‘Luddite’ Teens
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Yes, they're kind of posturing and pretentious, but in ways that remind me of myself in high school; I feel like I get them. Your average high school kid is a lot more confusing to me these days.
I did have to laugh at this:
> "I talked to my adviser, though, and he told me most revolutions actually start with people from industrious backgrounds, like Che Guevara."
I wasn't sure what they meant by "industrious backgrounds"; apparently it means "wealthy" based on Guevara's wikipedia page. She's in good company, though... Ho Chi Minh and Lenin grew up privileged too.
I always liked how 1984's Goldstein said that in principle Inner Party children did not automatically become Inner themselves.
a pay phone (phortress, because it was safer to phreak from than a home phone)
A few weeks ago I was at our local train station and there was an honest-to-god payphone. Walked up to it, picked up the receiver, and got dial tone. I had figured they were all gone now but apparently not quite yet.
On a personal note, it's also something that worries me for the day when I'll finally have my own children.
I wouldn't want them exposed to modern cyber-addictions from young age, but at the same time, I'm not sure how to protect them, when I can expect that all their peers will be on whatever social app's gonna be popular at that time.
Some of my friends with kids gave them cell phones around 12-14. But most of the kids had iPads prior.
w.r.t. "what will you do when they get older and jealous?", learning to deal with jealousy is a good lesson to teach kids. Giving a kid everything they envy and demand is how you raise an entitled brat.
Overdoing it either direction can be a serious mistake.
It's better to instill in kids early that it's important to cultivate deep rather than wide social connections. Teaching your kid to stand up for themselves and make friends that don't care about blue chat bubbles or fashionable clothes is necessary. Because there's always gonna be some group you're not going to be cool enough to be a part of. Maybe you're not pretty enough, athletic enough, maybe your parents aren't rich enough to send you on the holiday trip the other kids can go on, sooner or later everyone's going to learn the lesson that this isn't how you build genuine connections.
I noticed this even as an adult in my 20s, people who hadn't ever learned to deal with social rejection carry that teenage group behavior into their own adult life and can't deal with exclusion.
But they aren't standing up for themselves. They're standing up for decisions forced on them by their parents.
> make friends that don't care about blue chat bubbles or fashionable clothes is necessary
It has nothing to do with being cool (and I've never heard of anyone referencing blue chat bubbles that wasn't using it derogatorily like you are). It's about not being unable to communicate with people. Like, they may have friends who want to invite them to a party but don't because they put the event on (whatever app is cool). Your kids don't see it and therefore don't go to an event everyone wanted them to go to.
They're learning how to deal with adversity created by circumstances beyond their control.
there is a reference to this in TFA, it's a real phenomenon
That is quite literally the point of being a parent. They're children. They're not supposed to be raised by other children or by social media personalities they want to be like, but by you.
If that means having to be the bad and unfun parent who they get mad at because they can't get to do the thing everyone else is doing that's the job. Good parents give children values that last a lifetime even if the kid doesn't understand it or like it.
The chat bubble thing is a reference to a surprisingly widespread clash between kids with iphones and kids with android phones (https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...)
This is similar to alcohol or smoking. It is worth not giving it to your children even if "they will anyway try it later".
Now, Social Media alone is enough to make a parent take a step back and wonder what is the right time to introduce your children to the internet.
Our solution, which isn't perfect, is to use a parent control app. Kids can use their devices for X hours and only certain times of day, and we have to approve each app install or purchase made on the phone. It feels like too much control, but the alternative is too dangerous. And even still I walk in on the kids to see what they are doing.
It's a balancing act that will take time to figure out. We are evolving as a global cultural, technological race, and evolving fast.
I can't help but wonder whenever I hear this message: do you know, really?
After taking with them a little, it often comes down to pretty ... innocuous things in my opinion. Sure, there's always peer pressure and they'll be constantly judged etc, but that's just a an exaggerated baseline of what teenagers always had. Surely troublesome and not good for their mental health, but they'll probably get over it eventually.
From my perspective, the biggest danger that current social media created is that the creep factor is gone for stalking. To make a pretty regular example, let's say there is a teenage girl that's feeling lonely. She starts a live stream to talk with people. Some people show up and are super positive! They even give her some stickers (which are literally just money on TikTok she can check out...). Isn't it great to be valued? I don't think I need to write the rest of the story, as it's quiet obvious where the grooming eventually leads.
It's especially hard to swallow because the money she could make is astronomically higher then she'd ever have a chance of making anywhere else. Good luck explaining that...
