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Comment by oceanghost | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to say this. I hate how small the world has become and how we're supposed to be "reachable" all the time.

Some of my friends will freak out if I don't text back in as little as 5 minutes. A particular needy friend once tried to get me to "promise" that I would always return her texts within 10 minutes.

I said "hard no" explaining that it meant that it meant that I could never watch a movie uninterrupted, read a book, take a nap, etc. Also, Driving. I don't answer texts while I'm driving because I literally got in an accident texting (it was a freak circumstance, but these things do happen).

I have purposefully started training my friends by being erratic with my texts/messages/e-mails.

I have another friend who always calls on his commute home and gets offended when I don't answer. The idea alone that someone is obligated to answer the phone is insane. What if I don't want to spend an hour shooting the shit with you because I'm doing something else?

I miss the days when I could just walk away from contact.

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My ex wife was like that. One reason she's an ex wife. I lost a job due to her once because she phoned the office after I didn't respond to an SMS while I was in a very tough meeting with a client.

I now have my phone on do not disturb 24/7. I will choose when I participate in messaging. I also disable iMessage on my Mac. If someone comes up to me and talks to me, I may not even respond immediately.

I took this to extremes and a couple of weekends back I actually went for a day long solo hike with zero technology with me at all past a torch, map, compass and alcohol stove. I didn't even have any way of telling the time with me. It was invigorating with the obligation to communicate and steal my attention removed. What was most surprising was the removal of a camera and watch. Rather than being focused on recording my journey and keeping to a schedule I was focused on enjoying it. This has led to considerably more vivid memories and a much higher level of satisfaction. A trip I will always remember.

The only reason I take my phone with me on hikes is for the camera. One day I’d like to get a dumbcamera and leave my phone behind more. I don’t take a ton of pictures but do like to have the option.

I admit I use the GPS although I don't typically depend on it. (At least for anything serious.)

I’d like to get to places that I’d want to use gps. Most of my hikes are on pretty clear trails that I know.

I do carry bottom end etrex 10 with me but that’s for tracking route later and updating OSM. I’ve never used it for navigation.

I like to enable airplane mode for that kind of situation. Knowing my phone won't alert me about an email/text/call or whatever is very soothing.

Until you have an emergency and you need to call the helicopter, been there

I have a personal locator beacon (PLB) for that. Works even when there's no reception as it's satellite based. 10 year battery life...

Yeah. If you're genuinely concerned about being able to call for help, you should absolutely be carrying a PLB--though I don't. A smartphone may work. A PLB also may work but for higher values of may. Especially in more remote areas where injuries are probably a bigger deal, phones often can't be counted on.

Once upon a time it was rude to look at your watch at certain events as it implied that you were bored or keen to get home.

Famously got George H W Bush into trouble during a Presidential debate.

The trick is to look at someone else's watch.

Of course, today only old people like me wear a watch. Curses!

That is cunning.

My other feelthy trick is, for the D conferences, I make sure all the steenkin' badges have the names written large on them, and on both sides. That way, the peanut butter side always lands face up (or face down, if you prefer!). It ensures I never forget a name!

My mother’s house is full of wrong clocks. Imagine that terror!

Is that really true, given fitness/smart watch sales?

I thought the same thing, but OTOH most of them have screens set on raise-to-wake so you can't sneak a peek at the time anyhow.

This is a huge problem with smart watches.

So I left one story out of my little rant-- which was my ex-wife would do exactly what you described. She would text and then if I hadn't responded in a few minutes she'd call the receptionist and/or my desk phone. It was infuriating because she rarely answered a text in less than a few hours.

She said that it upset her when she couldn't reach me--and that's one of the reasons she's an ex-wife. Her go to manipulation tactic was this sort of ask for some sort of compromise or make some sort of promise with absolutely not intention of keeping her end of the bargain.

Same experience with my current wife. Has yours remarried?

She has not, but she's living with someone. I have not met him, but I can tell he's falling for the manipulation because I'm picking up my daughter from HIM most days instead of her (meaning, he's doing her dirtywork like driving our daughter places).

She was the kind of person, if you weren't doing exactly what she wanted you to, you were a piece of shit. Once I realized what was going on (our early relationship was much, much different, I would have never married someone like this) I stopped paying this game and it infuriated her to not have power over me.

Could I throw something at you-- I am sorry to be rude-- could it be your wife thinks you are cheating or is cheating herself? This was what I think was driving my ex-wife's behavior. One, to verify that I was at work and not cheating, and to make sure I was at work so she could cheat herself.

