Is there any hope of turning this trend around or at least keeping it where it is? I don’t think that the months spent on my phone have benefited me or anyone I know.
You have to start with yourself an be an example. It is an "addiction of sorts" (maybe a very strong habit?), but think of it like telling an alcoholic to just stop drinking.
Like an addiction, you need to get rid of the Pavlovian ringing bells to help you through.
Rule one: Turn off all notifications and turn on battery saver mode.
Rule two: Get off of all social media. I am including HN with this. Delete them, you will be fine. HN is the only place I talk online now and only on my laptop, but its days are numbered for me.
Rule three: Leave your phone behind. Probably the hardest. I started just by leaving it the car when I was shopping, then leaving it home when shopping.When I ma at the coffee shop I leave it in my bag.
Rule four: Do not use your phone at all when you are home. Start by setting time limits and extend them, but no one died stopping cold turkey. I only even use my laptop in the morning to read news
Rule five: Learn to do something else with your hands. Cook, work on your car, clean your house, anything.
Rule six: Be OK with "not knowing" and try to stop searching the internet every time a question pops up in your head. This was very hard for me because of my clinically diagnosed OCD. I found the "checking" my phone was allowing me to do just made my OCD worse in the long run.
I am at the point now where I use my phone so little the battery lasts five days easy with 20% left.
The thought that quitting social media is harder than quitting smoking also helps cement the idea that it is bad for me when I try to dissuade myself from using it
My laptop is essentially a desktop as well. I only use it on a desk in one room.
I never turn to these devices out of boredum. That is the best rule.
Plus, steven black on github has a great host file blocking all kibds of websites.
Wait, what? Has this been your experience? My sense has been the exact opposite: the younger the person the more attached to the phone and the more sense of existential dread when it goes missing.
Eventually I confirmed with the lawyers that I could also take away their phones, and that broke some of them. I mean that I had troops break down in tears in my office when I informed them of the punishment, and some went to extreme lengths to circumvent the punishment and secretly gain access to another phone. (They still had laptops and Wi-Fi, by the way, along with permission to borrow a phone if they needed to make an important call.)
The Army has studied this a bit and found that not allowing troops to have their phones during basic training is a significant obstacle to recruiting right now.
Millennials had it dumped in their lap like GenX and haven’t had time to build “cognitive antibodies” but I think that’s starting to happen
Elders were addicted to TV for similar reason, but as a Xennial I grew up on TV and find it fucking boring.
Teen use of drugs and alcohol, sex is way down compared to prior generations.
It’ll take time and progress can be hampered by avarice of powers that be coughVCcough
Human biology is analog not digital. It’s far more fluid than a machine; one can be a social nut but care for themselves and others because philosophy of proper social etiquette is pretentious phrenology like bullshit. It’ll evolve defenses on its own that corpo won’t be able to anticipate or ignore until it’s too late. And just not giving a fuck to begin with is an option. Not much Sam Altman, PG can do if people just don’t use these stupid things if people just evolve into nonsense discourse but keep stuff on the shelves.
IMO in the US we need to take a minute to live by Tim Leary’s mindset, drop out and get strapped and remind a couple hundred mega rich 8 billion other people don’t actually need them.
Only Watchman will ever be able to police Watchmen https://aeon.co/essays/game-theory-s-cure-for-corruption-mak...
Decades ago I would come home and crash in front of the TV — watching dreck.
At least in the evening I think the mind needs to disengage, relax. That can be found in watching "Forensic Files" or playing online solitaire or scrolling through BlueSky.
Perhaps reading would be a better substitute though.
Screen Time on iOS (which Android picked up later) was a response to people being concerned about being on their phones all of the time.
"Uglifying" hacks (mostly using the grayscale filter) are popular too.
Then there are purpose-built devices like the reMarkable and Daylight Computer that tout "focus" as a selling point.
All that said, I don't think we (in the US) are ready for a complete social media cleanse. Lots of people use tricks to reduce their social media consumption (not too dissimilar to quit-smoking tactics, interestingly), but the overall reaction to banning TikTok was overwhelmingly negative. Furthermore, their stats on phone use while driving are actually low; one study actually claimed that 90% of people did this (and my experiences walking and biking around all but confirm this).
Previously it was gaming (namely consoles), before that was TV, before that was comic books, and so on. Every generation has its "Spends Too Much Time on The Thing(tm)" stereotype.
I feel like we spend way more time on our phones that what we (or they) used to do with consoles, TV, comic books and so on.
people were sick with the flu before, surely the cancer won't kill them, they got over the flu, didn't they
I suspect more people would have bought Apple Vision if it was cheaper/more affordable. I suspect a lot more people would have bought it if it was 1/2 weight at $1000 and didn't require that dangling battery. The future will be people with their phones hooked to their faces.
Even if many of us old school computer users don’t quite like it phones are the general purpose computing devices for many people. There’s no reason to worry about the generic time spent using them.
I've tried this, but it feels like a big administrative burden, having to think about how long each app should be, when it should be available etc, similar to the feelings I had on Facebook about bureaucratising friendships (who's an "acquiantance", who's a "close friend").
It feels like you have to make so many explicit decisions for digital stuff that was much more fluid before - don't want X to come to a party? Don't phone them.
I still average about 2 hours a day on it. Most of this happens when I'm eating or using the bathroom and would not be productive time anyway. By the metric of this article that's still 1 month of my life per year. Not sure I see this as a huge problem, if I did, I could cut it down even further.
Maybe we should be more concerned about a related figure - the time we spend consuming digital media, which is now pushing 8 hours per day. The phone is a very pervasive vessel for that but when I cut back phone use I found that media consumption on other devices started creeping up so I'm trying to work out ways to avoid that. I think our lives are richer if we create more and consume less.
It honestly decreased my baseline well-being far faster than anything else, even when I'd just try to follow the most insular network of math academics and art people. At least tiktok was vaguely more positive and the occasional gnome footage or afghan giant conspiracy was fun.