Seriously, the original social media was so frickin tame. It's so much more twisted now that money is involved and everything is moving towards 1 person with an audience vs "your group of friends" before.
this is the basis of my fears for introducing the children I will be having (in the next few years) to the new Internet: it's a pervasive lifestyle change. modern social media apps (instagram, tiktok) are nothing short of digital drugs that you never run out of. why do x y and z in the real world when you could just pull your phone out of your pocket, swipe your finger across its screen a few times, and instantly obtain infinite entertainment that is infinitely more engaging than anything else you could possibly do with your time?
the real challenge in my opinion is to instill the dangers of these sorts of things upon one's children in such a way that despite peer pressure—including the ambient peer pressure of everyone out in public staring idly at their phones—they come to see these dangerous digital drugs as what they are, without having to partake in order to "find out for themselves."
and of course, this all has to be done without accidentally causing the classic "well my family banned this in our house but now that I'm on my own I'm going to binge as much of this shit as possible" conundrum. which I was definitely guilty of myself as a young person whose family highly restricted access to video games for most of my childhood… turns out that's a great way to get a kid to end up becoming a game developer lol
At an age when kids really haven’t learned to think critically or have the wisdom to realize they’re being manipulated particularly those vulnerable teen years, I think parents do need to consider this. It’s pretty much at least a second job to keep tabs on what kids are viewing/consuming/doing online at all times. If you have multiple children forget it. Parental controls are extremely limited, schools require access to youtube.com and google.com and facebook for events so that pretty much opens the door to view/access most adult things without ever touching a “questionable” website. “The algorithm” still forms a bias on what kids see as well, further eroding critical thinking skills.
A vast majority of parents don’t bother with any controls at all which undermines the effort of those that do which the can lead to resentment and frustration because of peer pressure.
To say that I’m worried about this is an understatement but I also don’t think the cat can be put back in the bag.
It's good to take care, yet at the end of the day the kids have to grow up. So they need the tools to evaluate information. This can start early and schools can help even if parents won't, or even if parents are part of the problem.
But if I were doing it, I'd do the same, but allowed couple of days per month of unrestricted internet usage. Just so they would experience how unproductive these days are compared to normal days
This implies that parents are knowledgeable and responsible people who know better, when in reality, the vast majority of parents are complete morons.
I expect that - in addition to mere time restriction from the outset - ensuring that the kids are sufficiently busy with leisure outlets and spending enough face-to-face time with others their own age will go a long ways. At the core of it, the addiction we have, as social media is concerned, is to each other, excepting the mindless never-ending-scroll entertainment part of it.
Not to say I would overschedule, but would take care that they a) are registered to at least one sport for the majority of the year (intramural is fine), b) have the means and habit to make use of things for creative ends, or to get out of the house and explore. If that foundation is there from the start, might not have to pry the phones/tablets out of them.
I can't very well completely cut off any access to devices because the SO and I use them and it will just become a sore spot, particularly as the kids age.
If you're interested, read the books "the pleasure shock" and "towards a psycho-civilized society"
from what? I've spent countless, countless, countless hours on the internet since 1996 when I was 4, by age 9 I had my computer on my room, at 12/13 we were laughing with my friends about the horrible shit on rotten.com and now I have a fine life without any particular issue, so what are you trying to protect them from? doing dumb shit? e.g. there's nothing you can ever do that will prevent a dedicated 15-years old to have sex, smoke joints or get drunk, but if you try hard I can guarantee you that they will resent you a lot and will have a much, much harder time when they are free from parental control and are left in the wild.
One thread they're touching on that I think is healthy and good is the DIY aesthetic, and the resistance to tools and media that primarily serve to make you a passive consumer, and to choose and live ones values more consciously & proactively. These features are (or ate least were) prominent in the punk scene, but also in many other subcultures including many religious groups.
I am glad to see "the kids" continuing to question & challenge and try to take more control of their own lives, so this is great in my opinion. A bit of pretentiousness is a small price to pay in my opinion.
In order for someone to actually be pretentious, there has to be a pretense. Being purposefully non-mainstream doesn't make someone pretentious as much as a more normal individual would like to believe. Hipsters aren't necessarily pretentious, even when they have a pattern of rejecting the mainstream. A hipster might be pretentious if their image is disingenuous (ex. wearing some article they don't actually identify with, pooh-poohing something publicly while appreciating it secretly), but that doesn't have to describe all or most hipsters.
