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Comment by kjkjadksj | Hacker News Reader

What does it say about the underlying issue if they can’t simply use their smartphone like a dumbphone which is certainly possible? I don’t think thats solved. These are people who sound like if there was a bowl of candy they’d have no control not to eat it all or something. Sounds like an issue for the psychologist not a tech issue.

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if you have a bowl of candy on your desk, do you eat more or less than usual?

Depends on your own willpower. I imagine if you are one to take more candy than usual if its closer, you also either sleepwalk or even somehow rationalize you getting your candy fix in even if there was no bowl of it. It then becomes a question of discipline or a lack of it, which no doubt might manifest in other aspects of life than this bowl of candy.

If you're exerting willpower to avoid the candy bowl on your desk, you're actively engaging in an activity that occupies some amount of your thoughts and attention. Simply not having it there is strictly better.

I think you're kinda stretching here to make this a moralistic thing, but no matter how much willpower you have it's better not to have the candy there.

> If you're exerting willpower to avoid the candy bowl on your desk, you're actively engaging in an activity that occupies some amount of your time and attention. Simply not having it there is strictly better.

Yep, I totally agree as someone with weak willpower for certain things. I keep temptations and distractions out of my own reach, because then it's easier to not succumb to them. I know my thoughts and habits are irrational to some extent and so I try to work around them.

The point is, the easiest way to keep it out of reach is to literally not have it within reach.

Everyone has finite willpower. Apparently they’d prefer to use some of theirs on things other than constantly minding their smart phone usage.

I'm agreeing with them. I was just saying that what they say corroborates my experience, that it makes the best use of my willpower to keep those things out of reach.

I'm not stretching this to be any one way or another. I'm just suggesting that its treating a symptom and not a root cause. Chances are if you are so predisposed to look at your phone to your detriment, you might have tendencies to do all sorts of similar actions to your detriment. The issue isn't the phone but the habitual tendency of trying to distract ones self from the (likely boring and mandatory) task at hand. If you tackled that issue directly, you wouldn't need a dumb phone, and you'd solve many other issues in your life beyond mere phone overuse I am sure. To me its a sell a man a fish, or teach a man how to fish and hunt and forage, type of situation.

Willpower is essentially made up: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/15/16863374/wi...

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