The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Not obtuse, just unconvinced. I'll try to be clearer about my stance:
I concede the design point entirely. The devices are adversarial. There's a building full of people in Menlo Park whose comp package depends on my thumb continuing to move, and I don't flatter myself that I'm immune. It is just, in my experience, a milder disease than most people think. A lot of innate dysfunction is blamed on the phones. That's why my recommendation was blockers rather than raw willpower. I'm not telling anyone to git gud in the face of a slot machine. I just wish to point out that it's not just a slot machine. It's like avoiding a city just because it has a few casinos in it.
Where I get off the bus is here:
My phone with Instagram, Twitter and Reddit stripped out is still:
I haven't used my laptop in six months, which is a shame, because I paid like £1200 for it. I only game on my PC because... the reasons are obvious.
It's the only way I speak to my parents from several thousand kilometres away. Calling that "not that useful" is a claim about your usage patterns being generalised into a claim about the hardware. Yours might genuinely be a Meta machine with a phone app bolted on, in which case locking it in a box costs you nothing and I withdraw my objection in your particular case. Mine isn't. And it is clear to me that's true for most people reading this.
I do almost all my reading on my phone. I genuinely can't remember the last time I bought a dead tree book. I acknowledge this puts me in a minority.
But the armchair with book in hand isn't what the phone is competing with. It's competing with eleven minutes in a queue at Tesco, a bus ride, the dead twenty minutes between clinics, and 3am when I'm awake on a night shift. I do not carry a Penguin Classic into the toilet. The realistic counterfactual for most of my reading time is not a better reading experience, it's worse, or none.
Which brings me to the actual disagreement, which is about the counterfactual rather than about superstimuli. Your model says the phone is a plug in the drain and pulling it lets the good stuff flow back. That is a well established vibe consensus but the evidence for that is thinner than people assume.
When English schools banned phones for the school day, the students didn't use their phones less overall or score better on wellbeing, sleep or attainment; they just shifted the usage till they got outside.
(That makes the whole "phones in school are bad for you" rather moot)
Meanwhile an RCT explicitly designed to teach goal-directed use rather than reduction performed about as well as a standard digital detox condition on problematic use). That is what I'm advocating.
Removing access and improving allocation seem to land in roughly the same place, which is what you'd expect if the binding constraint is what the person wants to do with their attention rather than where their attention is physically able to go.
A blocker is a scalpel: I lose the slop and keep the library. I don't need this, but I could do it.
A lock box is a tourniquet: it works, at the cost of the limb.
My on-call registrar cannot ring a box. I appreciate that FtttG's box has a timer and that this is a solved problem for most evenings, and honestly if it's working for him he should keep doing it. I am just concerned about he hasn't tried something... less extra.
My gripe is with the version of this that treats total removal as the obviously superior intervention because the intermediate one requires trusting yourself a bit.
And I stand by the mythologising point. The man who locks his phone away for an hour and reads a novel is real and I salute him, he must be, we've got plenty of people on the planet. He is also, in my experience, wildly outnumbered by the man who locks his phone away and then watches telly, or reorganises a drawer, or lies on the sofa contemplating the middle distance in a way he will later describe to himself as restorative. If it turns out that what you actually wanted was a book, you could also have just opened the book.
Replying because you're missing the obvious truth that different strategies work for different people and you do not always know why, especially by reading an internet post. First Toil then the Grave's plan may work for him splendidly, and not because he has some defect of character.
I concede all the usefulness of smartphones (I am typing this by the way on a computer). I still balk at your seemingly inalterable attachment to them. The other day on a walk I witnessed nearly every third person driving by looking at his or her phone. Who knows why. A map, a menu, an emergency text from a pregnant wife, a thesis on Heidegger. Or maybe just some dumbass inflammatory reel or so-called influencer. I do know that were Japanese suburban traffic only slightly faster on average that there would be a lot more swerving and crashing than there is now. And this with a current law enacting large fines and potential voiding of licenses for driving while staring at a phone.
People lose situational awareness when gazing at phones. They forget where they are, they forget what used to be basic manners. And this is in Japan where actually speaking on a phone in an enclosed space (such as a bus or train) is still tantamount to open-mouthed sneezing in an elevator. I still see it, and not always from foreigners. I had a girlfriend in grad school who used to read fucking books while driving until she was warned repeatedly that this was a reckless, selfish thing to do. This of course does not mean that reading books is innately harmful. Nobody is saying books are the devil. Still, reading has never been the best way to learn. As for phones, we've all seen the pithy quote.
You suggest @FtttG has claimed:
And maybe that was his intention (I did not get that.) And I understand perhaps yours is just an instinctive desire to defend technology or modernism or whatever.
But phones are not always, or even most of the time, such a wonderful thing, despite what is perhaps their potential to be such. Any more than many things that should be good, that are good in theory, that seem foolproof in their benefit to humanity, end up fucking people up. But then you know all this and you know some version of all the stories I might tell to make this point. I predict that you will remain intransigent. I would consider this a blind spot of yours, a shortcoming worth reflecting on. You will not agree. Call me Kreskin. You do you, as they say.
I'm not stupid. I couldn't miss that if I tried.
I have said, rather clearly:
Really? Are we going to psychoanalyzing arguments here? I can't stop you, even if that is an incorrect assessment. I've read the relevant literature, and shared it. It's not a content-free claim.
It would be trivial for me to turn this around and say that to you, and many others raising objections, phones are a mythical boogeyman holding them back from self-actualization. As I pointed out to @Iconochasm, their utility is ridiculously high even with the dopamine-pumps removed. Did I want to say this? Not really. I wouldn't, if you hadn't. I think it's true anyway.
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