I get called a hipster because I often reject or have no interest in many things that most people consider good on that basis alone. When something becomes mainstream, I like it less because I believe something going from unknown to mainstream is usually a bad sign, and that instinct is almost always right. Breaking Bad was way better until everyone started slobbering over it and chanted "get back to cooking meth bruh", and look how it ended. Such a long way for a ham sandwich. haha
It isn't that you like something, it's that you don't want to be associated to some other things. And you don't want to be associated to those other things because of some pretense about what associating to those things means.
Maybe this is confusing because of the phrase "false pretense", which is redundant and can lead to some people thinking that there's such a thing as a pretense that isn't false-ish.
At the end of the day, I think the pretentiousness comes from superiority signalling. When a vegan talks about how eating meat is wrong the implication is that they feel morally superior to those who eat meat. And when someone rejects things generally, as opposed to just liking their own things, it implies that those things they reject aren't worth consideration, and hence anyone who does has some inferior judgement or taste.
The statement "I would never listen to disco music" implies there is something wrong with doing so, and hence something wrong with those who choose to. "I would never listen to disco music" is a pretentious statement.
Star Wars, once lauded, has been milked dry. There are a few good works, but by and large they're beating a dead horse.
The same thing is happening to Marvel. People checked out after Endgame.
Game of Thrones was so near to perfection. It had an unusually large cast of a hundred characters and an expansive world to draw down. But even if the new show is good, the magic is gone.
The mystery of Stranger Things after season one ended. We're getting a rehash with common character tropes you can find anywhere.
The allure of Westworld softened after season one attempted to open up to bigger themes, but actually cut down on the possibility space.
The third Godfather. Dexter. Every single Jurassic Park but the first. Jaws. On and on.
Chiefly, it's simply a function of multiplied probabilities to continue with a success streak. Eventually the odds do not pay off in your favor.
But I think another contributing factor is that our brains begin to fit the shape of the setting, the motifs, the character arcs, the narrative world - and we just aren't surprised or pleased any longer. Few people would ask for twenty seasons of a show. Or ten movies in a given franchise. Our brains learn the shape of the landscape and grow bored.
First, it would be weird to say that was because Marvel was falling apart. It was the conclusion of a decade long movie franchise. Of course people might watch something else once the story they had been following was done. It doesn't mean they won't come back or didn't like the new movies, it means they wanted a break.
But mainly, it's also not true. Leaving aside 2020 (when Marvel released their movies all online), let's look at 2021. 4 out of the top 10 movies were Marvel movies (including number 1).
In 2022, they have 3 of the top 10 slots. They were beaten out by the Top Gun reboot and the latest Jurassic Park
My point exactly. We tire of the familiar.
> 4 out of the top 10 movies were Marvel movies
Disney operates at a scale none of their peers can match. They have the most well tuned pipeline of any production company. I'd expect this.
Nevertheless, metrics point to declining interest. If I had time to write a longer comment, I'd be able to cite sources and offer more than just a suggestion to google "marvel fatigue".
Which is both sad and hilarious in the context of this thread
In 2021, the only original things were the highest production cost Chinese movie in history that glorified the Chinese army vanquishing their enemies (South Korea, the US) in the Korean War (this is the one that got a sequel) and a Chinese comedy. The western movies were the latest Bond, Fast and Furious, Kong vs. Godzilla, and Sing 2.
(A Chinese movie series also was in the top 10 in 2021)
That's been true since 1983.
in that the corporate machine made a mistake in not extracting all that it could from it in follow-up seasons, movies, sequels, etc.
You know how good a movie is by how many sequels it took to kill it.
Kojima and the Metal Gear series.
Popular movies get discussed to death and over-mis-interpreted to the point where just the mention of it causes a mental effort to ignore the assumed sycophantic rambling that's to follow.
Popularity ruins perceived quality by the nature of media to seize upon it and, as someone else said in a slightly different context above, squeeze every last cent of profit out of the opportunity that's presented by it's popularity.
Technically it doesn't affect the quality, but it adds a thick layer of media slime that can take years to dry up and fall off.
Lastly, popularity and quality are two scales that have interesting intersections. It's a concept I'd actually like to investigate further.
Another mechanism is flanderization, in which writers simplify characters or other aspects of the show for various reasons, mostly laziness and to conform to expectations the audience develops about how characters should act. Characters with depth become shallow shadows of their past selves as one aspect of their personality starts to dominate the others. When characters are driven by audience expectations instead of the writer's internal muse, they become soulless and predictable.
