was
| comprehending correctly. And I'm more than a decade younger
| than the author!
| rblatz wrote:
| I'm in my 40s, how would you expect to court a partner
| without a phone?
|
| There is already plenty accounts out there that even the
| relatively small barrier of iMessage -> SMS is a large enough
| of an inconvenience to stop a lot of casual relationships
| from moving to the next level or even continuing.
|
| Having no phone means you are basically unreachable for most
| of the day. A much more significant hurdle to get over. It's
| possible to find another like minded person but that is a
| very tiny minority of people looking for a partner. It's not
| the 90s anymore and people are accustomed to living in this
| constantly connected world. Look at most sitcoms from the 90s
| so many of the situations they find themselves in just aren't
| relatable because of the easy communication we have with
| everyone at all times.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Random interactions at a third place can happen without a
| phone, but eventually you'll want to meet somewhere else,
| and unless you're comfortable with the old school "meet me
| at the clock" style meetup and all the failure modes that
| could occur, you're going to need a way to communicate
| bitfilped wrote:
| I guess we need to agree exactly what "not using a phone"
| means.
|
| I send >85+% of my sms or sms-like messages from a
| laptop/desktop. So no, I don't see a phone as an important
| part of my communication besides the fact it gives me a
| number serving as an ID that could just as easily be
| provided many other ways.
|
| I primarily took this line to mean dating apps, facetime,
| and other social media like functions; which I would argue
| are mostly worthless for developing and maintaining
| friendships or partnerships.
|
| If we're taking it to the extreme and saying that not
| having a phone somehow disallows you any digital
| communications; then yes it will be significantly more
| difficult without a phone, perhaps to the point that some
| would feel it's a necessary device.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| you're really not missing out; social media has its benefits
| but I'm not sure they outweigh its detriments
|
| I deleted my FB account ~8 years ago and twitter ~1 year ago
| and have not regretted it one bit. IG is the only one I have
| left and use that to share/keep up with family/friends' photos.
| arsome wrote:
| As long as you don't overspend on weird. Being weird is great
| until it isn't.
| araes wrote:
| Having gone the other way, can comment slightly. Tried FB,
| Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, Vimeo, Imgur, LinkedIn,
| and Slideshare. (Plus several forums/newsforums like Reddit,
| Slashdot) Mostly found out I was not humanity's demographic. I
| don't really like posting exercise photos. I don't really want
| to take pictures of my pets. I don't watch sports all that
| much. I don't follow celebrities much. There go most of the
| 10k+ categories. (re: Instagram's unlinkable explore page
| https://www.instagram.com/explore/ )
|
| From my own experience, you don't actually feel very "in touch"
| unless you're successful. Instead, you end up making a lot of
| posts into the void that maybe get 10-20 views? 100 on a ++
| post. Spend a month on a demo and get 1 comment. Watch nobody
| ever read what you wrote, while others post "does sugar go in
| spaghetti?" and get 60 million views and 4 million comments.
| [1]
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58270497
| fragmede wrote:
| what's your demo?
| andoando wrote:
| I dunno if it's that weird. It can help if you want to be more
| social of course.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| My phone has never really been the problem. I don't install
| frivolous apps, don't watch YouTube or TikTok, etc. The real
| problem for me is ... HN.
|
| Here I am. At work. With one browser tab wasting time on HN.
| Admittedly, though, I'm not totally lost. I'll check HN when I'm
| taking a break for some other reason, running a big suite of
| tests maybe, or like now, listening to our C-suite regale us with
| the exciting future of the company and how awesome we all are.
| Somehow they manage to do this while continuing to sound like
| they have no idea what to _actually_ do next (and it 's not a
| tiny company, ~5000 employees). But I digress.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I to, here right now instead of writing PowerShell am on HN.
|
| Although, who really wants to write PowerShell anyway. It's
| hell.
|
| The S is silent.
| vonjuice wrote:
| I chuckled.
| ap11071 wrote:
| A few weeks ago, I watched a YouTube video [1] that helped me
| reduce my phone usage from 2-3 hours a day to less than 30
| minutes. It made a significant difference in my life. Sharing the
| link here in case anyone needs a helpful guide.
