I recall, pre-iPhone, sitting in a pub waiting for a friend to arrive, staring into the middle-distance. I noticed a young man sitting at the bar with a phone. He'd pick it up, check for messages, put it down, take a sip of beer then his leg would start to judder (he was on a bar stool), then repeat the whole thing. A cadence of around 45s. "What a weirdo" I thought to myself. Turns out I was the weirdo, heh.
Yep. When I worked at Apple and took the (Apple) bus to work, I would arrive early at the bus stop and wait with the other employees. Lined up, everyone had their phones out, staring down. Me, I was looking at the old out-of-comnmision payphone, at the cars going by, at the copies of "Avisador" in the busted newspaper stand.
Boredom is a good thing for the brain.
And, honestly, I must be of the older generation because I find nothing very interesting on my phone. It takes pictures and gives me directions. I'm a lap-topper.
The internet is not really organised in a way for you to do anything useful if you are bored. There’s no “learn about the world” course you take when you have nothing else to do.
In fact, all the stuff we’ve designed to capture attention is almost the exact opposite of a good use of the internet.
I find it very difficult to queue up good content to read or listen to on a daily basis. And I try. Imagine all the people without the time to discover enough good content.
> The internet is not really organised in a way for you to do anything useful if you are bored. There’s no “learn about the world” course you take when you have nothing else to do.
I'd argue you're holding it wrong. The repository of all human knowledge absolutely does contain numerous "learn about the world" courses in all shapes and forms. HN, arXiv, Wikipedia, parts of YouTube, and dedicated learning platforms abound and each probably has enough content for a lifetime of learning. I agree it's not designed to make this easy, but it's also not particularly hard. Hit "random article" a few times on Wikipedia and you're off to the races.
Well, it's not all knowledge. It doesn't know the inner thoughts of everyone. And human explicit knowledge is limited, it can't tell me whether I'll enjoy a certain bookstore if I go there.
And it's only explicit knowledge, not tacit knowledge. Nobody learns skills from browsing the Internet.
> There’s no “learn about the world” course you take
There's practically an undoable number of hours of free courses on Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy, and others. Thousands of hours of interesting material on youtube.
I used to think so, but with more experience a lot of dark patterns and perverse incentives are becoming obvious. These people are not there to explain something interesting in a useful way, they are there to get your eyeballs to extract money from advertising or a Patreon. They are not teaching you, they are making you think they teach you to make you feel satisfied and give them money. Of course some of them are actually good, but a lot are not really.
I would agree that most people don't use the internet for that when they're bored (including me more often than I'd like to admit), and the big tech websites are all about capturing attention and not providing good uses of the internet, for the most part, but that doesn't mean it's not available for people if they want it.
Last night I was working through some shader tutorials, for instance, albeit on my laptop (I prefer laptop to phone when possible).
I also playtest one of my games (current one has a mobile version), or brainstorm and take notes for my game designs, or read up on something I want to do with one of my games, or go through my github issues list and sometimes even look at my code repos while I'm killing time while out and about (I mostly don't use my phone when I'm not out, I'll just use my laptop).
I try to remember I have a Kindle app with lots of informative books to read but I do forget about a little too often.
When I was younger, I would program text-based games all the time on my TI graphing calculator. I would even bring that instead of my Game Boy to my grandparents sometimes, because I just wanted to code more of my games.
I do think that capability is lacking on phones. It's technically possible, but the environment (at least on iPhone) is so sandboxed it's difficult to do effectively, or at least it was the last time I tried. Anything you're making on the device directly does not have access to the same capabilities as what you make from a laptop or desktop, and that's a shame.
I have a massive folder of ebooks, pdfs, YouTube videos, etc that I've downloaded on my phone. I also have a list in Google keep of about twenty of these things in order of preference, so I always have something to read/watch/listen to based on my level of energy.
> The internet is not really organised in a way for you to do anything useful if you are bored. There’s no “learn about the world” course you take when you have nothing else to do.
I have a list of links to read for when I have time to do so. But yeah, if I don’t have anything to do, I prefer just doing nothing than seeking engagement. Social media are a mind killer.
> I find it very difficult to queue up good content to read or listen to on a daily basis.
When I come across something that looks interesting, I add it to the list and stuff accumulates until I go through each link and read the page, usually during my 30 minutes commute. (or not, sometimes it is not as interesting as I thought it would be). For me it works quite well.
Sure there is. I used to read Wikipedia's Article of the Day every day at lunch. I only stopped because I found even more interesting (to me) things to read about.
> There’s no “learn about the world” course you take when you have nothing else to do.
I've been testing https://brilliant.org/ and like it so far. Its scope is limited to STEM topics, but the thing I like about it is you can set courses to bite sized daily chunks as small as 5 minutes.
What are you talking about? Find any topic you're vaguely interested in, say history. Type "history" in YouTube, and you'll very quickly find enough videos to fill hundreds of lifetimes, to suit exactly what you want. Prefer high-production high-graphics videos? Check. Prefer a person speaking into a microphone? Check. Prefer a university lecture? Check.
Rinse and repeat for anything you're vaguely interested in.
The problem is way too many interesting things to see, not too few.
