3 ms·

That is why it is so liberating.

by altitudinous 6y ago

nxc18 6y ago
What is it liberating you from? Your own empowerment?
- wholinator2 6y ago
  Basically yeah, but I would rephrase it as liberation from constant reliance, or from always having the perfect answer, from a lessened use of ones mind, from necessary human interaction to ask anyone a question, or from spending any precious second not maximizing the amount of information and "productivity" you can achieve. It's about being a human, in an environment, around other humans, with time to spare for original thoughts and just to enjoy being alive. I expect many people on this forum are the "productivity" and "maximizing" type. Not that there's anything wrong with that! We need those people! But I think we might all be able to benefit from truly relying on ourselves in difficult situations, instead of just asking the answer box to help us avoid any annoyance or unnecessary difficulty. If you wish your life to be a perfectly smooth series of directions given by a silicon hivemind, feel free friend. Sometimes the bumps and the dirt are what make life worth living though. Sometimes the empathy of unnecessary difficult situations can create bonds and perspective that shiny chrome smoothness cannot. Persistent smooth perfect answers have their purpose and we wouldn't have invented it if not for its use but I find the rather strong opposition to experiencing and exploring one's humanity, whether this way or that, rather frightening. Almost sounds like it's the chrome talking and not the human.
  - 1123581321 6y ago
    Think of it as rearranging your life to have those quiet moments when you want them, with the people you want to have them with. For example, I once used my phone to reroute my wife and I around an unexpectedly closed train station so we could spend a planned hour in an old cathedral. We were glad we were able to meditate and be alone with our thoughts in that cathedral instead of being alone with them trying to read unfamiliar train tables and chase down busy transit employees. After that we used the phone to update our plans to meet a friend in that city. In the 90s we probably would have just gone home and missed seeing our friend for another few years. We had a nice, long conversation with her. That doesn’t have anything to do with productivity and the only things we maximized were the most important leisure activities that day. Your motivation is certainly a good one, to be clear.
  - nxc18 6y ago
    I think there’s an assumption that if you’re using your phone regularly you’re never taking the time to have human experiences. For all but perhaps the most avoidant, I don’t think that happens in practice. I walk alone for 1-3 hours a day. Usually I wear headphones and listen to podcasts or the economist audio - I have learned a lot about the world this way. You could argue it is just entertainment, but I suppose my old CS lectures were just entertainment, too. Having audio content helps make the walks more bearable, and those walks have helped me lose over 100 lbs of unwanted body fat. Sometimes I take the headphones out to enjoy the sights and sounds. Sometimes I pause and enjoy the views for a while. If I see someone I want to talk to, I stop, take the headphones out, and talk. There’s no binary choice and I find that by sparing me actual reading time, this practice gives me more time to spend on things I care about. I do enjoy the nature exposure, but I don’t need 3 hours a day of focus on it - it really just doesn’t change much day to day or year to year. I wish living in a perfectly smooth chrome existence was an option, but it isn’t. My phone and the internet fail often enough that I still regularly need to call a real human and talk. The maps are wonderful, but they still require a degree of interpretation, like when a rail line is closed and the shuttle replacement isn’t listed. Just the other day I had to bother an airport employee to figure out where that shuttle pick up was. Having had that experience I don’t think it makes me better. I have empathy for unnecessarily difficult situations, that doesn’t make me want to maximize the existence of those. It motivates me to build better software, do better work, and contribute more to public efforts to make the world a better place for humans. Again, there’s no binary choice, people should use every tool at their disposal to maximize their happiness. I’ve got a perfectly good phone, but I walked the streets of a new city for 13 miles, soaking in the sights and sounds, and making minimal use of my phone, checking every few miles to make sure I didn’t overshoot my targets (parks and botanical gardens).
nradov 6y ago
Why is it liberating? I'm old enough that I used to live that way as a youth because I didn't have a cell phone. It was an annoying waste of time with zero benefits.
- wholinator2 6y ago
  It's especially liberating to those young of us to have grown up with the phone always on all the time. Never get to hang out after school without everyone wanting to know where you are. Never get to roam the neighborhood without everyone wanting to know where you are. Never getting to encounter danger without extreme societal pressure to take the least risks and encounter the least amount of strange and difficult situations possible. Never getting to rely on your own ingenuity and tact because the phone can always answer better and faster. The phone does improve life in some ways, but it also strips us of others. If you had lived your adolescence without the god-mind constantly watching you, you might not understand what it's like to grow up these days. I'm sure you had your own difficulties but I wouldn't comment on those like I understand them. I frightens me that we've set up our society to value perfect productivity over all else. It's unhealthy, at least for some. Maybe even life was worse on the whole before the connectivity singularity stole our privacy and our free time, but you cant say it was worse in every way. Why are we opposed to allowing others the ability to gain that perspective? Why should we tell someone that the way they discovered more of their humanity is pointless because it might "waste time". Do we meditate? Do we rest? I could just as easily say that spending all your time on your phone on a bus or transit is just as much wasting your time as is sitting and staring at the ceiling. The mind never shuts off. Could I ask anyone to repeat to me the important information they learned from that post on their bus transit 3 Tuesdays ago? Maybe they did learn something important and do remember. But maybe I came to a realization that I wouldn't have, without giving myself the space to think. Or maybe I met this beautiful girl who I just had my first date with. Or maybe I just sat and stopped stressing about everything that's bad in the world. Maybe I took some time to breathe so that I could be a more pleasant person for my child after a difficult day of work. You could say that these things are all achievable through the phone and I think we can all agree there are marked differences between conversations over text and those in person, between an interesting point we read and an epiphany that we came to ourselves. I don't want to be hypocritical tell you that your way is wrong or that your perspective is incorrect, just maybe a little push to think about what it would be like to be someone else. Who might have written that post? What might their life be like to make them think those things? What in my life has lead me to believe what I do? In my experience, these are the kinds of thoughts I don't have through the phone. As an addendum, I'd say that there are many many uses for the phone, I would guess that you don't have a snapchat and an instagram to check and constantly worry about. But these days you can't be social or even participate in high school (college to a slightly lesser extent) without having one or both of those things (probably even newer ones I don't know about). It's not necessarily just freedom from google maps, but from the panopticon and extreme pressures to portray your life in a certain way.