Wow , so many similarities. I don’t know about the cheating angle. It is possible she is but in wouldn’t know when she’s have the time for it.

I am sorry to hear that. If I can be a resource for you at all let me know. It might be better for you to learn from my mistakes than yours.

how do i reach you?

I know its been a week-- had some life happen. My e-mail address is in my profile.

grrr, I meant I haven't seen them together not I haven't met him.

Man, so many similarities with my life. This were only clear once I was out of her sphere of influence and only then I was able to see the manipulation and gas-lighting.

Now she tries to use our child as a manipulation tool, as that is the only aspect of my life that she has any input to.

Christ. Same here.

The ex moved 45 mins away and insisted I pick up and drop off the child. When I started refusing, she just abandoned the kid at her mothers house, betting correctly that I would comply (which i had to).

We had a legal agreement at my ex's insistence that we wouldn't disparage each-other. Now and then I hear from my daughter how I'm a "bad daddy"-- I have never said a single bad thing about my ex to my kiddo despite her cheating, stealing money, using my family and lying to not only our friends and family but the police to get custody.

If you need support or anything, I'm happy to lend an ear.

We might have been married to the same person... The lying is the kicker.

We had an agreement that the kid will go a certain school, after I bough her half of the house, someone changed their mind. I complied and moved to be in the zone of the new school, then someone changed their mind again. But the 2nd time it is go as court/lawyers sided with me.

I never discuss her with the kid, but I get same tidbits from him as you from your daughter. Children know a good parent, so just do your best. They will love you regardless of what they hear.

The latest thing was her not wanting to handover his medication on handover.

how can we contact each other?

Quick note (probably too late) that the behavior you describe is a classic symptom of something the DSM-5 calls "Borderline Personality Disorder".

My brother who is a mental health professional says she's an avoidant-- but I think she may be both frankly.

I feel for you. It’s embarrassing, manipulative and soul crushing.

One lives and one learns my friend :)

> If someone comes up to me and talks to me, I may not even respond immediately.

Maybe I’m too old fashioned, but there’s world of difference between ignoring someone contacting you through an async communication channel like SMS and them literally standing next to you and speaking to your face.

I agree, though I certainly will finish my thought, typing a sentence or two, before stopping and saying something like "I'm sorry, what were you asking?"

I'd be considered 'young' and would think it at least aloof so I don't think its your old-fashionedness.

There used to be an old-fashioned, well-known hand-signal for this situation. You pause long enough to hold up one finger for a second or two, then return to what you were doing. The polite would then poke around or sit down or return in a half-minute or minute to see if you'd paused. The impolite would get barked at.

I agree.

However, I wish our culture considered it rude to just walk up to someone in the middle of deep work and ask them something - unless it’s really important and time critical. It could be a simple as sending a message first “free for a quick chat?”

My counterpoint would be that before the widespread availability of chat and things like that, it was considered perfectly normal in most workplaces to swing by someone's desk. The modern obsession with "deep work" in some circles is mostly a modern invention. (At least in places that didn't commonly have offices where you could open or shut the door as a signal.)

I should have been more explicit but it does indeed depend on the context. If I’m in the middle of something I will acknowledge the person and defer the question until I’m done politely. But I won’t drop everything and context for ad-hoc stuff.

This is something I've been personally trying to get better at. As someone who did a lot of instant messaging in the 90s (think ICQ and IRC) I would think nothing of shooting off texts to people whenever I felt like it via SMS. There was never an expectation of immediately being answered back then and I always thought of messaging as 'write it while you remember and don't expect a response until whenever'. If something was truly urgent I'd call.

Except that's not how other people would perceive it. I've since learned that it can be incredibly annoying to others, to the point where some people would actually get distressed thinking they would have to answer the texts. Couple that with a bad habit of sending many short texts (it's how you'd write on messaging in the old days) and you have one REALLY REALLY ANNOYING FRIEND (regrettably I was that annoying friend).

So I guess I just want to apologize profusely from the other side of the fence. I'm trying to be much more mindful these days about whether that chit-chat message REALLY needs to be sent RIGHT NOW, or can it just wait for a conversation at a later time?

I'm trying to be much more self-aware in this regard.

In my view, if people are getting annoyed you're texting them, it's on them. They're the ones assuming you expect an immediate response, unless you're complaining about it. If you're getting annoyed about them not replying, that's on you.

