I recall, pre-iPhone, sitting in a pub waiting for a friend to arrive, staring into the middle-distance. I noticed a young man sitting at the bar with a phone. He'd pick it up, check for messages, put it down, take a sip of beer then his leg would start to judder (he was on a bar stool), then repeat the whole thing. A cadence of around 45s. "What a weirdo" I thought to myself. Turns out I was the weirdo, heh.
Yep. When I worked at Apple and took the (Apple) bus to work, I would arrive early at the bus stop and wait with the other employees. Lined up, everyone had their phones out, staring down. Me, I was looking at the old out-of-comnmision payphone, at the cars going by, at the copies of "Avisador" in the busted newspaper stand.
Boredom is a good thing for the brain.
And, honestly, I must be of the older generation because I find nothing very interesting on my phone. It takes pictures and gives me directions. I'm a lap-topper.
I hear this adage repeated a lot, but is it true? A quick kagi finds me lots of news articles quoting neuro-scientists, but no actual studies I can see.
If it is, I assume like sleep or vegetables there's a certain amount you should have per day and a point of diminishing returns.
Exact same experience at Google in 2015. I remember being super weirded out that seemingly everyone was buried in phones and laptops while walking around the campus. Hated it.
Wikipedia’s random link is great for learning something new. It is described here as I can’t copy the real link on my phone without it resolving to a new page.
Pre palm tro I'd have a book or laptop or newspaper with me everywhere cause it was either that, doing highlights, or reading o magazine at the doctor. Though I learned some great recipes from o magazine.
Pre Kindle I'd take around 15 lbs of books with me on trips.
There's a joke in knpins about reading the shampoo bottle on the John. I've done that
I would always have a copy of The Economist, New Yorker, NYRB, LRB or similar when I was travelling around London, so avoiding boredom was a priority for me even then. Much more restful to read a physical magazine though, and the only thing to distract me from an article was other articles in the magazine or my surroundings rather than "maybe that comment on Hacker News has a few more upvotes now".
A few years back I arrived at a venue sans phone* waiting for a date to arrive. I was early and she was late.
It was actually incredible to get the visceral reminder of just how ingrained having my phone for distraction was to me. I didn't take any action but sometimes wonder if I should have.
*I had lent my phone to a friend, who was using it to communicate with the person who had found their phone and making recovery/transfer easier... classic?
No, he was the weirdo. The fact that something is common does not make it normal. If you walked around Hong Kong in the 1880s you'd think you are a weirdo for not smoking opium all day. There will be a similar rude awakening after the current one.
> Reviews.org surveyed 1,000 Americans 18 years and older with a +/- 4% margin of error and a confidence level of 95%. The survey results were weighted to reflect characteristics of the United States population using available data from the US census.
Absent them explicitly saying otherwise, I think we need to assume that the survey was done of reviews.org visitors. Reviews.org has reviews for exactly three categories of services: internet providers, mobile phone plans and services, and TV and streaming.
Weighting for US demographics isn't going to make this sample very representative—this survey is of people who are browsing reviews for a set of products that most people don't think too hard about, which also happens to be a set of products that is tightly related to screen time use.
> we need to assume that the survey was done of reviews.org visitors.
That's pretty unlikely. Reviews.org likely engages one of many vendors (like Qualtrics[1]) that will solicit responses online for a survey you design and provide to them through their survey building tool.
I've read dozens of these survey methodologies, and the reputable ones always tell you who they recruited to do the survey and what sampling method was used (if only in broad strokes). Given that this one does neither, we have to assume the laziest approach possible.
If they wanted us to take their survey seriously they'd have a real methodology section.
One of my favourite achievements of the past several years has been to actively NOT use my phone.
I started by eliminating social media accounts, which had an immediate and positive effect on my phone use.
Next, I set hard phone time/day limits: no phone while hiking, no phone while at a social meetup or restaurant, no phone while shopping.
Finally, I focused on what I should use it for and stuck to only that: checking work email when I need to away from a PC (but replies wait until I get to a PC), the odd Googling when I'm away from a PC, scrolling my tech news feeds once per evening for up to 20 minutes, and of course, missed phone calls/texts from friends and family (checked periodically, 1-2 times per day).
And the end result? I'm very happy with my relationship with this non-invasive piece of technology, mainly because I ensured it was non-invasive.
I was very late to the party getting a smartphone. Didn't stop me picking up my laptop repeatedly. Visiting the same old haunts.
I have yet to install Facebook or Whatsapp or similar. I think it would be the death of me. I spend way too much time on my phone/computer.
I was in a care giving role and felt it couldn't leave my side. Since losing that person, I now rejoice in being able to leave my phone. Heck I didn't turn it on yesterday. And it has been sitting in the kitchen all day today.
The telephone does fill me with existential dread as most communication with me is asking me for something or alerting me to something negative. Perhaps that's an age thing. Whereas the Internet is still pleasurable but a complete and utter time suck.