I think the point is that mindfulness in your present moment, if done intentionally, can be a beneficial practice. There is value in not constantly seeking dopamine hits and allowing your brain to feel discomfort in doing nothing. It's really up to the individual when they choose to do this, though. I don't personally enjoy doing this in public and when having to do stuff like commute or try to get through a work day. But I can respect that others do.
I'm the same. I spend somewhere between 1 and 5 hours on the phone daily, but 80 % of that is writing articles and reading books I don't have on my Kindle.
Indeed. I spent surely a few thousand hours in books as a teenager. Now I spend majority of time on my phone reading short- and long-form non-fiction. “Time on phone” is irrelevant without specifying the activity. Perhaps not if it automatically implies “time on social networks”.
They very obviously weren't claiming that, they were responding to a specific comment about there being nothing interesting on smartphones. Try to interpret what people say with good faith.
the subtext of their comment, the unspoken implication, the between the lines meaning was that it's fine people are on their phone all the time, because some of them are reading books
Actually, you phrased your previous post as though it were a fact, not an opinion, so it's more like "A didn't happen for me, so A does not happen for everyone."
I was challenging your assertion, not making a counter-assertion.
I think the implication was that it didn't have to be on tiktok. it's a choice that people make. the phone doesn't force them. rejecting the phone entirely isn't some form of virtue or moral purity.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with hedonistic activities, so long as they don't harm other people and so long as you avoid things like addiction. Even something like using heroin isn't immoral in and of itself (except according to some religions), it's just that it's so unlikely you'll be able to use it once without going down the path of addiction that most of us sensibly treat it as something to never do.
Social media can cause mental health issues, qnd can lead to addiction to it, but that doesn't mean that using it is a moral failing. And frankly, neither is becoming addicted to heroin a moral failing (though most people would consider it a personal failing since we would dislike being addicted to it), it's a healthcare issue not a morality issue. The only moral failing would be committing offences against other people because of the addiction, eg stealing from somebody to pay for the drugs.
that doesn't negate what I said at all, not striving to keep a healthy body and healthy mind, not working on developing yourself, on elevating yourself, not wanting to become better, IS a moral failing
and certain hedonistic activities, like the social media dopamine dispensers, although they do not hurt other people, do hurt the moral imperative of growing yourself as a person
>>not striving to keep a healthy body and healthy mind, not working on developing yourself, on elevating yourself, not wanting to become better, IS a moral failing
Whoa. How is it any of your business how I live my life so long as I am not impacting you or society in any way? I'm 72 years old and I spend my time the way I want to spend my time. I don't exercise any longer. And that will almost certainly shorten how much longer I live. How is that any of your business?
> Whoa. How is it any of your business how I live my life so long as I am not impacting you or society in any way? I'm 72 years old and I spend my time the way I want to spend my time. I don't exercise any longer. And that will almost certainly shorten how much longer I live. How is that any of your business?
Because your actions will impact society. You might get healthcare, paid for by the rest of society, which may or may not be caused by you not exercising. Or it might be caused by you exercising.
The way people raise their kids affects society, or even simply their decision to have or not have a certain number of kids impacts society. Some personal actions can collectively impact society.
Just because your choices might not affect me, and they don't, at all, doesn't mean they're moral, doesn't mean they're good.
I would rank self-actualization, personal growth, as the second rule behind the golden rule, and there are many schools of philosophy where that's the case: aristotelian ethics, kantian ethics, existentialism, etc.
Why should I (or anyone) care where you (or anyone) rank anything?
I'm pretty comfortable with my ranking of things. What someone else thinks about how I decide to live my life is pretty much at the bottom of my ranking board.
> I think the implication was that it didn't have to be on tiktok. it's a choice that people make. the phone doesn't force them. rejecting the phone entirely isn't some form of virtue or moral purity.
I don't think staring at a bus stop is a meaningful step towards changing the American nightmare. We have a lot of problems due to poor leadership in this country and in the world, and people understandably struggle to take meaningful action to replace that leadership (i.e. vote in their best interest, and vote based on meaningful things that most people don't consider at all when voting). Instead we bicker about DEI and what genitals someone has under their clothes when they use certain restrooms instead of, you know, a voting and election process that is more representative and accountable. Until there is greater class consciousness and people have more emotional bandwidth to consider things outside what is immediately placed in front of them with instagram/tiktok/corporate news/advertising, I don't think it's going to change much. This is a weird tangent.
> I don't think staring at a bus stop is a meaningful step towards changing the American nightmare.
That is not even close to what I was speaking to. It is just part of the process of waking up and becoming unattached and less dependent and more aware of your surroundings and feeling the suffering so you create the will to change things.
> Instead we bicker about DEI and what genitals someone has under their clothes when they use certain restrooms instead of, you know, a voting and election process that is more representative and accountable.
All of this was brought to you by the internet by the people you complain about below.
> Until there is greater class consciousness and people have more emotional bandwidth to consider things outside what is immediately placed in front of them with instagram/tiktok/corporate news/advertising, I don't think it's going to change much.
Class consciousness starts off line, by helping the poor in your local area. Take a look at what the Black Panthers did and you will get an idea. If people are staring at TikTok it is highly unlikely that are running into this information.