Another is overdeveloping the setting. Throwaway lines in earlier media get needlessly turned into developed storylines. It leaves less to the imagination. This is often related to the first mechanism I mention; the writers squeezing all the juice out of the earlier media.
Hipsters are people who follow trends. They try to be "hip."
Rejecting things because everyone else likes them is not being a hipster. It's being a contrarian.
If someone ever asks me for an example of a pretentious comment, I'm going to give them this
I don't know, to me it all seemed exceedingly genuine. If they're spending lots of time outside in parks—"rain or shine, even snow"—their clothing choices make sense. They like reading, and their reading material has made an impression (as good books are wont to do, especially for impressionable teenagers), such as by convincing them of the value of activities like "listening to the wind".
I guess it seems a bit pretentious since those of us who were around as young adults when mobiles and the internet took off, and then worked in the industries that made the current situation happen, realise there is a happy midpoint. “The only thing better than a flip phone is no phone?” I can’t roll my eyes enough.
I dare say “our generation” started the idea of removing technology again and getting back some of the good old days.
Yeah, but kids often say groan-worthy things, or have opinions that lack perspective. I still think she was being perfectly earnest.
A lot of people's lives could be way better if they internalized this.
But I'm mostly seeing a single school, so it may just be that that school operates in some kind of techphobic bubble, not that the better-off are generally exposing their kids to cell phones and the Internet way less than the middle-class and lower.
... then again, maybe what I'm seeing isn't a heavily biased sample, and that's exactly what's going on, and this article is a manifestation of a real tendency of the upper classes to curtail tech exposure for their kids, compared with the general population.
This is not a story of consequence but it does speak to an important issue of our day. It's not as though this is the only kind of reporting NY Times does.
That's not at all what happened. There were rumors that tech reporting should be critical[1], instead of gushing and repeating claims from press releases without actually investigating. Real journalism is critical, and critical doesn't mean "bad" or "negative".
It made me realise that the mythologies of tech (an inevitable, ubiquitous force of progress and 'convenience' that we must slavishly follow or be "left behind") resides in my generation.
Also, they idolize Chris McCandless - he was also a child of privilege who wanted to reject society. Chris didn't have to die but he did because he went up to Alaska woefully unprepared. That doesn't make his death any less tragic, of course.
I guess my point is that this phenomenon is not anything new, if anything we've just gotten for enough into the 21st century that the 1970s ethic is making a comeback.
Idolizing McCandless is such an odd thing; Alaska is filled with people who rejected their past lives like he did, but who didn't die because they had more humility and respect for the land.
Anyway, my critique of McCandless is mild, talk to some Alaskans if you want to hear some proper vitriolic criticism of him. I barely scratched the surface by accusing him of hubris.
If you mean my criticism of teens idolizing McCandless, I don't know what to tell you. He isn't a good role model. There are obviously worse role models, but he isn't a good one.
Where is the roasting of teens? The closest I've come to roasting teens is saying that teens idolizing McCandless is 'odd'.
in practice: i wonder how practical it is to survive as an adult without a smartphone. uber has decimated cabs and i don't think you can telephone for an uber.
i wonder what else is unreachable/unworkable/etc...
I learned to drive before smartphones. I can assure you its very possible to find addresses without a phone. Heck, I still sometimes do it for fun! Nothing wrong with a little u-turn here or there.
reminds me of the old days when i used to text GOOGL for exact addresses
The biggest problem is 2-factor. Many services are starting to require it, which has led me to losing access to various accounts. Looking at you, Paypal.
Otherwise, it's fine. I make a paper shopping list. I schedule meetings in advance, and show up at the expected time. Uber isn't even in my city so there's no loss there.
https://i.imgur.com/V2WbK6C.png
There is no skip button. Even worse, every method I've tried to access customer support requires I be logged into an account.
I do have an Android device at home that may support TOPT, but a lot of websites still recklessly assume you have a mobile number available.
I mean, they are teenagers. I said this in a longer comment in this thread, but teenagers tend to be performative. That's sort of the point of growing up and finding yourself.
>I am glad to see "the kids" continuing to question & challenge
They are the children of (rich?) Brooklyn hipster parents at a Performance arts school[0]. Who exactly are they challenging? If anything, they are being congradulated and pushed along on the hipster path. There are Brooklyn hipsters who unironically use 1980's antenta phones. If anything this is a worn out trope.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_R._Murrow_High_School
*I don't mean to imply that you are illiterate, just that you haven't thought this through.