I think for many people, especially parents, they feel an obligation to at least read texts immediately to see if some action is required, and for whatever reason they are not up to the task of setting up different notifications for their kids and spouse.

In my circles text is generally for when you want to get the message to someone right away, and email is for when they should read at their convenience.

> text is generally for when you want to get the message to someone right away, and email is for when they should read at their convenience

I wish messaging apps gave the sender the ability to hint at urgency, like the priority header that some email clients support, and then the recipient would be able to use that (or choose to ignore it) instead of the relatively rudimentary controls typically available today.

A recipient can put their whole phone silent mode, vibrate mode, or ringtone mode; use DND mode, perhaps with a schedule, perhaps with exceptions for contacts; specify a ringtone per contact; mute specific group messages -- all of these have one thing in common, which is that if the sender has something unusually important or unusually unimportant to say, they're stuck with generating whatever type of notification the recipient already decided is appropriate for a typical message from that sender.

Using phone calls for higher urgency and email for lower urgency is usually good enough, but achieving that same effect in-band through a messaging app for continuity of history would be even better.

I find it helpful to actively (and when I first introduce myself) online is to also have a disclaimer on how I communicate and to let me know if I need to change my patterns to accommodate someone. This information up front (and regular reminders about my lack of offense at not being responded to immediately) is often extremely reassuring to others rather than a source of anxiety. Because now I’ve ensured we’re all on the same page.

I did a year long experiment; no phone.

It was life and perspective changing. I hate that because of work and personal circumstances I cant do it now, but there is so much value in completely disconnecting when you need/want to.

We shouldnt feel ashamed that this feels wierd to us ~Xennials(+-10yr) having grown up in a time of landline only pots (and phreakin!)

Frankly, as Snowden recently said, our phones are probably our greatest security threat as a country. Going off the digital grid is almost impossible, but knowing how is a matter of national security...

Which is why breaches like OPM etc are so egregious; because once the data is out there, its too late to take back.

My problem is that listening to Drake and Binney, it seems greed was allowed to take over policy decisions in order to maximize kickbacks while failing to protect americans privacy.

>I don't answer texts while I'm driving because I literally got in an accident texting (it was a freak circumstance, but these things do happen)

I'd like to address this in a non-judgemental way: not answering texts while driving should be the norm. It's not possible to operate a vehicle in motion and text simultaneously in a safe manner.

> "It's not possible to operate a vehicle in motion and text simultaneously in a safe manner."

This statement has been proven true by multiple studies now, many of them coming to the conclusion that texting while driving can be as dangerous or more dangerous than driving drunk.

But disproven by my 20-ish years of safely texting while driving. You have to be smart about it but it can be done safely.

You did it and it turned out OK, but that doesn't mean it was a safe thing to do.

The only smart thing is not doing it. I know people who regularly drunk-drove for 10+ years without accidents. Are they being smart about it too?

Please don't put other people's life at risk because you feel smarter. Don't text and drive.

If you could turn off being drunk at any point when you felt you needed more concentration -- foggy night, urge to speed, narrow turns -- it would be far safer to drive when drunk.

There are many reasons why the chart of auto fatalities is dominated by those with less than high school degrees[1], but one is that accurate risk assessment and good choices matter. For example, "Should I send a text one word at a time once an hour on a straight road going through Nebraska in broad daylight, or should I text continually with both hands in heavy traffic?" The first is a risk easily worth taking, even with other people's lives.

1. https://schultzmyers.com/low-income-missourians-more-likely-...

And all the drunk driving studies are proven false by my [unspecified relation family member] who also somehow suffers no consequences. Keep on gambling with other people's lives, it's definitely the important thing you should defend.

Since both behaviors are illegal and carry penalties, it is probably safer to do both at once.

So the occasional smoker that lives to 100 means smoking is harmless? That’s not how statistics and science work.

I agree completely and this was a looonngggg time ago (2009?).

Where I live, Ireland, it is illegal to operate a phone while driving and you will get a fine + penalty points on your license if you are seen. This includes holding the phone up to your ear on a call. I assumed it was the same in most countries, at least I'd expect so for other European countries.

I live in California and it has been illegal since 2009, but our society is in shambles as you are no doubt aware, enforcing cell phone laws is the least of our worries...

This was also probably no more than 2009 anyways as I was literally trying to get a date with my now ex-wife.

That being said it was a dumb thing to do.

In Washington, DC, it is illegal to operate a phone. But if you walk three or four blocks downtown looking at the passing cars, you are pretty sure to see more than once person driving and holding a phone.

