Anecdotally, switching back from an iPhone to a flip phone has been very revealing for me. I don't know about all the generalizations made in this piece, or decrying overall social change. And I expect I am an outlier as being far more distractible than most.
But I do think it's worth spending a week living your normal life but without a smartphone to see how you personally are different. Don't just go on vacation and "disconnect". Try living your life but disconnected. It's interesting. You have to get places earlier. You have to make plans that have pre-arranged fallback plans. You have to have something to think about to not get bored. (Or, at least, I do.)
Part of the draw of smartphones is that many of us are terrified of boredom. I view boredom as an asset: it's when I get to introspect.
My happy medium is to carry my smartphone (I need it for work) but I turn off many notifications that are not essential, or make them more discrete (eg. in notification center but no sounds).
People also feel very guilty for not filling every waking moment of their time with some task. I can spend a weekend doing nearly nothing and not feel an ounce of guilt. I won't do it every weekend, my house would fall into disrepair. But sometimes you just need that weekend off.
Indeed. This is what learning Buddhist and Stoic philosophy has taught me.
Doing absolutely nothing but staring at at river for hours on end reconnects me with the world. Hearing and feeling the world around you without distraction is grounding. Coming back to the electronic world after that really shows you how crazy and hectic a world we live in right now.
Worse how? When I'm "on the sauce", I pull out my phone to idly check Facebook, Instagram etc for the 3 minutes I have on BART or 2 minutes while waiting at the grocery store. I don't get the sense those make my life any better. If I didn't check then, the same stories would be surfaced later when I'm at home. If I know I'll have more than 10 minutes downtime (like riding the bus) I'll just bring a book/Kindle.
I've also noticed that when I'm not constantly looking at my phone, I notice more interesting things around me.
Why not just uninstall those social apps? There are lots of things that can be done on a phone without wasting it on social media. Things like language learning, listening to a podcast and the like.
At the rate FB is going, I can see an uptick in people not willing to install messenger, etc. either moving away from social apps or finding other alternatives. For me, if they force the change on iOS, I will definitely be cutting back.
Honestly, most people don't care. The only reason my SO doesn't use the Facebook app is because it kills her battery too much to be able to use Instagram later on in the day...
As of today, I can't read messages on m.facebook.com any longer - instant redirect to play store/messenger, no way to access messages after going back.
> I've also noticed that when I'm not constantly looking at my phone, I notice more interesting things around me.
This is so true. It boggles my mind how much cellphones have made it normal to just sit and stare into a screen while there are so many things going around in the real world around one.
I usually enjoy what I check on my phone. A book or a Kindle is a pain to carry compared to reading the same thing on my phone (which I do do, via the Kindle app).
That's how I imagine it would be for me. I don't use social media on my phone at all, it's either used for communicating (voice or IM), or I'm using it to read an article or comments here (but I very rarely reply using it. It's frustrating at best). I view my checking of HN on my phone as distinctly different than social media, because I'm not checking because the feed is engaging, I'm checking looking to some specific engaging item to them settle into and digest.
I have a smartphone, but no mobile data plan. I am always reachable on the phone (mostly because some people I care about really disliked that they could sometime not get in touch with me) but a lot of the time if I'm out, I don't have the internet. Being connected all the time makes me a into a person I don't like as much as the one I am when I can actually disconnect a bit every day. There a "zone", or maybe a rhythm, I get to when I'm walking outside where I can focus on myself or in whatever I'm working on. It's much harder to get here when I know I could be on the internet instead.
It's not the middle ground I'd chose in an ideal world - I'd rather not have a smartphone, maybe not even a dumb phone, but I develop for mobile a lot.
The reason I like small smartphones (3.5-4 inch screens) is similar to this. It's a middle ground.
I won't argue that a 6.5" screen is great for doing stuff on, and you can more comfortably do more stuff on it than on a hand sized device. I'm just not sure why you'd want to.
I think this goes the other way: the use case is still so compelling that you try to do on the 3.5" phone what you would normally do on the 6" phone, and then just get frustrated by the subpar UX.
I just did a road trip through southern Utah with the explicit goal of not using any turn-by-turn navigation. It requires a little more up front planning, but if you reset your trip odometer at each major turn, it's just as easy as following navigation. It also felt good to not be dependent on the navigation.
This is true in the countryside, but in populous regions, smartphones with their traffic data and ability to reveal sneaky routes stand to really enhance the road adventuring experience.
I imagine the roads in southern Utah are somewhat different to the UK. The best comparison here, whether urban or in the countryside, would be a plate of spaghetti.
But I do think it's worth spending a week living your normal life but without a smartphone to see how you personally are different. Don't just go on vacation and "disconnect". Try living your life but disconnected. It's interesting. You have to get places earlier. You have to make plans that have pre-arranged fallback plans. You have to have something to think about to not get bored. (Or, at least, I do.)