|
| [1] [YouTube video](https://youtu.be/Ek2eo5lrZws?si=dotZxn-
| EttMOmF9W)
| helboi4 wrote:
| I find that all of the positive effects he's talking about of
| trying to cut down consciously eventually fade away after a
| while. I dislike how the article acts like he's become
| enlightened from one detox. I've been in this mode many times.
| This has been harder than dealing with a nicotine addiction for
| me.
| marviel wrote:
| Recently, when I feel the urge to pick up my phone without a
| specific purpose in mind -- I force myself to write _something_
| down in my (physical, pen /paper) journal instead.
|
| It doesn't even have to be "why am I trying to pick up my phone
| right now," though it often becomes that.
|
| Analyzing how this makes me feel, I've found I am more calm
| throughout the day, and I attend to things with a bit more
| mindfulness / care.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > I'm currently on my phone for 90 minutes a day. Five of those
| are spent on Instagram. I no longer feel addicted.
|
| I take it this is an improvement over the prior state of affairs,
| so that's great to hear. But I'd personally consider 90 minutes
| an awfully long time to spend on my phone every day.
|
| If I assume the author doesn't have a laptop they're also using,
| and their phone is their only computing device, that sounds like
| a victory large enough to write a followup article like this
| about.
|
| If not, I think I'd want to know whether they had just shifted
| their usage from one platform to another rather than actually
| decreasing the overall magnitude. If that's the case, I wouldn't
| consider it much of an improvement.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > What's the desire underneath the desire to check your phone?
|
| This seems like a big question that gets elided in discussions of
| social media addiction. My understanding of "classic" addictions
| (ex. substances) is that there's typically some initial romantic
| experience or period where a person kind of falls in love with
| this ideological version of the object of addiction ("chasing
| that first high", but with a wider definition of "first high"
| than simply the first time they took the drug). Maybe they spend
| a beautiful month in Paris drinking wine all day long and that
| forms the bedrock of the later addiction, as they try and
| recreate th e magic of that experience ad nauseum. I've never
| really tried to reconcile phone addiction with this pattern
| though, but if we are going to call it a true addiction we should
| probably attempt to square these things up. Identifying the
| underlying desire, rather than just modeling the phone addict as
| someone simply pressing a dopamine button, seems like a more
| productive approach to developing a healthier relationship to
| technology. Like in my case, my worst scrolling behaviors occur
| when I'm avoiding something that I find overwhelmingly stressful.
| When I'm enjoying the outside world I rarely reach for me phone,
| it's only when I'm uncomfortable or anxious that I open Reddit or
| Insta (or when I'm waiting for my brain to finish waking up).
| Maybe targeting this anxious-avoidance would help me end the
| behavior, rather than trying to behaviorally hack my way off the
| phone.
| rolph wrote:
| F.O.M.O.
|
| fear of missing out:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fomo
| tech_ken wrote:
| Definitely see how that's a factor in many cases, but I can
| see other possible explanations. For example, I used to be a
| real serious Twitter addict, but it wasn't really FOMO
| driving that IMO. My own post-hoc analysis is that it was a
| mixture of needing feel "in control" during a period of
| political upheaval, alongside a desperate desire to build a
| personal brand and receive recognition. There's lots of
| people and lots of software, I think the underlying
| motivations are going to be different for different pairings
| of the two.
| jebarker wrote:
| I agree that it's deeper than just dopamine addiction. I think
| the phone provides relief from our deepest insecurities. For
| me, I found putting down the phone (and alcohol) came much more
| easily when I addressed the real issues I was trying to escape
| from or find answers to.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I've struggled with a bad phone addiction, and my previous
| attempts at either going phoneless (or rather smartphoneless)
| failed because there were enough useful things I needed from my
| phone on a regular basis (e.g. maps, Uber/Lyft, Venmo, etc.)
|
| I think that after years of trying I finally have a system that
| has greatly reduced my "mindless scrolling" on my phone. I had
| previously set up "focus mode" to block apps, but I did it with
| the idea that I would be "in the zone" and thus blocked anything
| that could give a notification like the Messages app and GMail.
| The blocklist was too broad so I ended up just turning it off.