Though commonly associated with the sensational, the Black Panthers conceived of and implemented a wide array of meaningful social programs. The Panthers started free breakfast for school children, with party members cooking every morning for the poor and undernourished kids in their communities. They established the Oakland Community School, which offered adult education and childcare, as well as free medical clinics staffed by well-regarded academic physicians who volunteered a portion of their time. Mary Bassett, former commissioner of health of the city of New York, writes that the Panthers initiated medical research into sickle cell anemia, which was largely ignored prior to their work. They provided plumbing, home maintenance, and even pest control services.
> It is just part of the process of waking up and becoming unattached and less dependent and more aware of your surroundings and feeling the suffering so you create the will to change things.
Unless there is already the seed of making change and recognizing what change needs to be made, the idle time isn't really going to help. I suffer plenty in life, I don't need to artificially increase that as some sort of motivation to vote differently or interact with my community differently.
> All of this was brought to you by the internet by the people you complain about below.
Disagreement on social issues has always existed and would also exist even without the internet. I'm not sure what your point is with this comment.
I agree local efforts are great and meaningful. But for large systemic change we need different voting habits.
This is the trap they have you in. Of course there is always something "more interesting" on the internet. The interesting creates the adrenaline rush, the adrenaline rush gets you addicted by changing adrenaline receptor density which leads you looking for something even more exciting.
Even when you are just looking around IRL, one view will be more interesting than the other, right? But now that got you all doped up on "super interesting" through this teleportation device to all things interesting, everything around you look extremely boring in comparison.
As your adrenaline receptors come back to life you will find that everything around you is really actually quite interesting.
I don't know where you're from, but in the US, the average spot I'd be killing time in is surrounded by acres of parking lots and a busy stroad or two. A Tamagotchi or 1980s pocket calculator is more engaging.
Nothing to do with adrenaline, addiction, doom-scrolling, dopamine or chemical receptors. Millions of people are surrounded by a wasteland of asphalt and machines going 60mph with nothing interesting within sight.
I’m sorry you had such difficult things to overcome in your life and I applaud you for your skilled eye as a photographer, but you’re coming on pretty strong and I think you could do with being a little less aggressive when trying to make your points. For the record, I am a cinematographer. I’m not sure why that’s relevant but apparently it is.
You also know nothing about our relationship with phones and such. You just sound like somebody who has an ax to grind.
My friend it doesn’t have to be my phone. If I’ve got something to read nearby I’ll pick that up if I think to grab it before leaving.
I am as much of a dopamine junkie as anyone here, but I am perfectly comfortable leaving my phone behind for long stretches and sometimes I’m just sitting at a public transit stop around ads and concrete. Unfortunately people watching, while romanticized as the ultimate fun activity by interesting indie folks in movies, does get old eventually.
I doubt you spend every second of your non-work time staring into space though. I like to read, for example; just because I do it on my phone in public sometimes doesn't mean I'm not finding other times for quiet contemplation.
> I doubt you spend every second of your non-work time staring into space though.
Do you really think that's what was being suggested? I assumed they were merely suggesting to not reflexively reach for your phone any time you have a moment of downtime.
The example used doesn't seem like a good indication of reflexively reaching for a phone, as doing things while waiting at a bus stop is pretty reasonable and has been around long before smartphones.
You're right though, that's likely what was meant, which I agree with. The hyperbole was unnecessary.
I hear this adage repeated a lot, but is it true? A quick kagi finds me lots of news articles quoting neuro-scientists, but no actual studies I can see.
If it is, I assume like sleep or vegetables there's a certain amount you should have per day and a point of diminishing returns.
Exact same experience at Google in 2015. I remember being super weirded out that seemingly everyone was buried in phones and laptops while walking around the campus. Hated it.
Wikipedia’s random link is great for learning something new. It is described here as I can’t copy the real link on my phone without it resolving to a new page.
Pre palm tro I'd have a book or laptop or newspaper with me everywhere cause it was either that, doing highlights, or reading o magazine at the doctor. Though I learned some great recipes from o magazine.
Pre Kindle I'd take around 15 lbs of books with me on trips.
There's a joke in knpins about reading the shampoo bottle on the John. I've done that
I would always have a copy of The Economist, New Yorker, NYRB, LRB or similar when I was travelling around London, so avoiding boredom was a priority for me even then. Much more restful to read a physical magazine though, and the only thing to distract me from an article was other articles in the magazine or my surroundings rather than "maybe that comment on Hacker News has a few more upvotes now".
A few years back I arrived at a venue sans phone* waiting for a date to arrive. I was early and she was late.
It was actually incredible to get the visceral reminder of just how ingrained having my phone for distraction was to me. I didn't take any action but sometimes wonder if I should have.
*I had lent my phone to a friend, who was using it to communicate with the person who had found their phone and making recovery/transfer easier... classic?
No, he was the weirdo. The fact that something is common does not make it normal. If you walked around Hong Kong in the 1880s you'd think you are a weirdo for not smoking opium all day. There will be a similar rude awakening after the current one.
> Reviews.org surveyed 1,000 Americans 18 years and older with a +/- 4% margin of error and a confidence level of 95%. The survey results were weighted to reflect characteristics of the United States population using available data from the US census.
Absent them explicitly saying otherwise, I think we need to assume that the survey was done of reviews.org visitors. Reviews.org has reviews for exactly three categories of services: internet providers, mobile phone plans and services, and TV and streaming.
