Oh yea, my kidney definitely died because of a lack of willpower. Indubitably.
And to loop the analogy back – I don't think ubiquitous network reachability is ultimately a big problem; it's what we do with it: Social expectations around constant availability to respond, addictive/heavily gamified applications, etc.
Thankfully our shared thought that you can't be away from everything is not true: caves, anything underwater or dense forests around the world are totally inaccessible for any satellite devices.
Also, not sure if you've used any satellite devices but even in most conditions you're still pretty away from things. You have to set up the device with a view of the open sky and wait several minutes for a text-only message of a handful of bytes. Using it in a Costa Rican rainforest was almost impossible.
This has already been the case for most people for decades. The change is a matter of degree rather than some new paradigm shift.
If you must for emergencies, bring it turned off locked away, and promise yourself you will only take it out in an emergency. But then you didn't need one for emergencies before it was possible, so I'd argue you still don't need one.
No one goes somewhere far away, explicitly for being disconnected, that’s an implicit goal.
Otherwise, you can just turn off your phone do I have to leave it.
I, umm, know a thing or two about going remote without communications.
No, people didn't have phones, satellite messengers etc. Nor did we have penicillin or water filters, and as a result, people sometimes died from (by today's measure) trivially preventable causes.
So that's not a very good argument for not bringing a phone or satellite beacon/messenger on a hike – permanently connected and livestreaming, turned off and at the bottom of your backpack, or anything in between. The choice is all yours!
The problem with getting disconnected is that we don’t want to do it, we are afraid of missing out and we usually invent other activities to rationalize it.
In a sense it’s a bit like enjoying the radio in traffic, taking the long ride home after work. This is not something that you would rationally do unless you have to, but there are some benefits that people are still seeking from it.
A lot of people today expect that most travel maintains some degree of connectivity back home, especially if something urgent/serious happens.
Yeah we will. Why wouldn't we?
> It’s not the L3 connectivity or texts from loved ones that harms us.
Yeah it is. The fact that you feel you need to "announce" yourself real time is depressing. Can you not deal with being away from your loved one. Are you that clingy that you need to be in touch 24/7? Or is it trust issues?
"Hi hun; love you, ill be back in a few days" does wonders for a relationship.
What's wrong of explaining your vacation after you touch base?
>> We won't all be addicted to digital cigarettes forever.
>Yeah we will. Why wouldn't we?
That's why I called them cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes used to be ubiquitous. We have dramatically reduced smoking and it's now more normal to not be addicted to cigarettes.
As we better understand how things negatively impact our health we gradually adjust our behavior. This makes sense from both a natural selection stand point and by simply observing consistent advancement in healthcare.
I don't claim it will go away entirely but it will be more socially acceptable to disconnect from the bad parts and you'll have better tools and support to do so.
> Yeah we will. Why wouldn't we?
We will until the civilization collapses due to humanity's smartphone induced apathy.
These all sound more like L8 problems, to be honest.
The human brain is not designed to handle that and is entirely abstract from normal pre-internet situations. Normal experience is low bandwidth input of mostly known self-reinforcing stimulus. A signal that's approximately analogous to 100% noise screamed at 120db does not improve the human condition. It just leads to mental breakdown and psychotic episodes.
Carefully filtered bias-reinforcing echo chambers are actually a good thing and are what we should be living the majority of our lives in. Having the option to not do that is a good thing, but it should not be the norm.
Libraries are not raw unfiltered samples of everyone's brains. They're carefully filtered and curated to provide maximal learning ability (with quiet environments to reduce distraction to allow focused learning).
We are also not evolved to handle constant streams of highly curated content, harnessing the psychology of addiction, leveraging our individual interests (conscious or subconscious) to advance other’s economic interests.
What we need: content curated by our chosen specified interests and quality bars, however refined we wish those too be, and completely agnostic otherwise.
You control your own experience.
Stop treating human brains like all-capable, all-rational, all-free-willed things. Stop treating any technology as a neutral tool. It's disgusting and harming.