It's not an accomplishment, but it's definitely more, as parent commenter said, "performative" than saying they read any popular author of today.
As you yourself pointed, Dostoyevski is a required reading in high school and as anybody who had the "pleasure" of attending school, knows required reading usually isn't something what appeals to the youth (killing joy from this activity is another problem).
That's true of a lot of students, but not everyone! A couple of classmates in particular come to mind who definitely, genuinely loved the books we were assigned.
Heck, while I didn't like most of the books we read, there were a handful I loved! Montana, 1948, for example, was amazing.
Admittedly, the reader effort is still ridiculously far below that of the author.
Quoting Fry: "It took an hour to write, I thought it would take an hour to read"
Murrow isn't strictly a performance arts school, and it's not located in a particularly hip or excessively wealthy part of Brooklyn.
And I think you're overthinking the performative aspect, it's bog standard teenage behavior that diminishes over time but persists forever. Every branded piece of apparel, every vanity plate, all interior decorating are in the same performative vein.
It also might be you projecting. It's entirely possible they genuinely enjoy their choice of clothing and literature and it's not a performance.
It's not really, it's become a pretty fashionable brand in urban areas. Basically a combination of work wear and basic REI aesthetic.
Also, does the NYT Style section have a reputation of elevating some tiny little clique into a "trend" that goes nowhere because it's not a real trend, just a clique that got written about?
I'd love for something like this to be an actual trend (sans the snobbish performance), but I'm skeptical this anything at all.
None of his classmates care one way or the other.
It's all good.
Won’t be true of everyone of course.
I know our generation (you can guess) is painted with the "too obsessed with social" habit.. and I'd say the preponderance of people staring at their phones during all moments of life (driving, shopping, dining with their partners) makes them no less lonely. You can pretend you're not lonely as long as you have a graph to pulldown-reload.
I have a phone, no one has called it in years, I wouldn't say I'm lonely.
Even if they're orthogonal, there's something seemingly off with people staring at their phones all the time, during every moment in life. My last gf would pick up her phone the minute I paused a show to pop into the kitchen or go to the restroom. That didn't bother me.. what bothered me is when she didn't notice my return and put the phone down so we could return to our show or movie. I'd have to do the "I'm back" cough or shoulder tap. It became increasingly objectionable.
Listen to this kid subtly rubbing it in:
> “I still long to have no phone at all,” she said. “My parents are so addicted. My mom got on Twitter, and I’ve seen it tear her apart. But I guess I also like it, because I get to feel a little superior to them.”
Anyway, that aside. The article is complete cringe though. NYT really is 95% lifestyle branding and 5% factoids. Also, these kids, I don't know if they realize, but it's always just that little skeevy (not necessarily in a sexual nature, more generically, as-in, unseemly, too familiar, think "cool teacher"), when adults - journalists, artists, ...- worm their way in kids culture, package their growing up for the entertainment of jaded, passe 50 year olds.
> We’ve all got this theory that we’re not just meant to be confined to buildings and work. And [McCandless] was experiencing life. Real life. Social media and phones are not real life.
I'm nitpicking, just think there are way healthier examples. Overall I love the mentality and really hope the next generation or two embraces a major shift away from tech addiction. Feels like growing pains from head-spinningly rapid technological innovation and availability.
I never got the impression that it was deliberate self sabotage. I understood that he simply had over confidence going into the woods, and that he stayed a bit too long in an unfamiliar area and consequently couldn’t make his way back due to snowmelt flooding.
Technology has created an unprecedented opportunity for us to turn the world into a human friendly imaginative playground.
That opportunity is squandered by people who think in the short term about control and money and status and grievance.
Call me what you will, but I have a hard time watching old videos like this and not getting emotional -> https://youtu.be/Uz__bJTlOjk?t=37 Great engineers using the most advanced technology of the day to make childhood fantasies a reality is one of the most beautiful uses of our time on Earth I can think of. Tech could make the world the ultimate fantasy adventure. We have so much capacity to alleviate material want and create amazing dreamworlds and make people happy, but laziness, greed, ego, jealousy, and resentment all get in the way.
Technological complexity obfuscates and entrenches a lot of existing problems and creates lots of room for abuse, but at root most modern problems are not fundamentally tech related. They're rooted in our difficulties cooperating with each other.
Wow, these kids sound like the new beatniks.
"The club members cite libertine writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac as heroes,"
and there's Jack..
Tangent, I really enjoyed reading On the Road
$150 doc martens seem like good value to me. They last about 5-8 years at the rate I wear through them, or about $20-30 per year. Certainly more efficient than any sneakers.