> I have purposefully started training my friends by being erratic with my texts/messages/e-mails.

This is the way. My whole family is like this, and it's awesome. Sometimes people are too busy and don't reply, but no one gets offended. It can be annoying when planning, but overall it's great.

> I have another friend who always calls on his commute home and gets offended when I don't answer.

Similarly, we have a rule that it's not rude to call to shoot the shit, but it's also not rude to send the person straight to voicemail for any reason. It's so nice to just be able to call my sister out of the blue and know that if I'm bothering her, she won't pick up.

> I have purposefully started training my friends by being erratic with my texts/messages/e-mails

I would very much like to do what you say but with a million interrupts a day, it is now or never. If I neglect / defer something now, I would likely get back to it next week. Even for work. I do find time to focus 4 hours on some work activities but those are just the high priority visible stuff otherwise maybe if someone did not remind and make it a priority maybe it was anyways not a priority. But then things slip through the crack once in a while.

> If I neglect / defer something now, I would likely get back to it next week.

As someone that lives life like this, yes, that's the point. If it's really important, they can ping me again and remind me to respond. Or when I have some downtime I'll peruse through my messages and emails again and stumble upon it and remember to reply.

Pinging me again sometimes makes sense (if we have a relationship and it's important) but it doesn't scale well. As someone who gets a lot of outside requests to do things, second and third emails to ask "did you miss my email?" get tiresome in a hurry.

(Sometimes I genuinely missed something interesting but this is rare.)

> I would very much like to do what you say but with a million interrupts a day, it is now or never.

The secret is to not be interrupted. If you're already reading the text, you might as well go and answer.

If you want to change something you will need to stop being interrupted (close the IM window, put your phone on silent, ...) and check once you have time. If you don't have time for a while, possibly give it a quick skim in case something important happened.

Things will always slip through the cracks. If you attend every interruption, it will once in a while interrupt an interruption itself and you're at status quo. At worst, put things on a todo list.

It's possible to do it.

I make heavy use of email scheduling (and more recently Slack message scheduling) and will often schedule messages to go out in a few hours or the next day. That way, I can get my thoughts down in the moment, but not get sucked into a back-and-forth when I don't have time for it. I work with students and have found that delaying my responses tends set their expectation that they're not going to get a quick answer and train them over time to spend a bit more time trying to find an answer themselves because they can't depend on me for an immediate response.

Curious what your situation is. If it was personal stuff, I would honestly just mute anyone who is too noisy, and then check in periodically. If you don't like them, well they get a large period in between check-ins :). Over time, they come to expect it, and realize it's not personal. If it's work stuff, maybe you could figure out a scheduling system (like a lightweight ticketing system or inbox maybe.)

My million dollar app idea-- which I can't write because the OS's won't allow it... is I'd like fine grained control over my notifications. I used to do the Pomodoro thing and found it quite effective-- Id like to apply the idea to notifications as well.

It would work like this:

A list of firewall rules about who/what was able to send notifications. The firewall would be able to bump up or down the priority of a message, or discard them. Including rules being able to match say a regex inside the text, sender, time of day filtering.

And then at some specified interval (I would use 25 mins), I get all my notifications that didn't meet the emergency criteria in the firewall.

The iOS Focus mode does seem promising though.

I've setup my iPhone to not display any notifications except for the red circles next to the app icon. I move all Apps that create notifications into a separate folder on the last home screen. That way I never receive interrupting notifications, and I have to proactively check my Whatsapp/Mail etc.

I am optimistic that I can use the upcoming Focus mode in iOS 15 to start broadcasting my unavailability to my contacts

Agreed. I've been missing this since AIM went bust.

I also wish there were a way for me to send a low-priority message to my wife so that it didn't notify her regardless of her notification settings. We send each other news articles throughout the day but don't really want to interrupt each other. It would be great if there were a sender-side option that could enable this.

I've thought about using a shared document in the Notes app, or just use a different messaging app for low-priority stuff, but it seems like too much overhead. Does anyone else have a way of handling this?

Email?

IMO, no one should have have email that sends notifications.

When we're on our computers, email notifications come up unless we're in DND (and even then, they show up whenever your email client is visible regardless).

For me, I have to open my email browser window to see new emails. No notifications. (And no client which I would set to 100% DND if I had one.)

Fair enough! I don't think email threads are best for daily spousal communication, but perhaps for some people this could work. It sure would be easier to search than Apple Messages!

