I've never understood the "it's a leash" thing. Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them.
You are right. However, a ringing phone in the mid-to-late 20th century created a ton of tension and was a movie trope. People felt obligated to respond to what they assumed was a human being on the other end.
Obviously, this obligation to respond has been diluted with robodialers and mixed messaging methods.
The expectation of actually catching someone was much lower than these days though. Because of course not being at home meant not being reachable.
There's was also this unwritten rule about not calling people too late, which doesn't really happen anymore in my circles since people can now see whether you're active (eg on WhatsApp) and switch their phone on DnD when they sleep anyway.
Do you though? Because people on the other end will often demand you respond to them if you have your mobile phone with you. This is why people consider it a leash.
I switched off the blue tickmarks in WhatsApp and even that really triggered people.
Oh, so you've never had the "why didn't you pick up/ call back/ answer my text/ etc" conversation with your partner? Lucky...
Everybody else seems to accept that it's an endless series of tweaks, adjustments and highly context-specific compromises
In this case is it the children ?
In the mid-'90s and 2000s phone batteries lasted longer than they do today, assuming the regular usage of the day.
A late '80s Micro TAC, especially with the fat battery, still easily qualified for my previous description. You'd have to go to the early '80s brick phones to get just 1h of talk time from a charge but then again realistically very few people actually talked that much on the mobile in those days when even the networks would have severely limited you. The real sticking point is more that turning off the phone to cut standby time wouldn't have really saved anything for talking time within a day, until you had the time to recharge.
I think the worst thing was the memory effect, where instead of conserving battery you'd actively try to drain it when you had the time so you could charge it from 0.
It wasn't many years that this made sense, but during the early 90s (and I think some of the 80s but not so sure) it was quite common to pair beeper for incoming with phone for outgoing. (At least in the UK, but I don't see why it would've been different somewhere like USA either.)
If I end up in this situation again I might try and get a cheap burner phone and only install the pager app on it.
Spotify/Audible/etc in my car. Google maps/Apple maps. When I go camping I have overlanding/camping/blm apps that are constantly updated with openings, etc. Weather apps so I know to put the top of my jeep/car on to not get rained in. Uber/Lyft of which I use multiple times a week. Bank apps. Investment apps. Checking the news/hockey/whatever when I'm out and about. Looking up facts my friends and I argue over while knocking back beers. Checking to see if anyone has stolen/broken into my car. Launching my botvac. Controlling my AC from anywhere. Plex..
Everyone survived without them, sure, but everyone survived without computers for a long time and now they've given us massive convenience.
It's far more a computer in my pocket than a telephone.
I ended up getting one for development. It proved useful enough that I used it myself, but I've managed to limit usage to WhatsApp (and SMS), web reading (like HN now) and not much else.
Lots of Web stuff (especially financial stuff) requires 2FA so SMS is now more-or-less required.
People have learnt though that my phone is always on silent, and I mostly don't check it during the day. I don't have email on it, and I don't do social media. I treat it as "my device" not as an "interruption device".
Of course the joy of them is that for every person it's different. You can use it whatever way you prefer.
Although there are likely an overwhelming majority of my peers who do have an interruption device phone, I refuse my phone not be My device, and I explicitly buy phones that I know I can customize (unlock bootloaders, flash roms, or simply just know it has the interop capabilities I need to make it my own). Where this is in opposition with your statement is that I do have social media, mail and even work email on my phone, I just chose to customize it to not be interrupting to work and personal life (though obviously that line is different for everyone).
Of course I'm not saying your way is wrong at all, just sharing my experience.
I'm notoriously unreachable, perhaps even offensively unreachable, and I'm starting to look for time and money savings to justify getting a new one/repairing the SE if possible. Eg. I'd save $10+/mo in Starbucks refills if I had that app, enough of those cases to cover the bill.
My next phone will be like parent poster's. I had iOS setup with no notifications except Venmo and a priority email alias. Currently I'm using an Unbuntu laptop where I can get to Google Voice that was activated with a Mint Mobile trial on Starbucks wifi. Am homeless, actually been able to secure and hold a couple labor/hospitality jobs like this.
I am okay with that.
Although a smartphone related work horror story I heard once, was somebodies boss who communicated the plans for the week for 12 employees in one 40 minute rambling speech message, which may or may not involve crucial need-to-know information at minute 35 and 30 seconds of information that affected you.
The same way people somewhat adapted to urban noise by better insulation and noise proofing, having a phone in dnd most of the time is I think a must nowadays.
You still can pay attention when you want, potentially at some regular intervals you set for yourself, and ignore it the rest of the time.
How far we’ve fallen since the days when usernames were opaque numbers and anonymity was prized.
There are still plenty of email providers left and right that will allows you to subscribe without a phone number. You’ll probably have to pay though. What may be harder in this precise use case is getting a domain name (which is not mandatory but really helpful if you want to be able to switch providers easily) but I’m pretty sure you can still register domains with a landline number.
Where I live, going without a phone would be incredibly tedious, as it handles bus and train tickets, tracking for hourly busses, no ATMs within walking distance and it's basically standard for local events to do "sign in" by having you scan a QR code and so on.
Not having a phone would mean budgeting much more time for going anywhere and having to carry change for the bus.
But if you have a car, you get to bypass most of that, no need to worry about tickets or tracking, ATMs don't need to be very local either. Then if you don't really care about attending local events, you get to avoid everything.
If on top of that, if your job is accomodating, you could conceivably go without a phone entirely. My job would crawl to a near stop if my coworkers had to wait for me to be in front of a laptop/desktop to respond to them.
Even here in Denmark that's still an option.
[1] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/Deutschlandtick...
Wouldn't it be more annoying to get home, and then have to go out again to get the milk? What they probably meant was that they didn't ever want to go to the store themselves and wanted their spouse to do it.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-sti...