There’s countless of alternatives to boots/shows that aren’t name-brand Doc Martens with that aesthetic.
Personally, I just shop at the clearance sections or sales (ive never seen doc martens there ime)
I always feel like a fool if i drop money on something expensive.
From reading On The Road, I just remember that they were always broke, drunk, drugs and chasing experiences and not aesthetics. at least thats what I took out from the book
I got a $220 pair of redwings in good shape for $12.
I've worn them up mountains a couple times (OMG don't, they're so damn heavy, it was such a bad idea), while tiling floors or drywalling or doing other DIY housework, building a fence, moving house, working on cars, bicycling (not the best, but they're OK for a quick ride), around town in general, to the office, everywhere. Haven't babied them a bit. Snow, rain, I make sure they don't sit around totally soaked after I'm done, but I don't shy away from wearing them in those conditions.
They still look plenty presentable for slightly-fancy-casual, a hair below smart-casual, which is about the "highest" wear they were suited for to begin with.
Meanwhile, the cloth sneakers I used to buy would look like shit after maybe 80 wears, and be trash no later than 200.
They're also my most comfortable shoes that aren't house-slippers. It's like they're part of my foot. After the ~2-week break-in period, anyway :-)
I've sworn off sneakers entirely though. Unless you're buying sneakers for a specific athletic purpose, I think sneakers as a default footware is something of a scam. They're all built to fall apart after months, maybe a year or two max. They're usually made with fabric instead of leather, with thin and soft rubber soles. Even the ones made with leather still have thin soles that wear out fast. I've never had nor heard of a pair of sneakers that didn't disintegrate before two years of daily use.
As for the broke, drunk and drugs lifestyle, I think dependable boots are a great choice. Even if nothing else in your life is stable, at least you can rely on your boots.
It’s something you can’t understand unless you actually buy and wear a pair of well-made boots or shoes.
A mall store pair of leather boots might weigh 1-1.5 lbs because it’s made of bad leather, EVA foam, and adhesives. A pair of well made boots, one boot will weigh almost 2 lbs because they use good leather uppers, real rubber or leather soles, a steel shank, and cork footbed.
A $300 pair of boots with last 5x longer than a $100 pair of boots if you take care of them and don’t wear them daily.
Generally at least once a week on this very website. And on reddit. And on something awful.
The original factory still makes boots, they aren't quite as "cool" though. The people at your Communist reading group might not even heard of the brand.
Btw, there are still a lot of manufacturers operating out of this region of Britain: Barker, Church's, Cheany, Edward Green...some of these are way too expensive, they are often handmade (and tbh, probably not worth it)...but there are options.
You're right that I don't care for the style of their UK made boots. I like their brown burnished leather "crazy horse" boots, or ones styled similar. Their UK made boots seem to all be black, red, white, or brown but suede (which I don't consider durable.) These are bolder / punkish designs which I don't care for.
If you can suggest an American brand that holds up to Doc Martens, maybe I'll buy those in a few years instead. But I think most boots are made in China or some other country with exploitative labor.
And once the spell is broken, you find yourself staring at people stumbling around, tied to their tiny screens.
If you're using 2FA with SMS, just stop, or switch to something like Google Voice.
Online banking is far too beneficial to give up (traveling abroad, checking balance, moving funds around) and there are other sites besides banks that do this too. It's infuriating.
I mostly go phoneless if at all possible. I use an old ipod nano for music. It's much better at it than the phone because it is so tiny and thin (and has a headphone jack).
For GPS my watch (Garmin) has GPS.
The only worry I have is whether I'll be able to replace the battery when it finally needs it.
Your watch can do navigation? Without being tethered to a phone? I'm interested, which model?
You just have to put it away. If it's a tool, treat it like a tool. You don't carry a hammer in your pocket all day.
No, it doesn't; it's you who carves to escape into the phone. I wish it would call me sometimes to at least remember to keep it charged.
And many people do carry a pocket knife or multitool in their pocket all day.
Removing the phone is treating the symptoms instead of the issue.
Anyone unclear on this should read some of the research about phone proximity and cognitive impairment. https://www.dataquest.io/blog/phone-proximity-effect/
Obviously it's actually your brain doing the calling, not the phone, but the effect is the same: it has an effect on you just by existing that you cannot control. It has nothing to do with notifications settings.
I think these kids have the right idea, going back to a flip phone. (Or maybe the modern variant: go Apple-watch only.)