| Now I only block the apps that I use for "mindless doom
| scrolling", like the browser, any social media apps, shopping
| apps, etc. Of course then it's easy to just click the "use for 5
| minutes" button, but I was amazed the amount of times I would
| just unconsciously open one of these apps whenever I felt the
| smallest tinge of boredom. It was at least a reminder to me "Do
| you really want to be looking at that now?" I'm not perfect know
| but I've come to enjoy being a little bored at times and forced
| to find something more interesting to do.
|
| I also banned my phone from my bedroom which _vastly_ improved my
| insomnia symptoms.
| madmask wrote:
| I think the key is blocking feeds. It's totally ok to actively
| look for stuff online with a question or problem in mind. For
| me it becomes addictive when I am prompted by a feed.
| Multiplayer wrote:
| Wait till these guys try the Apple headset.... oh the irony.
|
| I think the AVP (Apple Vision Pro) is incredible. I am wearing
| it... a LOT. I'm working, wandering around, playing, etc. I don't
| think I'm crazy either. It's not social media per se at the
| moment but it's definitely a major shift from not being "online".
|
| I'm wearing it so much I'm getting puffy bags under my eyes
| (hopefully temporary)
|
| There is a whole new set of issues and causation coming!
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| You don't look crazy, but it's definitely harming your social
| standing.
| iamsanteri wrote:
| Yep, just like I wrote about my experience in my age of
| distractions post back during the COVID-times... It stayed on the
| front page for quite a while here on HN:
| https://www.lostbookofsales.com/age-of-distractions/
|
| I also mentioned the greyscale screen trick people bring up here,
| haha. Phones are huge contributor to this whole problem.
| graphe wrote:
| I cracked my screen and didn't replace it. Ruins my experience
| for the better. Glad the writer stopped his anxiety and
| addiction... For now.
| hot_gril wrote:
| iPhone 6 throttling update did this for me. The phone was
| borderline unusable.
| Stephen_0xFF wrote:
| I think the crux of the issue is our brains looking to be
| occupied with easily digestible content. I removed Facebook a
| while ago but then replaced it with Reddit and X. I quickly
| removed them, but then it was like my brain was looking for
| something similar and I was on Neighbors and Telegram groups for
| a while. So I removed those too, but now I'm on HN more. I tell
| myself I would rather be working, and that working is more
| beneficial to me in the long run, but for some reason, it quickly
| opens a tab to HN when I'm stuck or tired. Rewiring my brain is
| harder than I imagined.
| orzig wrote:
| Having gone through the same cycle, I've done some amount of
| acceptance. HN is least bad, as long as I don't get sucked into
| writing comments (oops). The total amount of time I 'waste' is
| really not huge, so I try not to stress about getting it to 0.
| YMMV, but worth considering.
| keanebean86 wrote:
| I did a detox a few years ago. Just HN and maybe some Google
| news. Eventually I went back to reddit and it felt so weird.
| It took some time to get addicted to reddit again because it
| just wasn't as interesting. I really need to detox again
| because this stuff has ruined my attention span.
| dstroot wrote:
| "Why, exactly, are we rendered so uncomfortable by
| concentrating on things that matter -- the things we thought we
| wanted to do with our lives -- that we'd rather flee into
| distractions, which, by definition, are what we don't want to
| be doing with our lives? When you try to focus on something you
| deem important, you're forced to face your limits, an
| experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely
| because the task at hand is one you value so much."
|
| -- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
| j4yav wrote:
| Does he get to an answer in the book?
| colecut wrote:
| The last sentence looks like an answer to me.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I don't have an inspiring quote for it, but you can't focus
| on "things that matter" all the time, and often the things
| that matter that you can effect by thinking about them at
| that moment aren't that many. Yes, you can always be learning
| something new, but does learning for learning's sake actually
| _matter_?
| xedrac wrote:
| This is why I love playing chess, reading fantasy books,
| and gardening... because they don't matter, and I'd rather
| spend my idle time doing those things than being glued to
| my phone.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do as well. Less time on
| the phone, more time reading novel whose style and
| substance I enjoy. Reading isn't something that
| "matters", but I find one more fulfilling.
| chippy wrote:
| Perhaps we need to identify a substitute before quitting a
| certain thing? Something pleasurable and beneficial (not work).
| Like reading a book.
|
| Simply cutting something out will leave a gap where that
| something was. We should fill it with things of our choosing
| otherwise it will be filled up with something of a similar gap
| shaped thing!
| endemic wrote:
| Exactly -- don't resist, replace.
| boringg wrote:
| Isnt the best option to never have started using social
| media and creating that loop in the first place?
