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Comment by WalterSear | Hacker News Reader

I'm mystified by the number of people who think that they've solved the fundamental problem by getting rid of their phone: being that unable to control one's immediate impulses, is worthy of attention.

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There are veritable armies of psychologists trying to make this stuff as addictive as they know how to. It the same with advertising, you can consciously try to fight every ad that you are exposed to, but the simplest solution is to cut off the exposure altogether.

You too have immediate impulses that you are unable to control, you too are affected by marketing and advertising.

Almost everybody has impulses they can't control; the rational response is to plan ahead of time to limit the damage they do.

As a child, sure. That's part and parcel of growing up. But I would expect healthy adults to be able to control their impulses when it comes to things like wasting time on their phone. If someone genuinely can't, they're in trouble, and tossing the phone aside is treating the symptom at best.

Impulse control is really hard. But more importantly, it’s a losing battle, even for adults, if you use many popular services today. The reason is simple. Most of these services have highly paid and intelligent folks, whose sole purpose is to use the unprecedented private data they have on you, to hack into deep biological impulses embedded in every human built over millennia, to have you use their service more.

Its frankly not possible and anyone who believes otherwise is likely fooling themselves.

Possible. Not fooling myself. And the ad tech industry doesn't have the technology to control your mind, or steal your soul. Their efforts remain overwhelmingly wasteful and ineffective.

I would reiterate my recommendation of investigating why you feel such lack of self-control.

People are usually able to control their impulses. But controlling an impulse is not free: it consumes energy and willpower; it's a fight. I think people getting rid of their smartphones are making that move: getting rid of the struggle against their impulses so they can use the saved energy in other things.

Sure, but if you're using it only to fill a gap of time because it's there, it's worth evaluating whether you really need all the enrichment smartphones offer.

If you live in this time in history, you will be increasingly inconvenienced without a smart phone.

If you need to give it up to put it down, then your problem isn't smartphones, and you will fill it with something else in short order.

Moreover, you are going to be increasingly at odds with your surroundings: the world is becoming more smartphone-like, not less.

Re : increasingly at odds : I'm not sure this is true. I guess it's hypothetically possible that, say, card payments will be replaced by phone-facilitated payments, but for the foreseeable future, it seems to me that absence of smartphone distraction [provided one has easy access to internet elsewhere] promotes greater, not lesser, connection with one's surroundings. [Except, of course, that 'Minority Report'-type targeted advertising and other commercial tracking functions aren't available[?] to the non-smartphone-user]

You wouldn't tell a smoker not to bother quitting because they'll only pick up some other addiction. There are also very few people who can smoke just a cigarette every few weeks; most people who start smoking become addicted and smoke daily.

Smartphones, or more specifically, the addictive patterns used by pretty much every popular 'app' (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) are hard to defeat for a lot of people. This is an inherent feature of how our brain works, not a personal weakness — despite personal variations. For some not using smartphones (opting for 'dumb' phones instead) may be a very sensible thing to do.

> Moreover, you are going to be increasingly at odds with your surroundings: the world is becoming more smartphone-like, not less.

Everybody used to smoke too. There are plenty of folk who believe that you shouldn't be required to walk around with a computer on your person at all times.

You don't throw out your entire purse because it has cigarettes in it. Throw out the cigarettes and keep the purse. Uninstall the addictive apps and keep the smartphone if you want it for its utility.

A lot of this is contrary to my experience having lived without a cell phone.

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