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Comment by njitbew | Hacker News Reader

My sister’s former boyfriend used to carry a phone without a SIM. His mom ended up calling my sister or our landline to check up on her son. It was annoying AF.

Feel free to live off the grid, but please make sure you don’t leech off of those around you.

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This is really hard to do. I don't live off the grid by any means - there's a million ways to contact me, e.g. text message, calling, Signal messages, emails, etc. However, I don't use Whatsapp in a country where the vast majority of people does.

I'm fine with missing things if people don't feel like using any of the methods I have to get in touch with me. However, instead of either not bothering or using one of the communication channels we have in common, people tend to ask my partner to relay messages to me. So short of starting to use Whatsapp (which I'd really rather not do, and which requires installing a different OS on my phone - and possibly get a data subscription as well), the burden is on my partner to either tell them to contact me directly, or to relay the messages.

Any good tips for others ways of dealing with this are very welcome.

It's a social cost question, I guess.

Your signal: I don't care enough about our communication to use WhatsApp, because of reasons that are obscure to 99% outside a tech community. Similarly, they don't bother to reach out to you on other communication channels, because they don't bother enough.

The important thing to understand is, from your communication partners point of view, you create a burden without reason, so they work around it in (their) most effective way.

I've been there and didn't support this or that messenger. By now I think, the only way to solve those kind of issues are i) sane laws that regulate privacy and communication security, and ii) trends that create a need for a new communication style - private, secure, and human (like, calling from time to time, find a better solution to ghosting, things like that).

I'm convinced that we need positive incentives for that, instead of creating artificial burden.

Oh yes, I wasn't trying to imply that any party was at fault here - just that the outcome is unfortunate.

This isn't just limited to communications tools. For example, people might have dietary restrictions for non-health reasons (religion, environmental impact, etc) that others do not share or even understand. I don't mind accommodating those (to a limit) e.g. when picking a place to eat, but it is a burden placed on people around them. That's just the way it is, I guess, and I suppose all people can do is try to minimise the burden, and to be accepting of those placed upon you.

One needs to work on explaining the reasoning to the others in one's group, and providing tech support so they too can embrace the freedoms one enjoys

> The important thing to understand is, from your communication partners point of view, you create a burden without reason

They create a burden without reason.

I think that both sides create a burden. In my opinion, the difference is that, it is a one-to-many kind of matching scenario. One person (the one opting out of using the preferred messaging method of all their friends) creates a burden to many people, while all those people create a burden just for one person.

If it helps, you can try visualizing it as a fully connected graph that initially has equally weighted edges between all nodes. But then the weight of all edges connected to one specific node goes up by multiple factors. That node loses out much more than all the other nodes.

> I think that both sides create a burden. In my opinion, the difference is that, it is a one-to-many kind of matching scenario. One person (the one opting out of using the preferred messaging method of all their friends) creates a burden to many people, while all those people create a burden just for one person.

I personally rather observe various groups in society with very different kinds of preferences.

He was making a point about empathy that you seemed to miss.

Perhaps I missed this point - but if the empathy point exists, the other side did not show empathy, either.

You're creating extra cognitive load for people. If there's one thing behavioral psychology has reliably taught us (in spite of the repeatability issues on a few findings), it is that our brains are wired to avoid cognitive load as much as possible.

The cost of putting cognitive load is many people will choose not to pay it and that cost is instead borne by your partner

Would you walk through wet mud if a grass or concrete alternative path is available? That's pretty much what your contacts are doing

Another metaphor: if someone decided not to pave their driveway, because they don't want it to get so hot in the summer, would you tell them, hey I'm not going to visit you until you pave your driveway?

In practical life, people who chose to live in less accessible places actually don't get visited much except by very close relatives & friends (I can think of 4-5 of my relatives like this). So probably proves the point :-)

Depending on how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole, you could bridge WhatsApp to Matrix using the web client and whatsapp running in an emulator - https://www.matrix.org/blog/2019/02/26/bridging-matrix-with-...

Not a solution for even most people unless you're really into Matrix and running your own servers though. (I bridge WhatsApp, but use a physical phone to do so)

And then take it a step further with something building on matterbridge[1], which has libs to "bridge between mattermost, IRC, gitter, xmpp, slack, discord, telegram, rocketchat, steam, twitch, ssh-chat, zulip, whatsapp, keybase, matrix and more".

