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.)
And once the spell is broken, you find yourself staring at people stumbling around, tied to their tiny screens.
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.
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?
Somehow we have placed all of our faith in these devices.