I wonder how many people talking about self-control have a good relationship with their phone? I don't know anyone personally who likes their relationship with their phone.
I've been considering and trying to practice being kinder to myself, my phone, and my relationship with it. I still want to use less of it, but it's now a part of us, and will take time to almost amputate. I want to just stop feeding it, and let it die off slowly, peacefully instead of amputating it with a hacksaw.
Any kind of self-control based on shame seems doomed to be a vicious cycle.
I used to look at my phone all the time when commuting(by MRT), it was meaningless scrolls and short videos so I got bored quickly, but I didn't know what else I could do on my way to work, until I found reading books interesting, I wasn't really a book person ever since I was a kid, but right now it feels good to read books while putting on my favorite music on the MRT
I carry my phone with me just about everywhere. Sometimes in a restaurant I look at it a lot, even when I'm with friends. But in the sum of all things almost all my phone use is predominantly about the GPS and outside of that I look at my phone less than 10 minutes per day. Sometimes 5, sometimes 0.
It's not that I don't understand the fun of reading news, including places like HN, but I just can't get a proper hit on something like a phone so I'm not very tempted. Even typing in a URL is unpleasant on the phone.
I'm mostly happy with my relationship with my phone. Part of it is setting things up so it's not front and center in my life (disabling and/or silencing most notifications and only allowing calls and messaging apps to vibrate) and not really having a lot of "interesting" things on it that are easy to slide into and hard to pull out of (social media, which I've been fully off of for 4 or 5 years, and addictive games).
But yes, there's a component of self-control, too. I could easily pull out my phone and start scrolling Google News, reading alarmist headlines and getting myself wrapped up in them. And sometimes that does happen. But for the most part I just... realize I don't like how I feel when I do it, so I don't do it[0]. If I'm waiting around for something (transit, waiting room, etc.), I'll first see if there's anything else to occupy myself with, even if it's just people-watching or enjoying being outside. If I'm not feeling it, then sure, I might take out my phone and read something in the Kindle app, open messaging apps to find someone to chat with, open the browser and check out HN or a news site I enjoy, etc. And that's fine. The key thing is that I've looked at the world around me and actively decided that I'd rather read something on my phone to pass the time.
I don't think you need to develop this self-control through shame. Think about why you want to stop being on your phone so much. Frame that with respect to how you feel when you're using it. Not the results of the dopamine hits, but how you actually feel. Do you dislike the mindless aspects? Do you dislike all the inflammatory, outrage-inducing stuff that the algorithms throw at you? When you finally do put the phone away, do you lament the time you wasted, and think of other, more productive/useful/joyful things you could have been doing? Don't be ashamed, but do let the actual feelings associated with your phone use wash over you, and if you don't like them, start committing to doing things that don't make you feel that way. I'm not saying it's going to be easy for everyone to do that, but I think it's necessary.
If you can't develop self-control that way, try to leave the phone at home sometimes. Not in the "amputating it with a hacksaw" sense, but in short, easy, low-stakes situation. When you go into your kitchen to have lunch, leave your phone behind. It'll still be there, a couple rooms away, and you can pick it up again after you finish eating. Next try leaving the house without it. Got outside for a 20-minute walk around your neighborhood, without your phone. Next leave the house for longer without it. You know how to get to the grocery store. You've done it a hundred times and don't need your GPS. Write or print your grocery list on a piece of paper, and leave the phone at home. You'll be home in an hour or so, and then you get it back. Realize that there are actually a lot of situations in our lives where we can do this, and give it a try.
I think I'm lucky that I was a child of the 80s and 90s. I grew up without the internet until my teens (and then it was just intermittent dial-up until college), and without a smartphone until I was nearly 30. I got to see the evolution of a lot of this technology, and I believe that allows me to be more mindful about what I do and don't use. I know plenty of zoomers and younger millennials who have had always-on internet in their pockets for most of their lives, certainly for the entirety of their adult lives. It's all they know. And I think it's becoming harder and harder for today's parents to limit or deny screen time, as there can be severe social consequences for the children when that happens.
[0] This is how I got myself off social media. I examined how it made me felt, committed to a month with no access to it, examined how that felt, and realized I was so unhappy scrolling my feeds all the time. I still have the accounts open, but I've deleted all the apps from my phone, signed out on desktop, and disabled all the email notifications they send.
Seems like tilling might be counterproductive long-term then:
> Tilling and plowing are almost synonymous with land cultivation, aren't they? Yet they actually destroy soil structure, create compaction, and kill the very soil biology that's the basis of fertility, like fungal networks and all those earthworms that make the soil nice and squishy.
> According to the Michigan State University Extension, compaction is also a common side effect of tillage – at the soil surface, the plow layer and the subsoil.
> Tilling and plowing are almost synonymous with land cultivation, aren't they? Yet they actually destroy soil structure, create compaction, and kill the very soil biology that's the basis of fertility, like fungal networks and all those earthworms that make the soil nice and squishy.
I read it, missed this too, hmmm'd at your comment, but went back because usually these amateur communities are nerds enough that there's usually a reason behind this kind of thing. :)
"Hmmm" is a great reaction. It made me dig deeper and learn something.
I think it's just phrased unintuitively. "Balance usability against security hoops to jump through" sound better to me. You have to get to the last paragraph of the fifth section of this article before it makes anything resembling that statement. This could have been a paragraph or three.
I very much dislike folks who use their influence to spread this stuff. Precisely because the way social media works, it amplifies into a crescendo of shallow takes and worst emotion. People with influence have a responsibility not to abuse their position. Calling them out on it (the first I've ever done) is not a "crusade".
You replied to many top level comments for a period of time the same period of time with almost the same text. Telling people to disregard this one persons tech content because of software-politics views. Does he not also have the right to call out IBM/Red Hat?
> You replied to many top level comments for a period of time the same period of time with almost the same text.
I've reviewed my comments and this is mostly false. Not sure why you felt you needed to put this one in here.
> Does he not also have the right to call out IBM/Red Hat?
"Calling out" does not mean distorting facts to kickstart a rage-fuelled campaign against the company that offers, to this day, the most to the Linux ecosystem, free of charge, freely licensed.
To wit, he is an influencer, I am not, and should be much more careful with how he wields his influence. That was what I have re-iterated, comment by comment.
Ex-Redhatter that watched stuff go down while defending it till I stopped (much after I left). That's not Redhat anymore, it's IBM.
The lovely RHEL people and CentOS people didn't have a say. We kept hearing and believing that the CentOS stream change was never intended to break CentOS users until they hid the sources.
RHEL is built on open source products, and support is sold. To innovate in open source by coming up with ways to get around GPL (we'll retaliate if you publish our legally publishable sources IIUC) is evil. In direct violation of what every other contributor to linux/GNU/anything GPL ever released their software under.
Disclaimer: I was part of other projects, not this directly, and I had nothing, but respect and love for everyone I worked with. We were in denial then too.
From a particularly sunny day where I was having too much fun waiting for my builds:
More regularly: