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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

Now it's not the sundials, it's the smartphones. When was the last time anyone left their home without their phone? (And when you accidentally do, you feel something terrible could happen!)

This "always knowing" (the time, the weather, one's email, the status of one's friends, and so on) must be some mental burden. I think like any other information pusher, it presses against the natural tendency of the mind to wander and to spontaneously create.

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I don't know if it is the phone.

The iPhone was released when I was in high school and before buying one it was very stressful knowing there might be emails I really need to respond to asap, but I can't even know if they exist.

With physical mail it didn't matter since there were big delays and no expectations of fast responses.

I don't think the phone is the issue, but the bad habit of signing up for services that will give you notifications the importance of which is impossible to tell until you've checked (is this a like on a photo or an important message from a relative?)

> ...I was in high school and before buying one it was very stressful knowing there might be emails I really need to respond to asap

that's an interesting anecdote. it was the opposite experience for me. friends and i had yahoo and hotmail emails back then but no one cared about sending emails or replying to them.

yahoo messenger and msn messenger were the reason those were created. i can't recall anyone stressing about it because the person you'd be messaging was with you most of the time...

It's because I wasn't using technology solely to communicate with real life friends, but moderating various forums and running my modchip business.

Of course someone who doesn't use a near-instant messaging service and knows that messages can't arrive anyway wouldn't stress about having it available.

My wife’s family is from Puerto Rico, but we live in Spain. When the hurricane hit and the comms where knocked out, we where not able to talk with them for weeks. One of the things I told my wife was to remember when we where young, and it was normal to not get an update on everyone’s life on a daily basis. It was a bit of a wake up call to me of how used we are to instant comms.

That doesn't fundamentally relate to instant communication. Back then, you'd be worried as well - after all you probably knew a hurricane just landed.

My wife and I just returned from our first cruise. We elected to not purchase any internet and also left our phones in our stateroom about half the time. We wore no watches, and just wandered on the ship, reading, watching the ocean, watching people, sleeping in the sun. It was marvelous!

> stateroom

So what's the difference between "stateroom" and "cabin"?

Alternatively it's part of the human condition.

I can imagine someone complaining about the phases of the moon and how they are hacking up their month in 10,000BC.

>Why do I need there wretched months to know when it will be cold and when hot? The snow on the ground is all the time keeping I need.

I would almost guarantee you that people before the advent of modern time pieces had a much better sense of what the "time" was because they'd have been more reliant on it.

Likewise, there's not much need for developing a strong sense of direction now that we've outsourced that to map-apps.

Indeed, but it's a very, very different human condition from that of 50 years ago. It's quite a drastic change for such a tiny slice of human existence.

I'd wager that never before in human history have people been so inundated with information. It may take some time, but I someday people will study this period and identify significant changes in what people created and the way they created it (in relation to the sudden lack of mental wandering time).

This reminds me of a saying I picked up from some (very much) older engineer: Segal's Law: A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.

I feel like information overload is like this sometimes. Which is probably why I try to reduce information that shows up automatically on my phone...

I pretty much always have my phone with me, but I have almost all notifications disabled. I do use facebook, but I don't have an app for it, just go to the website, so no notifications here. I do have the messenger app, but I do not communicate much on it, so if I get a notification there it's probably important, not some random chat. I do not have my work email on my personal phone. All-in-all I get maybe a dozen notifications a day.

After all, you are right, most of the things are not that important that you should know about them right at the moment they happen. It's just a noise pretending to be useful information.

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