DND should be default and there should be custom sounds for different contacts. Ofc its not our computer anymore, you are not in control. Still, its weird that our digital overlords didn't implement this. Is it copyrights? Are ringtone purchases such good money? I have no idea.

Damn, PREACH.

If it's urgent, the sender will call.

And, even then, unless I am on-call there should be no expectation that I am always available even during work hours.

PREACH. AGAIN.

You could create a group with only the both of you in your messaging app and set that group to not have notifications, then you keep the direct messages for urgent stuff. You could even have more than one group to keep conversations on separate topics organized.

I feel like not replying is a simpler solution.

Text messaging is asynchronous communication, if someone is expecting an immediate response, they should be calling.

Then it had better be really urgent unless you're one of a handful of people. Even as an older person, I mostly ignore phone calls if I don't recognize the caller ID--and, even then, unless it's a call I know I want to take for whatever reason.

ADDED: Where I work, chat is a more time sensitive than email but basically no one phones out of the blue.

Focus mode is better because you do not get distracted at all by the ping. This allows people to send you a message at any time and you will see it at some regular interval. I'm fine checking messages once an hour but currently they come in at random times regularly. One 10 message ping is much less distracting than 10 pings.

I would much rather someone press a button to say "This is very important, send it now" over calling me where I have to scramble to turn off my music, put my headphones on, etc before answering.

Unknowingly, I've trained my friends and family to assume they aren't going to get an answer immediately. They now text to call when I have time. Or they immediately get to the point: "wanna go riding tomorrow" instead of "hey whats up". Some people are put off by this and others find it endearing, I couldn't care less what they think. My time is my time and I do with it what I please. That means being there for others when they need it, which means being the hell off my phone when I am there.

> Some of my friends will freak out if I don't text back in as little as 5 minutes. A particular needy friend once tried to get me to "promise" that I would always return her texts within 10 minutes.

This is on you. Plenty of people manage it. Try turning your phone of.

I knew an older guy who phrased it that his phone existed for his convenience, not for the people around him.

Soon they will replace the "phone ring" with an electric shock. Mark my words.

Like in 1984. People who want to "spend time alone" are deviant, diseased and antisocial. And must be stopped.

You're missing the tree in the forest. No one is forced to look at their phone, the reality is that people have trained themselves to want it.

There are 6 anecdotes in this thread where friends and family apply force to get a person to look at their phone. Social force, but still. Force.

Consider the soft forces of marketing, distraction, conformity, attraction and temptation. They are as real as a twisted arm.

Sure, I agree, it's all very coercive. But I think the point really is... physical force isn't even necessary. We're already addicted

The coercive forces are beneath discussion because we're all addicted anyway?

I dunno man. That sounds weird.

even if you ignore addiction , mobile phones have been integrated into society in so many infrastructure-like roles that they are hardly at all optional or 'ignorable' at this point.

When you live in a world that requires bills to be paid via mobile, rent to be paid via mobile, mass transit tickets bought via mobile, physical location reservation via mobile, as well as any customer service only available via mobile... who cares about personal addiction; normal life isn't feasible without a mobile phone at that point, and very few (if any at all) mobile phones are designed from the premise that they should respect your attention.

The mobile phones that are designed to preserve the users attention are widely incompatible with any functions that the user needs (billpay/specific group apps, whatever) to stay integrated with the systems being forced upon them, so those options are already non-starter.

That means this problem is worth discussing -- non-compulsive normal people as well as compulsive addicts are being affected by the lack of 'respect for attention' that mobile phones have, and this problem intersects with the 'required prevalence' of mobile phones across the world.

And there are quite a few anecdotes on how to prevent people from forcing you, some of them written by me :)

My overall point, however, is that there will never be an external negative reinforcement to look on your phone. We all have it internalized already and that's far more compelling than any external pressure ever could be.

> No one is forced to look at their phone, the reality is that people have trained themselves to want it.

Not quite. Tech and social media companies have spent billions to make their devices and apps as addictive as possible.

There are many employers who feel they can contact you at anytime.

When I had a smartphone, I never told my employer. I told him I only had a Landline, and I had a chatty roommate.

On the days I felt they might call, I just took the phone off the hook.

It's not just training ourselves, it's companies training us. When people talk about dopamine hits from getting a like on a post, or feeling a buzz from an app, they are explicitly setting out to create a behavioral pattern that benefits them in some way. They are training us like Pavlov's dogs, and while humans are smarter, we do respond to operant conditioning.

At the end of the day, we as people have to react to this environment that's been created, but the people who created it knew what they were doing.

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