That is why it is so liberating.

nxc18 6y ago

What is it liberating you from? Your own empowerment?

wholinator2 6y ago
Basically yeah, but I would rephrase it as liberation from constant reliance, or from always having the perfect answer, from a lessened use of ones mind, from necessary human interaction to ask anyone a question, or from spending any precious second not maximizing the amount of information and "productivity" you can achieve. It's about being a human, in an environment, around other humans, with time to spare for original thoughts and just to enjoy being alive. I expect many people on this forum are the "productivity" and "maximizing" type. Not that there's anything wrong with that! We need those people! But I think we might all be able to benefit from truly relying on ourselves in difficult situations, instead of just asking the answer box to help us avoid any annoyance or unnecessary difficulty. If you wish your life to be a perfectly smooth series of directions given by a silicon hivemind, feel free friend. Sometimes the bumps and the dirt are what make life worth living though. Sometimes the empathy of unnecessary difficult situations can create bonds and perspective that shiny chrome smoothness cannot. Persistent smooth perfect answers have their purpose and we wouldn't have invented it if not for its use but I find the rather strong opposition to experiencing and exploring one's humanity, whether this way or that, rather frightening. Almost sounds like it's the chrome talking and not the human.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  Think of it as rearranging your life to have those quiet moments when you want them, with the people you want to have them with. For example, I once used my phone to reroute my wife and I around an unexpectedly closed train station so we could spend a planned hour in an old cathedral. We were glad we were able to meditate and be alone with our thoughts in that cathedral instead of being alone with them trying to read unfamiliar train tables and chase down busy transit employees. After that we used the phone to update our plans to meet a friend in that city. In the 90s we probably would have just gone home and missed seeing our friend for another few years. We had a nice, long conversation with her. That doesn’t have anything to do with productivity and the only things we maximized were the most important leisure activities that day. Your motivation is certainly a good one, to be clear.
- nxc18 6y ago
  I think there’s an assumption that if you’re using your phone regularly you’re never taking the time to have human experiences. For all but perhaps the most avoidant, I don’t think that happens in practice. I walk alone for 1-3 hours a day. Usually I wear headphones and listen to podcasts or the economist audio - I have learned a lot about the world this way. You could argue it is just entertainment, but I suppose my old CS lectures were just entertainment, too. Having audio content helps make the walks more bearable, and those walks have helped me lose over 100 lbs of unwanted body fat. Sometimes I take the headphones out to enjoy the sights and sounds. Sometimes I pause and enjoy the views for a while. If I see someone I want to talk to, I stop, take the headphones out, and talk. There’s no binary choice and I find that by sparing me actual reading time, this practice gives me more time to spend on things I care about. I do enjoy the nature exposure, but I don’t need 3 hours a day of focus on it - it really just doesn’t change much day to day or year to year. I wish living in a perfectly smooth chrome existence was an option, but it isn’t. My phone and the internet fail often enough that I still regularly need to call a real human and talk. The maps are wonderful, but they still require a degree of interpretation, like when a rail line is closed and the shuttle replacement isn’t listed. Just the other day I had to bother an airport employee to figure out where that shuttle pick up was. Having had that experience I don’t think it makes me better. I have empathy for unnecessarily difficult situations, that doesn’t make me want to maximize the existence of those. It motivates me to build better software, do better work, and contribute more to public efforts to make the world a better place for humans. Again, there’s no binary choice, people should use every tool at their disposal to maximize their happiness. I’ve got a perfectly good phone, but I walked the streets of a new city for 13 miles, soaking in the sights and sounds, and making minimal use of my phone, checking every few miles to make sure I didn’t overshoot my targets (parks and botanical gardens).