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The
| second-best time is now.
| zogrodea wrote:
| I think that's true generally but:
|
| - It's possible that social media changes some peoples'
| lives for the better. (I do have a few friends who
| married people they got to know on social media, and I
| know the good things that have happened to me because of
| social media outweigh the real but less significant
| harms.)
|
| - It's possible that the thing one replaces social media
| ("replace, don't resist") with outweighs the harm they
| received from social media too.
|
| - I think we're mostly trying to work with practical
| solutions of how to mitigate harm instead of wishing we
| could change the past.
| schneems wrote:
| I've always dreamed of a social app that frog boils my brain to
| something useful. Like imagine mastodon, but posts start
| gradually transition to duolingo questions or paragraphs of a
| book I'm reading on kobo.
|
| My worry is that I would stop using the app in the same way I
| don't open an ebook by default when I'm bored.
| vonjuice wrote:
| If you stopped using the app and didn't replace it with
| social media that would be a good outcome, if it improved
| your habits to the point of doing something creative or
| productive instead.
| djhn wrote:
| Needs to be a feature built into the phone OS.
|
| Start out chuckling to yourself reading tweets at 10am but
| after doing that for more than 5 minutes the feed starts
| morphing into your email inbox. That email you were dreading
| to open? Yeah well too late, you've started reading it now.
| Thank me later.
|
| Come back from lunch and click on that catchy looking video
| of Primeagen reacting to yet another one of those articles
| that reads like hundreds of articles before it? Three minutes
| in he switches over to the terminal to prove a point about
| how anyone should be able to do a bubble sort except instead
| of vim it's 3brown1blue sneaking in a lesson on the Bursuk-
| Ulam theorem.
|
| It's 8pm and you had to reply to a whatsapp message you
| received from your brother. While you've got your phone out
| you might as well catch up on what your friends have been up
| to on instagram. Except after 2 minutes the feed starts
| showing you your own past snaps of your kids and spouse! May
| as well stop staring at your phone and actually talk to them
| seeing as they're in the same room.
| euroderf wrote:
| Sounds doable. Give it a year or two.
| EGreg wrote:
| It's called curiosity
|
| Gathering information about your environment
|
| And also social interaction. Can't be solitary hunter 24/7.
|
| Men's brains seem to be far better suited to embrace long
| abstract solitary activity (like math or programming) than
| women's, on average and also at the extreme ends. Probably
| because of evolutionary psychology. But still even men have
| limits and need to take a break from sustained solitary
| activity, and socialize. Even if the actual socialization
| doesn't produce any long-term deliverables, it helps center you
| psychologically.
|
| Given the rise in remote work, I wouldn't be surprised if
| FB/Apple hijack that to move interactions from the watercooler
| to the "metaverse". I already see a lot of young men (not women
| btw) "wasting" hours on various Discord gamer / political voice
| chats.
|
| https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Is-There-Any...
| conradfr wrote:
| Activate the noprocrast option in your HN account settings and
| see where you land next ;)
| jijijijij wrote:
| Personally, I found the smartphone app and web experience to be
| waaaaaaay more addictive than desktop browsing, because the
| phone is always with me.
|
| I also found I can break away from my phone, when I delete and
| disable _all_ content streams. This painfully includes podcasts
| and Spotify, at least initially, and I also disabled Safari all
| together! Otherwise it won 't break the habit of reaching for
| your phone! Screen time limitations for apps won't do, because
| I am still not getting the tease out of my mind.
|
| The idea is to have the phone for communication with contacts,
| do-one-thing tools, navigation and personal time and
| information management. And nothing else. The phone should
| never be the place where "something happens", where you can
| discover and explore. It shouldn't be more on your mind than
| your headphones, not more exciting than a spoon. Notifications
| should always ever be sent either by "myself" (e.g. calendar)
| or by real contacts (calls and messages).
|
| Public transport planning/navigation, synchronized calendars
| and encrypted messaging are the deal breakers with "stupid
| phones"/no phone, for me.