Somehow we have placed all of our faith in these devices.
Each of these devices, while not bad on its own and in itself, does provide an opportunity for the device to lay claim to one or more of our senses. The multiverse is a step further in that direction, a further bubble of engineered experience disconnected from reality and yes almost posing as reality. This does not bode well for the intellect as nothing in the intellect was not first in the senses. Our intuitions are at their best when seeded by the passive experience of the world, and if our experience is constantly flooded by media and engineered simulations often of a very unhealthy variety, then our alignment with reality will be off. This sort of passive perception of reality is at the heart of contemplation which is what true leisure (not recreation) is all about.
To quote Josef Pieper[0], "the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul."
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/408300-happiness-and-c...
Being someone with rather extreme "misophonia", in a noisy city environment disconnecting from the sound of my environment is a necessity for my mental health.
Also as a life-long musician, music is one thing that makes life worth living for me in the first place. If I don't have a music player with me I'm playing music in my head anyway unless some noisy car horn, screaming child or even the sound of someone else talking takes me out of it, triggering an autism/misophonia driven rage.
But if I'm out hiking in the backcountry, which is a something my wife and I do a couple of times of a year to escape the city and connect with nature ... absolutely we leave the music player at home.
Just remove all social media and you will be set, even chat apps are OK, its really the rapid attention grabbing content that is the issue.
Also the books and the weird connection to wanting to stop the industrial revolution is just r/im14andthisisdeep material
> “I still long to have no phone at all,” she said. “My parents are so addicted. My mom got on Twitter, and I’ve seen it tear her apart. But I guess I also like it, because I get to feel a little superior to them.”
This is an interesting way to put it.
None of them have read Dostoyevsky and pretended to be deep.
It’s not a choice I’ll make (I lived that life without a choice for several decades; I’m good), but I still like that they can.
Put the phone in the next room. As simple as that. Break the convenience of having it with you. Working in a home office? Put it in the next room. Watching TV on the couch? Put it in the next room. Driving? Don't mount it.
You'll still check it, during natural progressions of the day. Lunch. End of the work day. Before you go to bed. But that's still quite a lot better than the 100-200 times that people check it per day on average.
The most interesting thing in this article to me is the classist accusation. I wonder if this luddite trend is just some sort of counter signaling, where if rich kids decide to not use smartphones it's provocative (and they get flip phones from parents on a whim), but if poor kids don't it's because they're poor
I very much disagree with this.
We like to think that technology is value neutral, and we, as Olympian gods, are just applying it in good or bad judgment. Technology (the actual material thing) shapes the world around itself, it creates the conditions of its use _in absence_ of our judgement. The very existence of a bleepy bloopy thing that fits in a pocket, which constantly grabs your attention with gossipy, antagonizing content. That _thing_ in itself creates the nurturing conditions for phenomena like cyberbullying, meme-addiction, declining attention spans, political polarization...
Another example; the very existence of power tools created the aesthetic sensibilities where we aspire to large expanses of perfectly trimmed bushes and leafless virginal lawns. Our aesthetic desires did not proceed the technology. It is the technology that engendered it.
Let's run down more: easy-to-obtain guns, heavy and fast-accelerating cars, cheap mass-produced food, disposable furniture and living arrangements ... They all shape the world (and our minds, our relations to others) in _their image_.
We can be equal slave to the machine as well as master to the machine. Modernism is the submission to this slavery. Humanism is the celebration of our mastery. Now answer the question; do we live in modernist dystopia, or humanist utopia? A leading question to be sure, but I reckon the contrast is instructive.
Technology sometimes _is_ the problem itself. Fixing the problem, in many cases, will mean forceful rejection of this technology, rather than just finding the correct application of it.
I’ve deleted social media from my phone and it’s been…amazing. I don’t know what to do and end up staring into space instead of giving into my cravings for fresh content. You start to pay attention to your surroundings and think. It’s wonderful.
Your body hates boredom, because traditionally, it meant you weren't doing anything to better your life. Today, we won't die if we're not filling our boredom with farming/hunting our meals by hand. It's too easy to live nowadays. Now, we plug that hole with social media and entertainment. Rather than adapting that caveman survival instinct to something else: improving knowledge, personal health, or real relationships.
That's not to say these things as a whole need to be banned entirely. Like all things, they can be enjoyable in moderation. But too much is unhealthy. Even water has this caveat. The problem is we don't moderate.
Rather than doing/creating something useful and/or memorable, you're stuck scrolling a feed, watching other people improve. It's actually quite sad.