Weighting for US demographics isn't going to make this sample very representative—this survey is of people who are browsing reviews for a set of products that most people don't think too hard about, which also happens to be a set of products that is tightly related to screen time use.
> we need to assume that the survey was done of reviews.org visitors.
That's pretty unlikely. Reviews.org likely engages one of many vendors (like Qualtrics[1]) that will solicit responses online for a survey you design and provide to them through their survey building tool.
I've read dozens of these survey methodologies, and the reputable ones always tell you who they recruited to do the survey and what sampling method was used (if only in broad strokes). Given that this one does neither, we have to assume the laziest approach possible.
If they wanted us to take their survey seriously they'd have a real methodology section.
Sure, they could be lazy in a lot of ways in how they execute this survey leading to unreliable results -- indeed, fielding it through something like qualtrics could be said to be "lazier" than attempting to solicit and engage readers of your own individual site. It would be pretty hard and expensive to get enough responses yourself for even a lazy, low-quality result, vs. the at-scale offerings of a vendor.
One of my favourite achievements of the past several years has been to actively NOT use my phone.
I started by eliminating social media accounts, which had an immediate and positive effect on my phone use.
Next, I set hard phone time/day limits: no phone while hiking, no phone while at a social meetup or restaurant, no phone while shopping.
Finally, I focused on what I should use it for and stuck to only that: checking work email when I need to away from a PC (but replies wait until I get to a PC), the odd Googling when I'm away from a PC, scrolling my tech news feeds once per evening for up to 20 minutes, and of course, missed phone calls/texts from friends and family (checked periodically, 1-2 times per day).
And the end result? I'm very happy with my relationship with this non-invasive piece of technology, mainly because I ensured it was non-invasive.
I was very late to the party getting a smartphone. Didn't stop me picking up my laptop repeatedly. Visiting the same old haunts.
I have yet to install Facebook or Whatsapp or similar. I think it would be the death of me. I spend way too much time on my phone/computer.
I was in a care giving role and felt it couldn't leave my side. Since losing that person, I now rejoice in being able to leave my phone. Heck I didn't turn it on yesterday. And it has been sitting in the kitchen all day today.
The telephone does fill me with existential dread as most communication with me is asking me for something or alerting me to something negative. Perhaps that's an age thing. Whereas the Internet is still pleasurable but a complete and utter time suck.
It's a false sense of urgency thing. The kids just grow calloused to it, culminating in e.g. completely ignoring the door bell.
I had a friend that decided to essentially go off the grid around 2000-2005, he's my age (gen-z), I remember him showing me a website he was developing with javascript and IE.
Now he's asking me to help with the Google Play / Mac App stuff because it makes no sense to him. It isn't an age thing.
In an age of smartphones, nobody would think of ringing my doorbell without texting first. Deliveries come with notifications. An unexpected door ring at this point is probably someone I don't want to bother dealing with like a salesperson.
Is there any hope of turning this trend around or at least keeping it where it is? I don’t think that the months spent on my phone have benefited me or anyone I know.
Old guy here who grew up without phones but later felt the dependace they were creating in me so worked to stop it.
You have to start with yourself an be an example. It is an "addiction of sorts" (maybe a very strong habit?), but think of it like telling an alcoholic to just stop drinking.
Like an addiction, you need to get rid of the Pavlovian ringing bells to help you through.
Rule one: Turn off all notifications and turn on battery saver mode.
Rule two: Get off of all social media. I am including HN with this. Delete them, you will be fine. HN is the only place I talk online now and only on my laptop, but its days are numbered for me.
Rule three: Leave your phone behind. Probably the hardest. I started just by leaving it the car when I was shopping, then leaving it home when shopping.When I ma at the coffee shop I leave it in my bag.
Rule four: Do not use your phone at all when you are home. Start by setting time limits and extend them, but no one died stopping cold turkey. I only even use my laptop in the morning to read news
Rule five: Learn to do something else with your hands. Cook, work on your car, clean your house, anything.
Rule six: Be OK with "not knowing" and try to stop searching the internet every time a question pops up in your head. This was very hard for me because of my clinically diagnosed OCD. I found the "checking" my phone was allowing me to do just made my OCD worse in the long run.
I am at the point now where I use my phone so little the battery lasts five days easy with 20% left.
These are all good points - and ones I’ve been trying to follow for the past few months. Rule five was the most important one for me. Anytime I have an urge to doomscroll, I make a conscious effort to do something IRL instead. Taking up a deep hobby which can take years/decades to actually master seems like a better time sink (practicing visual art in my case)
The thought that quitting social media is harder than quitting smoking also helps cement the idea that it is bad for me when I try to dissuade myself from using it
Yes, dicipline is needed there as well. I do a lot if genetic reseach and I look at my laptop as a tool, a potentially dangerous tool, like a woodworker using a lathe, i stay alert and focused on the task at hand.
My laptop is essentially a desktop as well. I only use it on a desk in one room.
I never turn to these devices out of boredum. That is the best rule.
Plus, steven black on github has a great host file blocking all kibds of websites.
Notice how gen Z is less anxious than Millennials and Gen x when it comes to losing their phone. I think that younger generations will have a better understanding of the addictive nature of phones from a young age and will learn that they will not go far if they are absorbed in their phones. My hope is that we will learn to use the easily available entertainment on our phones like we learn to use recreational drugs, with moderation and respect.