|
| Sure you can still shift your pleasure seeking to the desktop,
| but at least your mind won't be bothered by temptation and
| intrusive thoughts, when you're on a walk, sitting in the bus,
| in the kitchen, on the toilette, ... You will have a chance to
| break away.
|
| For desktop web, maybe ublock the 'next' button on websites
| like HN? Hide all the internet points?
| muffinman26 wrote:
| I think attempting to replace the easily digestible content
| with work is part of the problem.
|
| You say you're opening a tab to HN when you're stuck or tired,
| but should be focusing on work. Your brain is stuck and tired
| because it needs a break. You can train it to do something
| other than switch to easily digestible content when that
| happens, like taking a walk or stretching, but you can't
| completely avoid a loss of productivity when you're stuck or
| tired. The brain isn't 100% effective all of the time.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| For what it's worth, I think I did a reasonable job of this. I
| don't consume any web-based algorithmic feed content and
| participate in nothing interactive other than Hacker News and
| do not visit Hacker News every day, or even every other day
| most of the time. Almost never on weekends. It's really an "I'm
| bored at work" thing.
|
| As others said, I had to replace these things with something
| else. I'm not meditative enough to just sit around with a
| perfectly still mind staring at the wall. For me, it was a few
| things. Books, first. Not hugely consistent with what they're
| about. First few years was mostly sci-fi and fantasy, then a
| year or so of non-fiction pop physics books. Right now, I'm
| mostly reading cooking books and learning to cook better.
| That's the second thing. I cook all of my own food, from
| scratch, and experiment a lot. That consumes quite a bit of
| time and it's active time. Third, music, but not algorithmic
| feed music. No YouTube music or Spotify recommendations.
| Nothing social. I'm listening to complete albums, curated
| either because I'm in my 40s and already know a lot of music I
| haven't listened to in a long time, or via human critics the
| same way I curated music in the 90s. Fourth, movies, but again,
| nothing algorithmically generated. Just like it's 1999 again.
| In fact, Alamo Drafthouse is doing a celebration of 1999 for
| its 25th anniversary. It happens to also be my and my wife's
| high school graduation year, so a lot of beloved movies to go
| see. At home, we're doing 70s. We've gotten through Easy Rider
| and Rosemary's Baby (yes, I know, they're 60s), Badlands, Days
| of Heaven, Dog Day Afternoon, and Harold and Maude. Quite a few
| more to go, queued up and ready, curated from prior knowledge.
| I've already seen most of these but my wife has not. Fourth,
| exercise. You can't just get off the couch and do it. I spent
| years building up the capacity after spending the latter half
| of my 30s mostly inactive due to degenerative spine problems.
| Started off with resistance bands and walking 6 years ago.
| Today, I lift for about an hour 6 days a week and then run,
| row, or both for cardio, anywhere from 60-90 minutes a day.
| Fifth, concerts. My wife and I saw Judas Priest and Dead
| Kennedys at the end of last year, Tool last week, and we've got
| Madonna, Social Distortion and Bad Religion, Ministry, Echo and
| the Bunnymen, and Slowdive scheduled over the next few months.
| We usually travel to a multi-day festival or two each year as
| well but haven't decided which yet for this year. This is also
| curated from prior knowledge. I guess I miss out on whatever is
| hot right now, but oh well, there was plenty of great music
| already out there in 1995 and plenty of these acts still tour.
|
| All in all, this gives me goals, accomplishments, scheduled
| events, social interaction with a real, non-anonymous person I
| actually know who is physically present, had made me far
| healthier, more fit, and better looking, and the quality of my
| entertainment, though I suppose less "addicting," is much
| higher.
|
| The downside is this is expensive, but it probably doesn't have
| to be if you actively bargain-hunt, stay local, work out at a
| gym instead of buying your own equipment, and eat worse than
| me. Probably many people on the Internet would say another
| downside is I'm not very tuned in. It's an election year and I
| have no clue what any candidates are doing, saying, winning
| races, and I probably won't vote. Oh well. I'm sure the world
| will do about the same as it would have done if I didn't exist,
| which is fine. I'm not that important and neither are you.