It's a false sense of urgency thing. The kids just grow calloused to it, culminating in e.g. completely ignoring the door bell.
I had a friend that decided to essentially go off the grid around 2000-2005, he's my age (gen-z), I remember him showing me a website he was developing with javascript and IE.
Now he's asking me to help with the Google Play / Mac App stuff because it makes no sense to him. It isn't an age thing.
In an age of smartphones, nobody would think of ringing my doorbell without texting first. Deliveries come with notifications. An unexpected door ring at this point is probably someone I don't want to bother dealing with like a salesperson.
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.
Old guy here who grew up without phones but later felt the dependace they were creating in me so worked to stop it.
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.
These are all good points - and ones I’ve been trying to follow for the past few months. Rule five was the most important one for me. Anytime I have an urge to doomscroll, I make a conscious effort to do something IRL instead. Taking up a deep hobby which can take years/decades to actually master seems like a better time sink (practicing visual art in my case)
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
Notice how gen Z is less anxious than Millennials and Gen x when it comes to losing their phone. I think that younger generations will have a better understanding of the addictive nature of phones from a young age and will learn that they will not go far if they are absorbed in their phones. My hope is that we will learn to use the easily available entertainment on our phones like we learn to use recreational drugs, with moderation and respect.
> Notice how gen Z is less anxious than Millennials and Gen x when it comes to losing their phone.
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.
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.
TV is nowhere near as addictive as social media. Take it from someone who watched hours of it daily as a teenager and then barely even missed it upon going to college. Social media has all the niche stuff that wouldn't merit a 30-minute TV series. It's unpredictable, funny, local and international in ways TV never is.
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).
It feels like for a lot of people (I'm including myself in that) "reducing social media consumption" is a somewhere between "reducing my cocaine usage" and "reducing my heroin usage" it's so compulsive. I'm not sure there's much to be done except not be on it.
Give it 10 or so years and The Thing(tm) will cycle around to the next thing.
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.
The difference is that you can take your phone with you but the same can't be true for the TV or the gaming console. That's a big factor.
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.
> 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.
Get a kindle and start reading books. That’s what's keeping me from staring at a phone all the time. I might be spending similar amounts of time looking at a screen but at least I get something valuable out of it.
One of the things I don’t get about the panic over phones is that we’re panicking over phones and not what’s done on them. Why buy a kindle, when you can use any of the many ereader apps out there? If the concern is discipline while on you phone there’s also ways to lock yourself out of apps and websites after X amount of time on them.
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 dunno. What’s better about a book (at least, a fiction book read for fun) than HackerNews, for example? I mean, I don’t think either is particularly good but I’m not sure how the book would be an upgrade.
I've tried a lot of things like app blockers and so on, and what has given me the best sense of control is simply removing the phone from my physical presence. I.e. turned off or silent in my bag or in another room. And being intentional about when I bring it out. This has given me a huge productivity boost. (I commented about that boost a while back and some guy actually accused me of lying because he found it so unbelievable!)
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.
Nah I think twitter is among the worst. It doesn't actually make you more informed of anything actionable you'd actually benefit from being aware of. It just broadcasts the most shallow rage-bait possible, from a constantly updating stream of pointless arguments and mentally ill strangers.
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.
This Christmas, a relative's boyfriend was on his phone literally 90% of the time we were together. Even when we were opening presents. So I started talking to him. He kept looking at his phone but eventually he put it down. I just needed to get him talking about Lord of the Rings and it was over.
Those of us who do not use phones at all we need to engage with these people who are suffering the worst. We need to show them that loneliness can be alleviated by other means.
Please do not say this is all harmless either. The material they are looking at, and behavioral programing they are being subjecting to, is not harmless. I grew up watching old school TV, and I was never able to see anything remotely close to what an 11 year old can see today.
Something new that I've seen is men standing at urinals on their phones. It really blew my mind that they can't even take a pee that lasts maybe 20-30 seconds without looking at their phone. What could you possibly do in that time in that position?
I do it. Typically just checking a few message alerts, or finishing a news story, or starting a podcast download. It's less disruptive than checking those items in front of someone else, when you should be giving the other person attention.
Do I have to? No. Do I always do it? No. But just today at the gym, I used the 30 seconds or so there to start downloading a podcast to listen to during my workout. Every button click takes a couple seconds, pause, wait, etc... Why not stack those non-productive times together?
I guess, but doesn't that start to feel like the tyranny of productivity? If it doesn't take long while you're the urinal it doesn't take long just afterwards too, and then you can enjoy the feeling of having a pee! (Perhaps there's a blogpost in "Mindful pissing"...)
Probably 30 years ago, a Washington Post columnist (a recent arrival from Philadelphia) thought it an illustration of Washington compulsiveness that he had seen a man at the gym take his pager into the showers. That I should say makes less sense, given the slight probability of saving half of one's shower duration in returning a call.