They’ll grow up with it and it will seem boring in adulthood.
Millennials had it dumped in their lap like GenX and haven’t had time to build “cognitive antibodies” but I think that’s starting to happen
Elders were addicted to TV for similar reason, but as a Xennial I grew up on TV and find it fucking boring.
Teen use of drugs and alcohol, sex is way down compared to prior generations.
It’ll take time and progress can be hampered by avarice of powers that be coughVCcough
Human biology is analog not digital. It’s far more fluid than a machine; one can be a social nut but care for themselves and others because philosophy of proper social etiquette is pretentious phrenology like bullshit. It’ll evolve defenses on its own that corpo won’t be able to anticipate or ignore until it’s too late. And just not giving a fuck to begin with is an option. Not much Sam Altman, PG can do if people just don’t use these stupid things if people just evolve into nonsense discourse but keep stuff on the shelves.
IMO in the US we need to take a minute to live by Tim Leary’s mindset, drop out and get strapped and remind a couple hundred mega rich 8 billion other people don’t actually need them.
> Notice how gen Z is less anxious than Millennials and Gen x when it comes to losing their phone.
Wait, what? Has this been your experience? My sense has been the exact opposite: the younger the person the more attached to the phone and the more sense of existential dread when it goes missing.
Yeah, I'm Gen X and if I don't have my phone, it is an inconvenience. But my Gen Z son misplaces his phone and he is completely panicked and non-functional.
Relevant story: In 2015-2016, I was the commander of a few hundred new troops going through their initial Army training; not basic training, but the subsequent stage where they had a bit more freedom. When they violated the rules, I had the power to take away those freedoms, fine them up to a few weeks of pay, etc. Most of them endured that without blinking an eye.
Eventually I confirmed with the lawyers that I could also take away their phones, and that broke some of them. I mean that I had troops break down in tears in my office when I informed them of the punishment, and some went to extreme lengths to circumvent the punishment and secretly gain access to another phone. (They still had laptops and Wi-Fi, by the way, along with permission to borrow a phone if they needed to make an important call.)
The Army has studied this a bit and found that not allowing troops to have their phones during basic training is a significant obstacle to recruiting right now.
Decades ago I would come home and crash in front of the TV — watching dreck.
At least in the evening I think the mind needs to disengage, relax. That can be found in watching "Forensic Files" or playing online solitaire or scrolling through BlueSky.
Perhaps reading would be a better substitute though.
TV is nowhere near as addictive as social media. Take it from someone who watched hours of it daily as a teenager and then barely even missed it upon going to college. Social media has all the niche stuff that wouldn't merit a 30-minute TV series. It's unpredictable, funny, local and international in ways TV never is.
Screen Time on iOS (which Android picked up later) was a response to people being concerned about being on their phones all of the time.
"Uglifying" hacks (mostly using the grayscale filter) are popular too.
Then there are purpose-built devices like the reMarkable and Daylight Computer that tout "focus" as a selling point.
All that said, I don't think we (in the US) are ready for a complete social media cleanse. Lots of people use tricks to reduce their social media consumption (not too dissimilar to quit-smoking tactics, interestingly), but the overall reaction to banning TikTok was overwhelmingly negative. Furthermore, their stats on phone use while driving are actually low; one study actually claimed that 90% of people did this (and my experiences walking and biking around all but confirm this).
It feels like for a lot of people (I'm including myself in that) "reducing social media consumption" is a somewhere between "reducing my cocaine usage" and "reducing my heroin usage" it's so compulsive. I'm not sure there's much to be done except not be on it.
Give it 10 or so years and The Thing(tm) will cycle around to the next thing.
Previously it was gaming (namely consoles), before that was TV, before that was comic books, and so on. Every generation has its "Spends Too Much Time on The Thing(tm)" stereotype.
The difference is that you can take your phone with you but the same can't be true for the TV or the gaming console. That's a big factor.
I suspect more people would have bought Apple Vision if it was cheaper/more affordable. I suspect a lot more people would have bought it if it was 1/2 weight at $1000 and didn't require that dangling battery. The future will be people with their phones hooked to their faces.
> Previously it was gaming (namely consoles), before that was TV, before that was comic books, and so on. Every generation has its "Spends Too Much Time on The Thing(tm)" stereotype.
I feel like we spend way more time on our phones that what we (or they) used to do with consoles, TV, comic books and so on.
Get a kindle and start reading books. That’s what's keeping me from staring at a phone all the time. I might be spending similar amounts of time looking at a screen but at least I get something valuable out of it.
One of the things I don’t get about the panic over phones is that we’re panicking over phones and not what’s done on them. Why buy a kindle, when you can use any of the many ereader apps out there? If the concern is discipline while on you phone there’s also ways to lock yourself out of apps and websites after X amount of time on them.
Even if many of us old school computer users don’t quite like it phones are the general purpose computing devices for many people. There’s no reason to worry about the generic time spent using them.
Yea that’s totally fair. I’d actually second the kindle/ereader recommendation if the goal is to read more. One awesome feature of the kindle is that it auto syncs progress so you can use your kindle for most of your reading but if you’re away without it the kindle app on your phone will know what page you’re on.