There were more, urgent responsibilities to tend to.
Yeah, other apes also work less hours on average than humans do.
>even medieval farmers, worked less hours on average than we do today.
On their lord's farms. After serfdom, they needed to provide for themselves too.
> /fad/
> noun
> an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, especially one that is short-lived; a craze.
I was at a coffee shop yday and made the mistake of sitting next to their huge decked up christmas tree. Wasn't crowded but there was a constant stream of teen girls shooting selfie with the tree. Each one taking literally hundreds of pics to get the 'right' one.
My usage is pretty much: listen to music, use (Google) calendar, texting, FaceTime.
Any surfing is plain doom scrolling and not productive.
Recommendations for me? Analog/simpler substitutes?
For ppl that has gone down this path - how do you feel now?
iOS has Screen Time, which allows you to set limits on how much you can use an app. I'm sure there is some equivalent on Android.
I made the mistake of purchasing FTL (a game) and had to add a Screen Time rule for it. :)
With Twitter in particular, I don't know a better way to find artists, writers, and podcasts. I have never enjoyed Twitter less than I do now, but it is unfortunately the best way I currently know. I guess it's time to start digging.
It worked great. I sometimes just don't know what to even look at on my phone. It's as exciting as an old flipphone.
That took care of the impulse. Beyond that, it's just a matter of self-discipline.
All that being said, I work on a computer all day long. I am in front of the computer all day and do a fair bit of "time wasting" there.
I'd be totally content to replace my physical phone, with a virtual one on a computer, provided I could make calls and send/receive text messages. Maybe I need to look into Google Voice...
That said I treat my phone mostly like a phone. I have my calls and texts whitelisted. If you're not in my contact list, the phone won't ring or ding. Then if I hear it ring, I know it's someone I know.
I remove most of the apps on my phone and keep it on my desk at all times. No different than a phone you would have hanging on a wall. I treat it the same, so I don't feel the need to really "use" it.
I will take my phone with me when I go places, and use it for music or maps in the car, but because I mostly treat it as a phone, I don't really see it as anything other than that.
When I started doing this I was admittedly pretty bored, but over time I just found other things to do and am never bored now. You just get used to it. Humans are pretty adaptable.
Edit: OK, I am probably wrong about this. Sorry for the stupid opinion :(
Not seeing it myself. Where's the not having the choice to disconnect? You just have a flip phone. People can still call and text you.
It will impact your social life, but you can mitigate that if you put in the effort.
The worst for me when I don’t have my phone while driving. It’s an odd anxiety.
When I was their age, I was similar -- down to wearing the trendiest of trendy clothing items (that were designed to not look overly trendy, but anyone in the know would know that they were), while still thinking myself some sort of "outsider." We had a communist club (despite all of us really being capitalists and having rich parents and benefitting immensely from capitalism), we rejected television as a lesser medium (despite secretly loving our favorite shows), upheld the virtues of "arthouse cinema" (which, you know what, fair -- I still love arthouse cinema) and we only listened to certain types of music -- on vinyl (some things never change) -- and this was just ahead of the vinyl resurgence. But secretly, a lot of us still listened to pop music on MP3s in our bedrooms, watched the same trash TV we claimed to reject, and enjoyed the same populist commercial films. It was an outward rejection, but not who we really were. It was aesthetic and fashion and came out of reading and loving Kerouac and Salinger and Thompson (authors I still love) and wanting to feel like we weren't part of the suburban bubble we were painfully part of.
I look back at my pretentious, self-important 16 year old self and I don't feel pity or regret, but I see it for what it is, and it was about fashion and aesthetic and wanting to signify to the world that I was "different." But the irony is that feeling different is one of the most universal feelings a person can have.
Again, I don't know these teenagers. And maybe they are completely genuine. I don't judge them or think less of them if it is all an aesthetic. Or if some of this is a purposeful troll. But there is still an irony about a Luddite club being profiled by the biggest media organization in the world and going viral on the very platform they claim to reject.
I do dig the aesthetic tho. I would absolutely carry a flip phone for just the aesthetic today (you can tear my iPhone from my cold dead hands).
[0]https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone/schok-flip
[1]https://www.consumercellular.com/shopping/details/link_II/vi...
It has proven reliable in middle-of-nowhere West Texas over the past few months on both T-Mobile and Consumer Cellular, likely using T-Mobile’s network.
I have no idea how any of the other functions stack up, but neither my dad nor my aunt care about anything other than making and taking dialed phone calls.