Let me add that I am not one of the multi-tasking multi-monthers: the phone says that I had 32 minutes/day of screen time last week.
I just finished reading Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” It is a good read, especially for parents.
I think there's a lot that's wrong with phones, but I can't help but think of scares from decades past that were laser-focused on inducing parental panic, but turned out not to be as harmful as initially reported: the fears of Rock 'n Roll making teenagers out-of-control lascivious horndogs, the Satanic panic, DARE/war on drugs, etc.
Readit News
Boredom is a good thing for the brain.
And, honestly, I must be of the older generation because I find nothing very interesting on my phone. It takes pictures and gives me directions. I'm a lap-topper.
It contains the entire Internet? If you see me on my phone at a bus stop, I’m probably reading a book.
I hear this adage repeated a lot, but is it true? A quick kagi finds me lots of news articles quoting neuro-scientists, but no actual studies I can see.
If it is, I assume like sleep or vegetables there's a certain amount you should have per day and a point of diminishing returns.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Random
Pre Kindle I'd take around 15 lbs of books with me on trips.
There's a joke in knpins about reading the shampoo bottle on the John. I've done that
I guess I sort of saw the social-media-in-your-pocket thing coming a long way before it did.
A very professional way of saying you were getting a lot of play? /j
It was actually incredible to get the visceral reminder of just how ingrained having my phone for distraction was to me. I didn't take any action but sometimes wonder if I should have.
*I had lent my phone to a friend, who was using it to communicate with the person who had found their phone and making recovery/transfer easier... classic?
> Reviews.org surveyed 1,000 Americans 18 years and older with a +/- 4% margin of error and a confidence level of 95%. The survey results were weighted to reflect characteristics of the United States population using available data from the US census.
Absent them explicitly saying otherwise, I think we need to assume that the survey was done of reviews.org visitors. Reviews.org has reviews for exactly three categories of services: internet providers, mobile phone plans and services, and TV and streaming.
Weighting for US demographics isn't going to make this sample very representative—this survey is of people who are browsing reviews for a set of products that most people don't think too hard about, which also happens to be a set of products that is tightly related to screen time use.
That's pretty unlikely. Reviews.org likely engages one of many vendors (like Qualtrics[1]) that will solicit responses online for a survey you design and provide to them through their survey building tool.
[1] https://www.qualtrics.com/research-services/online-sample/
If they wanted us to take their survey seriously they'd have a real methodology section.
I started by eliminating social media accounts, which had an immediate and positive effect on my phone use.
Next, I set hard phone time/day limits: no phone while hiking, no phone while at a social meetup or restaurant, no phone while shopping.
Finally, I focused on what I should use it for and stuck to only that: checking work email when I need to away from a PC (but replies wait until I get to a PC), the odd Googling when I'm away from a PC, scrolling my tech news feeds once per evening for up to 20 minutes, and of course, missed phone calls/texts from friends and family (checked periodically, 1-2 times per day).
And the end result? I'm very happy with my relationship with this non-invasive piece of technology, mainly because I ensured it was non-invasive.
I have yet to install Facebook or Whatsapp or similar. I think it would be the death of me. I spend way too much time on my phone/computer.
I was in a care giving role and felt it couldn't leave my side. Since losing that person, I now rejoice in being able to leave my phone. Heck I didn't turn it on yesterday. And it has been sitting in the kitchen all day today.
The telephone does fill me with existential dread as most communication with me is asking me for something or alerting me to something negative. Perhaps that's an age thing. Whereas the Internet is still pleasurable but a complete and utter time suck.
Sorry for your loss.
It's a false sense of urgency thing. The kids just grow calloused to it, culminating in e.g. completely ignoring the door bell.
I had a friend that decided to essentially go off the grid around 2000-2005, he's my age (gen-z), I remember him showing me a website he was developing with javascript and IE.
Now he's asking me to help with the Google Play / Mac App stuff because it makes no sense to him. It isn't an age thing.
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
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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 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.
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
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 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.
Dead Comment
Those of us who do not use phones at all we need to engage with these people who are suffering the worst. We need to show them that loneliness can be alleviated by other means.
Please do not say this is all harmless either. The material they are looking at, and behavioral programing they are being subjecting to, is not harmless. I grew up watching old school TV, and I was never able to see anything remotely close to what an 11 year old can see today.
Do I have to? No. Do I always do it? No. But just today at the gym, I used the 30 seconds or so there to start downloading a podcast to listen to during my workout. Every button click takes a couple seconds, pause, wait, etc... Why not stack those non-productive times together?
Watch one ad on youtube?
Let me add that I am not one of the multi-tasking multi-monthers: the phone says that I had 32 minutes/day of screen time last week.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxious_Generation