Maybe you live somewhere this is possible but it's definitely not in the developed world
But also, one doesn't always need a phone - phones can die, signal is not gauranteed. What are your "must have" things that require one to have a smart phone to participate? Assume the poster has a home phone, laptop, and credit card.
It's rather dramatic, but the phone call/conversation I could never forgive myself for missing, is the last words of a loved one before they die, whether due to car crash or some other calamity (9/11). Or missing the opportunity to take the very next flight out to see them before they pass. You are free to treat your family, biological or chosen, as you see fit, I just know there are some phone calls I'd rather be woken up in the middle of the night for than miss. Reaching me via cellphone is more direct than trying to find whatever hotel I'm at since I'm on the road as CEO and talking to customers and vendors in person on the road as CEO, so calling my house phone doesn't help.
I spent most of my career as an infrastructure engineer so high redundancy, self healing you can trust, infrastructure-as-code, and follow-the-sun shifts, are healthier for everyone than expecting people to be available to work 24/7.
A burner phone left at home just for the ability to receive SMS would be helpful for account registrations though
I'm not sure about this. With everyone moving to the cloud and web applications, this seems to not have been the case for a while to me. There surely are what are now called "local-first" alternatives to the main services (in the past those would just be called desktop applications), but if someone is using Office 365, does it have an offline mode? (Sincerely asking since I never tried this, plus, you should still get to load the web application before losing connection, right?)
Depends on how you define a phone. Cell phones are not required but SMS capable phone numbers kind of are.
I ported my cell phone number to a voip provider and get SMS and can even take calls from my desktop, or laptop, or simple voip capable DECT phones around my home as needed.
Mandatory SMS 2FA is always a red flag on a product anyway as SMS is wildly insecure. FIDO2 or GTFO.
Since the whole world is covered by satellites, living in the undeveloped doesn't guarantee privacy.
You pay a price (we miss many party invitations, only one friend consistently emails us and FB everyone else), but it's worth it.
Recently spoke to a colleague in Italy that told me he hates WhatsApp, but is forced to use it because the school of his kids in Rome use it as sole means to communicate, despite this being a legal violation (public organizations in Europe must use GDRR-compliant tools).
I lost so many connections to people and it seemed to set me back multiple years on my goals. I thought it would make me more productive, instead my userbase got cut in half.
I'm never doing that again. Huge mistake.
These are shitty shallow people, not real friends. Real friends will support, or at least tolerate, your honest ethics based lifestyle choices. Smart people often -prefer- being around people that think differently from them, and being different can even be an asset in making more smart friends.
Many of the most talented people in the world only exist on free open source platforms. Social media is not the enemy. Proprietary centralized stock price driven social media is the enemy.
Come hang out on #!:matrix.org or other great tech communities on Matrix, and/or get invested in networks like Mastodon.
Many have done this and won around the world. People just need to stop being cowards.
That said I’d be lost in five minutes if I tried to drive somewhere without gps
I used to be that way, but MRI brain scan studies have proven that regular use of GPS actually atrophies the parts of your brain responsible for navigation. You likely need a GPS because you make too much use of a GPS.
I weaned myself off by regularly printing directions or writing them down before I leave. Eventually I finally learned to navigate the san francisco bay area on my own but I always keep a map in the car just in case, though I almost never use it.