> there’s also ways to lock yourself out of apps and websites after X amount of time on them
I've tried this, but it feels like a big administrative burden, having to think about how long each app should be, when it should be available etc, similar to the feelings I had on Facebook about bureaucratising friendships (who's an "acquiantance", who's a "close friend").
It feels like you have to make so many explicit decisions for digital stuff that was much more fluid before - don't want X to come to a party? Don't phone them.
I dunno. What’s better about a book (at least, a fiction book read for fun) than HackerNews, for example? I mean, I don’t think either is particularly good but I’m not sure how the book would be an upgrade.
I've tried a lot of things like app blockers and so on, and what has given me the best sense of control is simply removing the phone from my physical presence. I.e. turned off or silent in my bag or in another room. And being intentional about when I bring it out. This has given me a huge productivity boost. (I commented about that boost a while back and some guy actually accused me of lying because he found it so unbelievable!)
I still average about 2 hours a day on it. Most of this happens when I'm eating or using the bathroom and would not be productive time anyway. By the metric of this article that's still 1 month of my life per year. Not sure I see this as a huge problem, if I did, I could cut it down even further.
Maybe we should be more concerned about a related figure - the time we spend consuming digital media, which is now pushing 8 hours per day. The phone is a very pervasive vessel for that but when I cut back phone use I found that media consumption on other devices started creeping up so I'm trying to work out ways to avoid that. I think our lives are richer if we create more and consume less.
Nah I think twitter is among the worst. It doesn't actually make you more informed of anything actionable you'd actually benefit from being aware of. It just broadcasts the most shallow rage-bait possible, from a constantly updating stream of pointless arguments and mentally ill strangers.
It honestly decreased my baseline well-being far faster than anything else, even when I'd just try to follow the most insular network of math academics and art people. At least tiktok was vaguely more positive and the occasional gnome footage or afghan giant conspiracy was fun.
This Christmas, a relative's boyfriend was on his phone literally 90% of the time we were together. Even when we were opening presents. So I started talking to him. He kept looking at his phone but eventually he put it down. I just needed to get him talking about Lord of the Rings and it was over.
Those of us who do not use phones at all we need to engage with these people who are suffering the worst. We need to show them that loneliness can be alleviated by other means.
Please do not say this is all harmless either. The material they are looking at, and behavioral programing they are being subjecting to, is not harmless. I grew up watching old school TV, and I was never able to see anything remotely close to what an 11 year old can see today.
Something new that I've seen is men standing at urinals on their phones. It really blew my mind that they can't even take a pee that lasts maybe 20-30 seconds without looking at their phone. What could you possibly do in that time in that position?
I do it. Typically just checking a few message alerts, or finishing a news story, or starting a podcast download. It's less disruptive than checking those items in front of someone else, when you should be giving the other person attention.
Do I have to? No. Do I always do it? No. But just today at the gym, I used the 30 seconds or so there to start downloading a podcast to listen to during my workout. Every button click takes a couple seconds, pause, wait, etc... Why not stack those non-productive times together?
I guess, but doesn't that start to feel like the tyranny of productivity? If it doesn't take long while you're the urinal it doesn't take long just afterwards too, and then you can enjoy the feeling of having a pee! (Perhaps there's a blogpost in "Mindful pissing"...)
After that, I need to be using my hands more - washing them, putting stuff in the locker, tying shoes, etc. Standing there for 20-30-40 seconds is one of the few times one or both hands are free and my brain can go do something else for a bit (read, get a podcast, etc).
I feel like people have a need to “fill the void” with productivity. It’s like they can’t be alone with their thoughts anymore.
I feel like this is becoming a more serious problem than people realize.
I also feel like people can’t do tasks quietly, without having a feed of music or podcasts. I see it with my wife and my kids. None of them are able to carry out activities without some audio being steamed to their brain. Most people can’t even work without headphones on, even in a quiet environment.
Most people will say “what’s wrong with that?”, but I feel this is a symptom of some underlying anxiety, we just don’t realize it.
I need the audio streamed in - usually white/brown noise. This blocks out distractions. 30 years ago perhaps people could do 'knowledge work' without these, but most of the people I know who did knowledge work years ago - lawyers, accountants, architects - they all had private offices they could go do heads down work in. 'Open office' plans seem to have ruined this. I spent years in the late 90s in open office plans trying to build web applications, sandwiched in between ad sales and project management people, constantly on the phone. Worked fine for them - they were often on phone calls. But those phone calls bled over in to my ears - unwelcomed - and created constant interruptions and context switching.
The 'underlying anxiety' might be because there's far more noise in our environments - inside and outside - than there was a couple generations ago? More traffic, bigger cars, leaf blowers, lawn mowers, more airplanes. More people in smaller open plan offices... None of these are really under my control. Wearing head phones to block that stuff out is under my control.
Listening to actual music with words or podcasts while trying to work would, in fact, be worse for me, and I think for many folks. Unsure how people do that, but white noise blocking does help many folks.
Probably 30 years ago, a Washington Post columnist (a recent arrival from Philadelphia) thought it an illustration of Washington compulsiveness that he had seen a man at the gym take his pager into the showers. That I should say makes less sense, given the slight probability of saving half of one's shower duration in returning a call.
Let me add that I am not one of the multi-tasking multi-monthers: the phone says that I had 32 minutes/day of screen time last week.
