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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

None of these devices contain a portal to the internet. None of them contain apps that bombard you with notifications to try and get you to spend hours in them. None of these devices have been relentlessly A/B tested to maximize addictiveness.

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To me that sounds like, "yes, it is a self-control and discipline issue — and the solution is forced abstention, à la mode d'Odysseus tying himself to the mast." (Although the old tactician did so to keep his ears unplugged and experience the sirens without the usual catastrophe.)

Except instead of the Sirens hanging out on a remote island, they hang out in your pocket and there's a huge corporate machine who is constantly trying to find new ways to get the Sirens in front of you because they make money off of every person the Sirens lure to their death.

Then curate those apps. My wife doesn’t run the social media apps on the phone, forcing her to make a conscious decision to pull out an iPad. The Apps I use are largely work, browser, email, Strava(/garmin/athlytic), maps, music and smart home control / network tools. It’s just about being conscious of what you put on it and what you use it for.

Oh certainly, I do this myself.

But out of the box all this shit is constantly begging you for your attention, they come with so many attention sinks installed that you have to find time and energy to sit down and curate, there's entire huge industries based on getting you to stare at your phone forever that you have to consciously spend time and effort to get rid of, versus "this ipod just plays music and cannot do anything else".

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