Taking Flight Without a Smart Phone

Peak HN: "I use my phone too much" -> "Life is inconvenient without my phone" -> "I must design my own phone from scratch"

<i>&gt; I periodically check my phone for the next 5-10 minutes. The driver arrives right on time. I would have had no issue just waiting there.</i><p>You had no issue <i>this time</i>. If the driver cancelled you&#x27;d still be standing outside and you&#x27;d miss your flight. Unlike public transportation, there isn&#x27;t another arriving in 30 minutes.

A very honest account by Adam that captures the anxiety of addiction, especially those moments of panic that cause us to fall back into smartphone dependency or use &quot;just this last one time&quot;.<p>This article will resonate with everyone working to take back tech in their lives, but succumbing to the (false but emotionally very real) sense of isolation and disconnection from the so-called &quot;expectations of society&quot;.<p>In Digital Vegan [1] I tried to re-word and make more accessible ideas from a book that I found life changing. It is called &quot;Missing Out&quot; by Adam Phillips [2]. It is written in quite dense, psychotherapeutic language that gives me pause to recommend it.<p>If there&#x27;s just one idea I&#x27;d love to get across it is within the subtitle &quot;In Praise of the Unlived Life&quot;, which is not about Stoicism, abstinence as a virtue or any shallow &quot;self-help&quot; themes. It&#x27;s deeper and darker, and about dealing with the loss that comes with being a real (true to yourself) person.<p>People talk about FOMO, a &quot;fear of missing out&quot;. And of a fear of being &quot;left behind&quot;. But if the person next to you has their head blown off by a bullet, or everyone else is swept away by a tsunami wave, being the one who &quot;missed out&quot; or was &quot;left behind&quot; feels like survivor guilt. It means dealing with a kind of grief about the life you so nearly had, or chose to walk away from. The fact that you got the better deal, even though you know that to be profoundly true, sometimes still doesn&#x27;t feel like enough. Cult escapees feel this too.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;13369538-missing-out" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;13369538-missing-out</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;digitalvegan.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;digitalvegan.net</a>

I empathise. You can get a quick win just by using a Focus mode. Just make sure that it hides notifications on the home screen, and I’ve set it to dim the home screen so that it’s visually different.<p>The habit of walking past your phone – which, needless to say should not just be in your pocket all day – and hitting the screen to see what’s come in is neatly broken. Because now you can’t see what’s come in, you have to stop, bend over, unlock it. Now that’s an actual <i>thing</i> that you have to do.<p>That’s enough to cause my brain to say, no, you don’t need to do that. And I’ve found the needless-check-of-notifications cycle breaks itself quite naturally.<p>This assumes you can just leave your phone somewhere. I’m working from home so it can just sit in a corner of the office. Bonus points if you hide it in a drawer.<p>Edit: also, this lets anyone messaging you know that you’re in a DND-like mode. When I see this, I think, okay cool, don’t expect an immediate response. All good.

I can relate. I spent some time using a simple feature phone. It was impressive how quickly and effectively I could slow down. I felt more present, read more, my thinking become clearer. But there were annoyances: my country is in a similar path as China&#x27;s in terms of transfering payments and internet banking to smartphones; restaurants are more and more adopting QR codes to access the menu as a very inconvenient, unreadable menu in PDF; certain commercial and government services got very hard to get unless you&#x27;re using a smartphone using their apps; among others. So I recurred to a midterm: quitted most of my social media and did some habit-changing exercises to interrupt my instincts of getting the phone and wasting too much time in it. It hasn&#x27;t been as effective as my feature phone period, but it&#x27;s been a good compromise.

Fyi, that is the town of Squamish, half way between Vancouver and Whistler. It is a legendary area for flying and probably the most popular rock climbing area in canada. But to call its airport small means this guy doesnt do much general aviation flying. It is at least paved. There are dozens of smaller strips dotted around BC.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;squamish.ca&#x2F;business-and-development&#x2F;real-estate&#x2F;airport&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;squamish.ca&#x2F;business-and-development&#x2F;real-estate&#x2F;air...</a><p>A funny thing about Squamish: even though it is right between Vancouver and Whistler, basically a highway town, if you draw a strait line between it and Alaska you will only cross two roads. Canada is vast. In BC that vastness starts the moment you step out of Vancouver.

