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Comment by arccy | Hacker News Reader

with a modicum of self control, you can turn off your phone when it's not needed.

Humans are not rational. Even if you are 99% of the time, with a smartphone in your pocket there's a good chance you will use it for your emotional 1% within 2hours (and unravel). Read Rutger Bregman's goal for 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jan/04/lifes-t...

As a parent of young children I've found that I need my phone on any time my children are not with me. Calls from school or day care don't always come from the same number, so I answer every call when my kids are in the care of others (but none otherwise).

Then practice keeping your phone in your pocket for increasingly long periods of time. You may need to build up to this and to develop some level of control.

Why? What happens if you don’t have it, just as parents didn’t have them for centuries?

Child care now requires parents to be readily available, especially to pick up children who are sick. A century ago, child care providers were expected to care for sick children until the parent arrived. Failure to be responsive would be a violation of the child care agreement.

Is this really true? There are millions of parents who are unreachable while working. A surgeon isn’t going to be able to leave in the middle of surgery to pick up their kid from child care.

My kid got sick at daycare one time when I was over an hour away. They just had to stay there while I worked my way back.

It happens, and it is handled normally.

I don't think that's a counter example. Our day care requested sick kids to be picked up within an hour. A single late pickup of a sick kid due to traffic/distance would be handled normally. An unreachable parent who turns off their phone and is extremely delayed, especially on multiple occasions is a very different thing.

When we looked at in-home child care, one of the options was a nanny who would care for kids even when the kids were sick. So I'm sure the rapid-pickup-of-sick-kids policy isn't universal. However, our day care had that policy and we made sure we knew who was "on-call" to get kids when important meetings or work travel impacted our availability.

The problem with the reliance on self control is the self control. You have it or you don't. While I generally agree just exercising pure self control may be a viable strategy for some, it does not work for everyone. Particularly people with ADHD do have a tendency to be easily captured by screens.

I've personally struggled with adherence to my reduce screen time goals and while exercising more self control has helped, making active choices about my environment did help a lot more. And I like it that way, and I hate to see these choices be torpedoed all the time

> You have it or you don't.

To quote the Gorillaz:

> That's a fallacy

Self-control is not a "have it or don't" thing. It can be developed and exercised, often simply by trying and failing, and then trying again (like any exercise!).

I'm not saying it's not harder for some people than others. I'm also not saying that it isn't harder to exercise on some circumstances than others. However, it's absolutely not a binary thing, and it is achievable, in some form, for anyone.

It's also about building systems to help with self control. Turning alerts off would be one. Leaving the phone in another room for longer periods of time is another.

easier for some brains than others, no? It's a sad loss of agency (for those whom it matters) to not be able to make such a simple choice to control the environmental conditions they are weak to

but i am genuinely glad for people who find that level of self-control readily accessible, that's just not me.

There's some interesting implications around the "default mode network" that's worth thinking about, and the sort of world we might be inadvertently bending toward [building] when everyone is constantly struggling to engage internal control mechanisms and depleting their ability to do other unconscious sorts of processing: https://archive.is/fYqtB

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