>These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. Itβs quite a difference.
reading all of these 'royal we' anecdotes makes me feel grateful that I can survive without a mobile quite fine. HN is as close to social media as I get -- so I guess i'm stuck wondering : are all these 'conditions' of the modern world inexorably linked and self-perpetuating?
Like, if I wanted to develop a mobile-phone habit would it be best for me to get interested in social media, and vice versa?
Maybe my ducking of these trends just stems from my aversion to social media all together, and that saved me from mobile-phone overuse?
I don't know. But it is interesting, and wildly segmenting, that everyone around me refers to these problems that 'we' have -- but I don't. I can't be alone in this feeling.
p.s. to be clear, i'm not gloating -- if anything it's kind of loneliness inducing that I can't relate to the struggle.. but it's kind of a bittersweet feeling like being one of the few who doesn't catch a plague and has to watch others suffer.
> I don't know. But it is interesting, and wildly segmenting, that everyone around me refers to these problems that 'we' have -- but I don't. I can't be alone in this feeling.
I feel the same way. HN is as close as I get to social media, I don't even look at reddit.
I think it is a "good thing" people use your "royal we" term in that at least people see phone addiction as a problem. It is usually always couched in the tone of "the problem is too far gone" which isn't a good thing.
I wonder what it would be like if an entire country picked one hour during one day, and everyone just somehow disabled data on their phones, calls only, with the idea being that you only make calls that are required, not to stymie boredom.
I don't think it's a plague, but more like a bunch of attractors now that ~everyone has expectation that everyone else is "always online". I'd say I'm in a similar position as you with regards to not opting into most of it, yet I still feel the social pressure of being drawn into crap like group texts. People, who a decade or two ago wouldn't call you back for days, now pile on within the hour with walls of emote-laden content-free well-wishes. If I were 10 years younger I'd probably have declared bankruptcy already and written an LLM autoresponse bot.
The other half of the mobile 1-2 punch is that the UX is terrible, due to both the limited form factor and the hostile software. People are social animals so most just suffer through it for the connection, and not knowing that the experience can be so much better on a real computer. Using software that functions across devices, I do feel the same attractors on a fully fledged desktop. But it's much less concentrated as I can read the entire context without scrolling, type out a response at a comfortable speed, and then switch away from that window until I poll it again. Whereas even with a phone running mostly libre software it feels like being sucked into a tap-tap-tap morass that I'm only using because I have to.
I don't use social media, but I have Whatsapp groups for organizing, and its useful if I want to read something I don't have immediately on hand on the go, or if I want to take a picture, or take a call, or check the map if I want to go somewhere or if I get lost. I can look up recipes or set timers while cooking, use it as an alarm clock, stopwatch. Plus the one, billion, quadrillion apps; though, they were a lot cooler back when smartphones first came out, and, as I said, I usually don't use any apps besides email and the browser and maybe also a music streaming app.
I think those are the main things I use my phone for, and getting rid of it would be very inconvenient at this point, especially since I have an iPhone anyway so I can shut off all push notifications and all tracking software and what have you. It's not 100% secure, but what can you do. Though, to be honest, I think this will be my last smartphone, I won't get another one after it breaks. I was in my local library the other day, just checking it out, and there happened to be a travel guide for a city I'm visiting soon. My god, that thing was way better than any info I've found online, and it was quite pleasant to sit down and read a book for a few hours, instead of frantically browsing through one million websites to find out what was cool, interesting, and legit, and what was a tourist trap. Its a shithole, the internet, its just a means for large-scale fraud, theft, and surveillance. But there are still a few good things left, and that redeems it somewhat.
reading all of these 'royal we' anecdotes makes me feel grateful that I can survive without a mobile quite fine. HN is as close to social media as I get -- so I guess i'm stuck wondering : are all these 'conditions' of the modern world inexorably linked and self-perpetuating?
Like, if I wanted to develop a mobile-phone habit would it be best for me to get interested in social media, and vice versa?
Maybe my ducking of these trends just stems from my aversion to social media all together, and that saved me from mobile-phone overuse?
I don't know. But it is interesting, and wildly segmenting, that everyone around me refers to these problems that 'we' have -- but I don't. I can't be alone in this feeling.
p.s. to be clear, i'm not gloating -- if anything it's kind of loneliness inducing that I can't relate to the struggle.. but it's kind of a bittersweet feeling like being one of the few who doesn't catch a plague and has to watch others suffer.