|
| Edit: I guess it's worth adding none of this involved or
| required getting rid of my phone. The phone is, in fact, quite
| useful. I listen to my albums on it. I buy movie tickets and
| concert tickets through it and they're delivered to the phone.
| I buy airline tickets and keep them on the phone. I keep my
| recipes, log my food, log my workouts, and map my runs on the
| phone. The local train system sells and keeps passes on a
| mobile app. There is nothing wrong with phones per se. Just
| don't let these apps gamify shit for you. Don't opt into social
| features. Don't create an account if they don't force you to.
| Disable all notifications. Don't worry about what other people
| are reading, where they're running, what they're eating. Just
| worry about yourself. Don't have or use any pure social apps.
| No algorithmically-generated content feeds. Read full-length
| novels, watch full-length feature films, and listen to complete
| albums. Force yourself to exercise at least a medium-term
| attention span. You don't need a change of theme every 40
| seconds.
| ericmcer wrote:
| HN is opened subconsciously while working whenever I encounter
| a difficult problem. Focusing is pretty easy when the road is
| straightforward, but the second I run into a challenge my brain
| tries to escape.
|
| Not sure what that means biologically/evolutionarily.
| stmblast wrote:
| This is a great article.
|
| I think it's difficult to _not_ be addicted with how much simple
| content there is out there that 's easy to digest. TikTok, YT
| shorts and Instagram reels are pretty good examples of this.
| wsintra2022 wrote:
| That sugar addiction is the elephant in the room. What a history
| that drug has! We still ain't had reparations for it.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Gave up having a phone a year ago, when even the cheapest
| "prepaid" plans went to $30/mo minimum.
|
| I'm way out in the woods, anyway. Verizon ran a tower here I
| could talk to until a few months before I gave up phone; but then
| something happened and i'm told its an AT&T tower now. It didn't
| provide signal anymore, even in the front yard, most of the time.
|
| Having had several years of "phone don't work" is a great way to
| make switching to "no phone" easier. I just regret the money I
| spent all those years for a service i didn't really receive.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I mostly stopped using Facebook: I slowed down a few years ago,
| and generally stopped in early 2021. Now I probably open it every
| few months.
|
| But, I'm still looking at news frequently when I'm on the toilet,
| or if I'm trying to fill a few minutes. I do it instead of
| reaching for a magazine. I use Google's feed. It's...
| addictive... But at the same time, it's not endless. At a certain
| point the "news" is just the "olds," and if I'm reading the
| "news" for that long, it's time to switch to Kindle or find
| something educational.
| andoando wrote:
| My interest in no phones is going back to the old days where
| you'd have to make plans to meet someone at sometime and be there
| next week with no communication in between, not having ease of
| access to every bit of information, not relying on maps, etc.
|
| It's crazy how much having a phone changes things and it's fun to
| think about living life in almost another world simply by getting
| rid of it.
| weiliddat wrote:
| I'm trying to go smartphone-less, but a major blocker are
| services that rely on apps that are critical to my life, e.g.
| banking, insurance, transport. Some of these services don't even
| have alternatives and you MUST use an Android/iPhone to do basic
| operations like transferring money, logging in, or showing your
| ticket.
|
| Now that I mention it, it seems like the critical functionality
| that these apps provide are usually just credential holders, e.g.
| ticket / card, MFA auth that happen to be locked in a proprietary
| app. I really hope more services adopt standard
| credential/authentication mechanisms.
|
| Anyone happen to know a list of services, e.g. banking (US/EU-
| based) that don't require an app these days?
| wt__ wrote:
| One addiction to watch out for is the desire to read articles
| about other people's attempts to conquer their phone addiction.
| They seemed to start about 2-3 years ago - surely we have passed
| the peak by now?
|
| In my experience you get a degree of dopamine from the inevitable
| schadenfreude felt reading of the author's difficulty or
| perceived "failure", but there is a steep law of diminishing
| returns when it comes to learning anything new, until eventually
| you realise this and that, even if you are not addicted to your
| phone, you are almost certainly addicted to something else
| yourself (e.g. Wordle, some podcast you could almost certainly
| live without, websites you would be ashamed to admit to using,
| damaging personal relationships, the spotting or collecting of
| pretty much any real or virtual object and so on.)