I just finished reading Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” It is a good read, especially for parents.
I think there's a lot that's wrong with phones, but I can't help but think of scares from decades past that were laser-focused on inducing parental panic, but turned out not to be as harmful as initially reported: the fears of Rock 'n Roll making teenagers out-of-control lascivious horndogs, the Satanic panic, DARE/war on drugs, etc.
Many phone apps have completely abused the notification system, transforming it into a slot machine of dopamine. Between this and "engagement" being metric number one in developing mobile apps, this outcome isn't surprising.
(I am militant about what gets to notify me. Most of my apps are denied notification permissions. Any apps that begin to spam me get denied as well. I also do inbox zero, so any emails I get are either dealt with in the moment or are treated as a todo for later.)
Ironically, as much as I loved smartphones and the iPhone in their prime, I'm thinking about going back to separate simple devices.
I've always been a "simple" phone user (email, reading stuff online, camera/video, no social media, no games,no YouTube). Phones and tablets are becoming even more consumption focused, and it's clear that market forces are leaving people like me in the dust. (I'm typing this on an eInk Boox Go that I rooted, debloated and firewalled; sucks for "typical phone shit" but is amazing for reading.)
good luck trying to find a simple device - it is not possible anymore. and with the proliferation of eSIMs it is now hard to go buy a dumb-phone on eBay and get it “connected” to some carrier. I tried to resurrect my old RAZR and had a helluva time trying to get it working. your best bet is a smartphone with everything removed from it except messages and phone apps and the shutting everything off except cellular
Small phones are all but extinct (unless you count the iPhone 13 mini that Apple discontinued, which I had and I absolutely LOVED). Again, market forces leave us simple folk behind. I'm broken for NOT wanting a 6.3" slate that can hit 2000 lumens on a bright day that requires a case because the titanium is too slippery.
What I would LOVE is a small Kaleido eInk phone that runs Android on a mid-tier SoC. Rooted and debloated; no assistants or AI (like you described).
I would use eLauncher to make a really simple launcher with the names of the apps I use (like I do on my BOOX) and Tasker to automate common tasks. (I want a simple interface so I can move around quickly and move on with my lifem, but have no problem with complexity so long as it's within my control. I'm a heavy user of Shortcuts, as terrible as that software is.) Since I already carry a fanny pack around everyday, I would just use a small mirror less SLR for point and shoot stuff like the Canon EOS M300.
Our phones replaced numerous different devices. All the time we used to spend watching TV, listening to music, reading books, getting the news, playing games, talking to friends is now done on our phones.
My theoretical strategy for reducing smartphone time includes substituting it with a smartwatch. I.e., have my phone in the vicinity (as opposed to on my person) and only have the smartwatch equipped. At night, keep the smartphone away from my bed and only have the smartwatch and Bluetooth earbuds next to me.
As a Pixel user, the first attempt in early 2023 was rough as the 1st gen Pixel watch had growing pains. I gave up on it but have recently started looking into this approach again. Hopefully the latest updates to WearOS will show an improvement, especially in battery life.
I would have considered switching to Apple, but from what I've seen, there is no support for responding to Signal messages via the iWatch. That's critical functionality for me.
If the technology pans out and the strategy is a success, then my comments here on HN will be significantly less in 2025.
I just got a Pixel Watch 3 a few weeks ago and have been pretty impressed with the battery life so far. I'm getting 36-48 hours with always on display turned on. The Apple Watch that it replaced barely lasted 12 hours.
If this was a legit study I'd expect an arXiv link or similar instead. Looking at their methodology, it's vague enough to be interpreted as 'ok' but really I'd expect ALOT more information on their sample distributions, weighting done to that sample for comparison, etc. It skimps on all the actual details. Seems like clickbaity junk to me, but I'm open to the idea that there is meaningful studies to be had here on this subject, or that this was done in a proper way but was communicated poorly.
Reviews.org surveyed 1,000 Americans 18 years and older with a +/- 4% margin of error and a confidence level of 95%. The survey results were weighted to reflect characteristics of the United States population using available data from the US census. Respondents were asked to refer to their phone’s screen time report to determine the average number of times per day they check their phones, in addition to how much time in total they spend on their phones per day.
As much as I'd like to support the overall sentiment of the article, or at least of the part that I actually read, the stats just don't pass the smell test.
> If you’re like one of the Americans surveyed by Reviews.org, this is one of 205 times today that you’ll be checking the device in your hand. To spare you opening the calculator app, that’s about once every five minutes you are awake or two and a half full months out of your year.
That just can't be true. First of all, it assumes 1 minute of spending at the phone, every of those 1 times per 5 minutes. Totalling 5 hours a day. On average for everybody. I'm sure there are some outliers like that, but there are tons of people out there for whom there is no way they would get even close.
To top it off, their sample was surely neither random nor representative. Of course you get heavily biased data if you are asking a tech crowd.
I stopped reading at this point. Garbage in, garbage put, i.e. whatever conclusion they were eventually drawing was not based on actual facts.
The watch can't have a cellular plan of its own. It must be associated with the plan that's on the iPhone it's tethered to. If you use a dummy iPhone for this purpose, then the SIM for your primary number needs to be on that phone.