[1] https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

> His mom ended up calling my sister or our landline to check up on her son. It was annoying AF.

What you call "annoying AF" was reality for many many years, and yet people were not constantly annoyed..

I remember plenty of annoyance in those days! My friends' families being on the phone for hours and making it impossible to reach them. Having to get off the internet so someone could make a call. Having whole systems to make sure the people got important messages in a timely manner whenever they got home. Having every call need to take place in a central room of your house where you were usually in the way of other people. Having to make sure someone was near the phone/in the house if you were expecting a call.

It's not a constant annoyance, but if anything there were more annoyances in the 90's around phones than having people call me to speak to my sibling.

Things are not annoying when you know there is no other more practical solution.

>What you call "annoying AF" was reality for many many years and yet people were not constantly annoyed..

It might have been a reality pre-00s ─ today if you want to play out any Jason Bourne fantasies, they will not be considered just annoying but suspicious, as your number gets intrinsically linked with somebody else's activities.

It was a different time. The cost of communication is near zero, so if you can’t be bothered, people get annoyed.

I would say this demonstrates that the cost of communication is not near zero.

I just don't think most "people get annoyed" by such things, definitely not "annoyed AF", besides some very impatient people who'll always find this or other reasons to be annoyed.

> 'The cost of communication is near zero'

You mean the 'cost of interrupting other people while they are in the middle of living their lives' is near zero. On the other side of the coin, the cost of being constantly interrupted by beeping, buzzing, ringing, and jingling of every asshole in the county who calls/text on a moment's whim, and gets annoyed/offended when I don't instantly respond, is not zero.

Likewise, the cost of being constantly surveilled by intelligence agencies and evil corporations is definitely nowhere near zero.

I live completely off the grid. Far from giving a fuck about how offended/inconvenienced others are by my lifestyle, I purposely disconnected from all of those people. Life for me is much better now.

Yea that's by definition not "off the grid" anyway.

It's like German getting out of nuclear power generation but then buying nuclear power from Czech and France, where power plans are literally at the German border.

> make sure you don’t leech off of those around you

I think that's a toxic attitude. Picking up the phone for someone else every now and then is really not a big of a hassle. Obviously I don't know the whole situation, but in general I do think that one should be ready to do such minor favors for another human being without calling them a leech.

I know someone who lives off the grid like this, they are also too cheap to ever pay their share of airbnb lodging (I will stay with someone else, oh you got it I come stay with you), too cheap to give a bit of scotch tape for taping up a box when clearing out their dead mothers house because they bought that tape for 2 euro, or finally too cheap to buy their own chewing gum when they have had all their other expenses paid (flight, lodging) to go to a wedding in Kiruna Sweden.

on edit: changed some incorrect uses of to to correct usage of too.

Sounds like they're just cheap; and the off the grid part doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it.

exactly the original comment was make sure not to leach, and someone else thought it was a toxic attitude, and I don't think it is too toxic an attitude - because there are people who are leaches after all.

But there's being a leach, and there's trying to cope given a moral-philosophical decision not to use a phone. And you're not distinguishing them.

Yes but there was the original comment which suggested that it was not nice to suggest not to be a leach, because that was a little bit much to assume, so I provided a counterexample where that was a reasonable assumption.

Normally I would not expect, given that thread of conversation, that I should have to explain that my example was not meant to be a universal condemnation of anyone not having a sim card in their phone.

They aren't mutually exclusive.

Especially because it wasn't that long ago (by my standards) that not everyone had a personal phone in their pocket.

In fact, only 33 years ago my parents had to call the neighbours 3 doors further to call my aunt to notify her (and my grandparents who happen to be visiting her) of my birth.

Although, I admit as someone with a speech impediment, I absolutely loath using the phone. But it's a necessity even as a software developer. But nothing as annoying as having to pick up the phone, only to hear that it was (effectively) the wrong number and they needed someone across the room...

Or when you (effectively) work night shift, and some #$%#$%# telemarketer decides to call at 9am.