It is not the smartphones. It is the user.<p>I am using my phone to control my entire house: Cameras, door alarms, motion detectors, laundry machines, dishwasher, smart door bell, sprinkler system, smart lights, thermostat, smart plugs for fans and other utilities, garage door, solar panel, backyard garden controllers as well as their logging system.<p>This is only for the house, I also check my finances (banking, stocks, credit), all client communications (slack, skype, whatsapp, ringcentral, keepass). My health applications for smart stuff like garmin watch and garmin heart rate, bicycle sensors, weight scale, for work: office apps including microsoft and google. My dog greatly benefits from the apps I use including ordering his food with two taps, his schedules for vet visits with direct vet contact thru the app, training schedules, etc. I can listen to music in my car the way I want thanks to Spotify, or listen to great podcast like this american life directly thru their app. I can identify songs with shazam. The list can go forever.<p>Just no social. I tried not using it for a day after these random people posts; it just made things inconvenient and I missed my schedules. I feel like I am maximizing my tool.<p>Users who are &quot;scrolling&quot; all day can also abuse drugs, alcohol, coffee, or other things. It is the character. Don&#x27;t blame the tool.

A half-measure I&#x27;ve considered is dropping my iPhone in favor of (only) a cellular Apple Watch. This would allow me to call Uber, check my email, and do most of the other things expected by modern society, but harder to loose hours to the device.

The user should operate the phone, not the other way around.<p>I have all notifications turned off except incoming voice calls and SMS messages. Anything that comes in via Whatsapp &#x2F; Signal &#x2F; email I will see when I happen to open those applications. I don&#x27;t have many apps and I don&#x27;t allow notifications from them. So I can take a look at Google Maps if I need to, or add something in my todo list, and not be bombarded with messages and events.<p>I do browse news while in public transit, for example, but I&#x27;d be reading something anyway. What matters is that I choose to open and use my phone whenever it&#x27;s convenient&#x2F;sensible for me and not the other way around.<p>I still remember the excitement of dialling into a BBS and seeing there are 10 new messages, then downloading them home and reading them via an offline reader. That excitement is gone if you see everything right away. I still try to create moments where I go through all my messages, and ration those moments so that my life won&#x27;t be ruined because of notifications and I could actually enjoy the &quot;you&#x27;ve got mail&quot; moment when it happens.

It&#x27;s frustrating how very, very large dumbphones are.<p>Dimensions on this device are 131mm x 53mm @ 13.7mm thick ... and that 13.7mm thick is almost comically thick. This is for a device that does a very small subset of what a smartphone does <i>and</i> does not benefit from screen real estate.<p>The tradeoff we <i>should</i> be making is smarts vs. size ... but in this case, you get the lack of a smartphone but also weirdly large and ... comically large in one dimension.<p>If you&#x27;re wondering what should be possible in this product space, look at the MOTO F3 (FONE)[1] which is 16 years old and had dimensions of 114mm &#x2F; 47mm &#x2F; 9mm.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Motorola_Fone" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Motorola_Fone</a>

I bought an iPad recently (4 months ago?) and moved all &quot;content&quot; apps to it from my iPhone, and blocked all news sites on my phone. It&#x27;s not perfect, but it&#x27;s been pretty helpful to train myself to use the &quot;fun&quot; device (which I don&#x27;t have on me when out and about) for fun and to keep the phone as a communicator only

Ironically the OP can just use airplane mode and probably get the same benefits as if they built one from scratch.

I used the Jelly 2 for 6 months <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unihertz.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;jelly-2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unihertz.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;jelly-2</a><p>Highly recommend it for people who want to get a smartphone break. It&#x27;s a &quot;proper&quot; android with maps, google pay and surprisingly all apps run on it. But the small size of the screen (and the keyboard) somehow does not emit dopamine when casual&#x2F;mindless browsing and the urge to check things quickly disappears like if you don&#x27;t have a smartphone in your pocket. Yet it&#x27;s sufficient for all the apps and features if you need them <i>occassionally</i>.<p>I switched back to an iphone after moving to a city where i have to use a smartphone a lot more for uber, food, maps, payments and entertainment for long commutes.

My dad, in his 70s, has never used a smartphone and barely used a computer. I act as his personal assistant, booking flight tickets and managing stuff that comes up along the way, but there’s an increasing assumption that the passenger has a smartphone. At some point, I’m worried that his credit card issuer or an airline is going to block a purchase because I’m using his credit card (with his full knowledge and permission!) in a different country - VPN would just look even sketchier.<p>I’m glad the author mentioned email-only Covid test results - that’s just another thing I’m going to have coordinate with printer-having family near him.<p>My dad really doesn’t want a smartphone, and having seen his peers engrossed with theirs like stereotypical teenagers when I visited his Sunday School class a few years ago, I’m not sorry.

<i>&gt; our current society makes it very difficult to live without a smart phone</i><p>I call baloney. It&#x27;s not a matter of society, it&#x27;s what kind of life style you prefer. I&#x27;ve never owned a mobile phone in my life, and I consider myself a happy part of society.

A phone is just a tiny computer. Everything these days are electronic, so getting by without it is annoying.<p>Although, I think you could disable all notifications and train yourself to not impulsively look.

There is a shockingly large group of us trying to figure this one out. See reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dumbphones community as an example.

did this person just completely *miss the point* of bioshock?