nradov 6y ago

Why is it liberating? I'm old enough that I used to live that way as a youth because I didn't have a cell phone. It was an annoying waste of time with zero benefits.

wholinator2 6y ago
It's especially liberating to those young of us to have grown up with the phone always on all the time. Never get to hang out after school without everyone wanting to know where you are. Never get to roam the neighborhood without everyone wanting to know where you are. Never getting to encounter danger without extreme societal pressure to take the least risks and encounter the least amount of strange and difficult situations possible. Never getting to rely on your own ingenuity and tact because the phone can always answer better and faster. The phone does improve life in some ways, but it also strips us of others. If you had lived your adolescence without the god-mind constantly watching you, you might not understand what it's like to grow up these days. I'm sure you had your own difficulties but I wouldn't comment on those like I understand them. I frightens me that we've set up our society to value perfect productivity over all else. It's unhealthy, at least for some. Maybe even life was worse on the whole before the connectivity singularity stole our privacy and our free time, but you cant say it was worse in every way. Why are we opposed to allowing others the ability to gain that perspective? Why should we tell someone that the way they discovered more of their humanity is pointless because it might "waste time". Do we meditate? Do we rest? I could just as easily say that spending all your time on your phone on a bus or transit is just as much wasting your time as is sitting and staring at the ceiling. The mind never shuts off. Could I ask anyone to repeat to me the important information they learned from that post on their bus transit 3 Tuesdays ago? Maybe they did learn something important and do remember. But maybe I came to a realization that I wouldn't have, without giving myself the space to think. Or maybe I met this beautiful girl who I just had my first date with. Or maybe I just sat and stopped stressing about everything that's bad in the world. Maybe I took some time to breathe so that I could be a more pleasant person for my child after a difficult day of work. You could say that these things are all achievable through the phone and I think we can all agree there are marked differences between conversations over text and those in person, between an interesting point we read and an epiphany that we came to ourselves. I don't want to be hypocritical tell you that your way is wrong or that your perspective is incorrect, just maybe a little push to think about what it would be like to be someone else. Who might have written that post? What might their life be like to make them think those things? What in my life has lead me to believe what I do? In my experience, these are the kinds of thoughts I don't have through the phone. As an addendum, I'd say that there are many many uses for the phone, I would guess that you don't have a snapchat and an instagram to check and constantly worry about. But these days you can't be social or even participate in high school (college to a slightly lesser extent) without having one or both of those things (probably even newer ones I don't know about). It's not necessarily just freedom from google maps, but from the panopticon and extreme pressures to portray your life in a certain way.