I feel you. After my last phone broke I decided to get a dual SIM phone. I set up my phone to block all calls on the first SIM from any unknown number. I got a cheap second pre-paid SIM and essentially made it my 'business number'. On my android I then have it set up to 'Do not disturb' mode during sleeping hours. The transition was a bit more cumbersome than I anticipated, but after it was all said and done, I couldn't be happier with the outcome. My friends and family can get a hold of me whenever, and I no longer get calls from business/employer/etc unless it is in the allocated times I want.

Or a friend forgeting about jetlag ringing you on a sunday morning when you were sleeping happily (just happened to me this morning :-D )

That's easy to fix though - I am putting my phone to do-not-disturb (or even airplane) mode when I go to sleep every day and I honestly don't see any disadvantages of doing that. If somebody calls me when I'm sleeping, I will react when I wake up. I don't think giving the people on the whole world the ability to wake me up whenever they want to is justified in any way.

Well I kow I should do that, but perhaps because I'm near my fifties (so lived a lot without a mobile phone), I always fail to remember to active it back when I wake up.

My wife (who is younger than me, as in 16y younger) do that too and have no problem.

For me, if I do it, I sure remember, but 2 or 3 days later :-D

I have been on do not disturb mode 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the last few years. It’s actually amazing. It has allowed me to use my phone on my own terms, when I choose to, not on someone else’s terms when they want me to.

I haven't gone that far because unwanted phone calls aren't a problem for me, so I've just turned off most notifications and it's been great. Email is a much better tool when you don't have notifications on, I'm much better at paying bills because I check a couple of times a day when it's also convenient to pay them, with notifications on I'll swipe away and forget. Same goes for things I actually want to read, I'll read them properly now instead of a quick skim at an inopportune time.

Google has been awful at respecting my decision though, they'll keep enabling various news notifications and the have a very different opinion on "breaking news" than I do, I think the last one was for some Hollywood awards show. If there really is some breaking news I need to be interrupted for then the government emergency SMS service should suffice.

I first read this on HN: app notifications should really be called app interruptions. It really changes how things should be viewed.

Sounds like automating it to enable sounds at some hour when you usually are already awake may be an easy solution.

Sure, it is not a hassle for you but it can be a huge hassle for other people.

The example doesn't quite seem to connect to the moral. Maybe he didn't want his mom to call him. If a third party calls you to inquire about me, why is that my problem?

Because you care about people around you and don’t want them to suffer because of indirect consequences of your actions...?

Some time ago when mobile phones were very expensive one of my relatives carried SIM without phone.

We’ve recently got rid of roommates like that. They owned nothing and borrowed everything. Plus their ideology was that every corporation conspires to poison people. And they were heavy on drugs. And smelled pretty bad.

Sharing is great when you put in something material in, not just try to be bubbly person.

He could've just used a SIP client (plus e.g. WLAN, which does not even have to be on 24/7), and being the one who initializes the call. If he does it on a sane time, then he'll reach contact.

You presume that he wanted his parents to be able to contact him.

I don't. My use-case, where you have a SIP client and WLAN, allows for you to be disconnected, and only connect when you feel like it. It is akin to Invisible mode on ICQ; and that was perfect for people who wanted to lay low.

But why go to the trouble of that at all if you only want to make outgoing calls, and without giving people you call a return number to reach you.

People need your return number for voicemail (if you decide to opt into that; personally, I don't), and to recognize who's calling them. I know enough people who don't accept a call from a "private number" or "unknown number".

I have my smartphone 24/7 on DND. I only feel/hear my vibration motor if I get a call. Sometimes, this causes me to miss phone calls, but in general it works well enough. It also makes me one of these people who isn't annoying in public transport or on yoga class.

That's on his mother not him. Maybe he did this specifically to try to have some breathing room from his mother?

You don't seem too impressed by those that make the choice to live off the grid...

> You don't seem too impressed by those that make the choice to live off the grid...

I don't think the author of that post is living "off the grid" at all.

I am surprised nobody noticed that he mentioned he uses OKCupid.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/grindr-and-okcupid-sel...

It's great if you choose to do that. But if everyone else has to compensate to deal with your choices, like parents can't reach the person so they call their friends, you aren't really living off the grid.

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