|
| The secret is to (a) tell yourself not to click on the stories in
| the first place and reward yourself for doing so (b) look but
| quickly scan them. Also, actually check who wrote the article, so
| you can decide whether or not you know or care who they are.
|
| My own phone tips are:
|
| - deleting apps (especially anything social but also YouTube and
| anything that feeds you random content - the advice from another
| commenter about considering the business model of the app is
| good) - inserting gaps between apps on your home screen so it's
| not cluttered (iPhone users: do a search for "Invisible iOS Home
| Screen icon Template" - it's ridiculous Apple don't let you add
| blank spaces, but we are (still) where we are) - turning all the
| badges/counters off - massively pruning notifications - having a
| mobile browser home screen filled with icons for
| 'meaningful/useful' favourite sites - using text only news sites
| (less distracting) - placing the phone face down or across the
| room - keeping it in silent mode the entire time - putting it in
| airplane mode at night - books/audiobooks (because more effort's
| gone into them but also they're longer, so there are far less
| frequent occasions when you have to decide/browse what to listen
| to next) - personally I'd also recommend turning screen time etc
| OFF - on iOS at least you can get a decent enough idea of usage
| just from looking at the battery page and time limits inevitably
| never work.
|
| I'm aware if I was truly free of any addictive behaviour myself
| I'd have skipped writing a comment about it, but I don't comment
| on this issue _that_ often and the above have genuinely worked
| for me for quite a long time.
| Rudism wrote:
| I used a Light Phone II for a few years, which is essentially an
| expensive e-ink dumbphone (it runs Android under the hood, but
| you can't actually run any apps outside of some minimal built-in
| ones for stuff like directions and music).
|
| My main gripe was that I like to listen to music and podcasts
| while I walk, and the LP2's apps for that are rather lackluster
| (nearly to the point of unusability for me). It drove me back to
| my smartphone a few times (a OnePlus something-or-other), which
| would usually last a few weeks before I'd go back to the LP2
| again because the smartphone was too distracting (like I'd pop
| open a web browser to look up an actor while watching a movie,
| then getting sucked down a rabbit hole and missing the whole
| movie before I realized it was happening).
|
| I'm trying a new experiment now--I've got a smartphone again but
| it's a super tiny one (a Jelly Star which has a 3 inch screen).
| It's very annoying to actually use for typing or reading because
| it's so small. It's only been a month or so, but so far I'm
| finding it's a very nice compromise. I can listen to all my
| podcasts and music using my normal Android apps, and I can fire
| up a web browser in a pinch, but it doesn't suck up my attention
| because it's so uncomfortable to use for any period of time.
| wakasaka wrote:
| After many years trying to reduce my phone usage, I think the
| best way is to install a MMORPG such as wow classic or similar. I
| barely touch my phone now.
| _benj wrote:
| this made me chuckle, but I'm with you on that! The times that
| I've been deep into something, either a project that enjoyed a
| lot (like writing a CHIP-8 emu, that was fun!) or a book that I
| couldn't put down, or a video game that I just to play (Ark?) I
| didn't even cared about my phone!
| lrvick wrote:
| No phone for 3 years now. I am so much happier. Every excuse you
| have in your brain right now is moot because we survived the 90s,
| and with probably higher attention spans.
| npteljes wrote:
| I have several excuses: one, yes this worked in the 90s, but as
| smartphones shape the culture now, they are a soft, sometimes
| hard requirement, now that they are widespread. We did fine
| without the internet and credit cards too, but not culture,
| business, life relies on it.
|
| Second, surviving is a very low bar. Maybe it's not such an
| excuse to set it a bit higher. Living organisms survive all
| kinds of ailments, abuse, deficits and other bad situations.
| Yet, it's not "fine" to inflict these on each other at all.
|
| Third, what works for one, doesn't necessarily work for
| another. It's great to find something that's working, but
| humans are different, their situations are different, they are
| at different stages of life, and so, advice in general is not
| very universally applicable.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| My biggest help was switching to gray scale. A lot of the
| entertainment value of scrolling videos and photos goes away.
| spacecadet wrote:
| I tried this for over a year back in 2011. The hardest things for
| me were maps, I had become reliant on mobile mapping... and of
| course friends and family complaining I dont have imessage or
| facetime.
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