Despite other comments that are somewhat aghast at the idea of dictating a margin of error, the threshold at which you consider something significant IS arbitrary. The 'p' value of 0.05, the inverse of the '95%'confidence interval, is commonly chosen by researchers but is by no means the only choice you could make. Some research uses less stringent or more stringent thresholds, depending on the nature of the research and the assumptions of the researchers.
What do you mean by "dictate" or now"? Every survey always states the margin of error like that. Its a function of the sample size and introductory stats to get that number.
I somehow doubt that they actually randomly sampled from a representative population. It's more likely that they use an online audience who likes to fill out review forms.
I guess things went wrong with my sarcastic remark on being able to "dictate" the margin of error.
With respect to statistics and online surveys, I'm not even skeptical but outright cynical. Calculating the margin of error with a standard deviation only works for representative samples, which reviews.org most likely is not able to provide. Adding these percentages and terms to the report gives a false sense of reliability, which annoys me.
Still, I should probably not have resorted to sarcasm. My apologies for that.
I wouldn't say it's all trash, but I find TV like this. I loathe most of it finding it pretty vacuous. I am still drawn to it.
We had a defining realisation last year when we found a Youtube channel where a guy cleans carpets. I found it more nutritionally satisfying than 99% of programming on the TV. It was and is totally eye-opening. I have a similar draw to nature. I can watch wild animals doing their thing. And get some entertainment with curtain twitching. I think it's just that inherent human thing - watching.
I do like reading. The minutes I do this are ever dwindling through competition for my idle brain.
I just opened screen time in my iPhone, checked devices for phone, selected weekly tab, and flipped back last few weeks to get average of 42 hours per week, with 168 hours in a week puts me at 25% for December.
I try to get around with just an apple watch. The most frustrating part is needing (or worrying I'll need) to take an uber or a lyft (my main modes of transport). They discontinued their watch apps and their api's are very locked down.
In fact if it's not a voice call it should probably be excluded, lol. I feel like semantically right now being on your phone refers to looking at the screen actively, even though that's very much not the origin of the phrase. Yet, nowadays the meaning of the phrase probably excluded when you're holding it to the side of your head, as you're not looking at a screen at all.
Rather than calling to question their methods it’s Sunday so we all just got told our screen time for the week what do you guys got?
~4h a day which is 2 months..
~1h a day, so half a month. I use my laptop far more often, so naturally it's a lot different than a phone in when I use it and for how long, and of course what I'm using it for. On most days my overall screen time (phones, computers, and all) is probably comparable to others', so it's not really too much to be proud of on my end. I like to think I still have an advantage.
In traffic, this number approaches 90%. I see it through every window as I cycle past the queues.
The funniest is when the lights go green and a large gap opens up in the traffic because someone has got sucked into their phone and forgot they were driving. Remarkably common.
I'm reading a lot of comments here that are defensive about their phone usage. I think that misses the point. It's fine to chase productivity (real or otherwise) and we can all rationalize how we burn our spare minutes: decompression, etc.
Being able to be bored and have those creative thoughts enter is for sure a useful thing. I'd argue the more important thing is being comfortable with silence/boredom. Being able to sit in a meeting and let awkward silence stew; or make a sales pitch and quietly let the gears turn, is a super power. If you're the one at the table better with silence, you have an inherent advantage.
Context: I'd put myself in the very low phone usage category but I still use my phone far more than I'd like. I pretty much just check email/text, HN, a bit of news, and occasionally doom scroll reddit. I'm also a developer turned exec/sales guy.
That's like 5 hours per day? Doesn't seem the case for me even I consider myself pretty addicted. I don't even have 5 hours of free time in total, including poop and food time. But maybe average Americans do spend more time then me.
Using a smartphone isn't "computing" in the same sense as programmers using a laptop for programming. Neither is it in the same sense as writers using a laptop for writing.
Consider: Some devices are consume-only (e.g. Kindle, original iPod); some devices are consume-heavy, create-light (modern iPhone or Android smartphones); some devices are consume-light, create-heavy (modern programmer laptops); some devices are create-only (e.g. typewriters, or modern alternative experiments like Freewrite).
If you only use the consume-only or consume-heavy devices, you're not "computing" in any creative sense. In the same way, you usually aren't writing in any creative sense if you only carry books (or a Kindle) in your backpack and read all day.
Most people spend weeks or months per year "consuming content with a computing device" while not creating a single thing with that computing device. Some of that is communication, like text and group chat messages. But quite a lot of it is short-form content that is passively delivered to eyeballs and ears.
Either way, this isn't creative computing. It may not even be deep content consumption. The typical and popular content doesn't resemble books. There is a widespread and population-wide decline in deep reading as short-form video rises and app notifications flit users from smartphone app to app. You have to be very intentional to even wrangle a smartphone media diet that leaves the space for deep reading. To escape the trap, most find the need to put the smartphone away and pick up a device with different affordances (a Kindle to deep read, or a laptop to code or write, as examples).
Even if you manage to escape attention farming, due to the design of smartphones as omnipresent devices (on-screen keyboards, touch screens, cellular data plans), creativity will still usually be out of the question for the vast majority of users. For that, you usually need to simply put the smartphone away. I personally find that to do creative computing I need a device with a physical keyboard, a mouse-equivalent, and, optionally: a speedy wired/wifi connection and a large monitor on a comfortable desk in a quiet workspace.
