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Guy's making too much of this. I finally gave up Facebook and disentangled from all that was left of Google services I still used a while ago, and it's really n

Guy's making too much of this. I finally gave up Facebook and disentangled from all that was left of Google services I still used a while ago, and it's really not that big a deal. Maybe I just have fewer friends and they mostly didn't know me from social media, but nobody thought I was dead. I still have a smartphone, but I barely use it and have always been in the habit of not having it with me all the time because I worked in a SCIF for years and was in an active duty combat arms unit before that and couldn't bring a smart phone with me everywhere I go. It's not that novel. First, more than half the world still lives like this right now anyway. Second, 1999 was barely more than 20 years ago. As late as 2003, there were still no smartphones, no Facebook, and Google was still just a search engine. Going back to the life you had 18 years ago is just like riding a bike. At least if you never made this kind of thing your entire life, but plenty of people never made this kind of thing their entire life. My dad still has never made a social account and doesn't even have an email address. This is maybe hard to realize for someone who maintains a personal blog, but not everyone made the Internet the cornerstone of their existence.

flatline 6y ago
It would be no problem for me to go back; I don't really use social media and would probably be fine without anything beyond a land line to maintain social contacts. My kids, by contrast, have grown up in a completely different world. Especially since COVID, so many of their peer interactions are through social media. They are highly dependent on devices for a lot of basic needs. Perhaps this is geared toward a younger audience that has no idea what 1999 was like - it was 22 years ago!
cannam 6y ago
> Second, 1999 was barely more than 20 years ago. As late as 2003, there were still no smartphones, no Facebook, and Google was still just a search engine. Going back to the life you had 18 years ago is just like riding a bike. The article appears to agree with you, more or less: A lot of people around me don’t understand how I can live my life like that, they tell me they will never do it. What they don’t realize is that we all used to do it, smartphones have only been mainstream these last 10 years. So unless you’re ten, you’ve lived your life just fine without it. The ability to "just sit" is a wonderful thing. I never thought about it until early adulthood - one day I was pacing anxiously around, while my girlfriend and a friend of hers talked on the sofa, and suddenly her friend looked up at me and said "Men never just sit, do they?" But this was almost 30 years ago, long before smartphones.
unethical_ban 6y ago
Don't just think about millenials and older, consider younger M's and zoomers. These people have grown up (in the developed world) with constant always-on connectivity. Parents want their kids to be connected for safety reasons. Schools don't want to pay for paper books so they get every kid to have a laptop or tablet. In university, you cannot operate without a laptop, and I doubt it would be easy to work without a cell phone. I agree it's not very healthy, and I agree many people don't understand. I personally am working on using "do not disturb" a lot more on my phone, so that only calls will get through in real-time. That said, to say "1999 was only 20 years ago" really doesn't capture _how much has changed_ in those 20 years.
- rchaud 6y ago
  > In university, you cannot operate without a laptop, and I doubt it would be easy to work without a cell phone. I was in uni 15 years ago and the first mistake I made was trying to do course readings of JSTOR/ScienceDirect papers directly on the screen. I thought I'd be saving paper, as after all the readings amounted to 500 or more pages per course. After a semester of destroying my eyes and being unable to remember key details, I thought "screw that". Printed out every single reading after that. It took until 2017 to have a consumer product like the ReMarkable that's large enough to comfortably display PDFs and allow for marking up with a pressure sensitive pen.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    > It took until 2017 to have a consumer product like the ReMarkable that's large enough to comfortably display PDFs and allow for marking up with a pressure sensitive pen. It blows my mind just how good the reMarkable is, and how long it took to happen.
    - filoleg 6y ago
      I was seriously considering purchasing one, as it seems to tick off a lot of boxes for me, including hackability and a rather significant open-source enthusiast community around it. The lack of a simple feature that is backlight killed it off for me though. After using ebooks for the past decade, I cannot go back to using one without a backlight. I still use backlight at a bare minimum, but a complete lack of it seems like a serious oversight. Looking forward to remarkable v3, as I expect them to address this, given how simple and requested this feature is.

flatline 6y ago

It would be no problem for me to go back; I don't really use social media and would probably be fine without anything beyond a land line to maintain social contacts. My kids, by contrast, have grown up in a completely different world. Especially since COVID, so many of their peer interactions are through social media. They are highly dependent on devices for a lot of basic needs. Perhaps this is geared toward a younger audience that has no idea what 1999 was like - it was 22 years ago!

cannam 6y ago

> Second, 1999 was barely more than 20 years ago. As late as 2003, there were still no smartphones, no Facebook, and Google was still just a search engine. Going back to the life you had 18 years ago is just like riding a bike. The article appears to agree with you, more or less: A lot of people around me don’t understand how I can live my life like that, they tell me they will never do it. What they don’t realize is that we all used to do it, smartphones have only been mainstream these last 10 years. So unless you’re ten, you’ve lived your life just fine without it. The ability to "just sit" is a wonderful thing. I never thought about it until early adulthood - one day I was pacing anxiously around, while my girlfriend and a friend of hers talked on the sofa, and suddenly her friend looked up at me and said "Men never just sit, do they?" But this was almost 30 years ago, long before smartphones.

unethical_ban 6y ago

Don't just think about millenials and older, consider younger M's and zoomers. These people have grown up (in the developed world) with constant always-on connectivity. Parents want their kids to be connected for safety reasons. Schools don't want to pay for paper books so they get every kid to have a laptop or tablet. In university, you cannot operate without a laptop, and I doubt it would be easy to work without a cell phone. I agree it's not very healthy, and I agree many people don't understand. I personally am working on using "do not disturb" a lot more on my phone, so that only calls will get through in real-time. That said, to say "1999 was only 20 years ago" really doesn't capture _how much has changed_ in those 20 years.

rchaud 6y ago
> In university, you cannot operate without a laptop, and I doubt it would be easy to work without a cell phone. I was in uni 15 years ago and the first mistake I made was trying to do course readings of JSTOR/ScienceDirect papers directly on the screen. I thought I'd be saving paper, as after all the readings amounted to 500 or more pages per course. After a semester of destroying my eyes and being unable to remember key details, I thought "screw that". Printed out every single reading after that. It took until 2017 to have a consumer product like the ReMarkable that's large enough to comfortably display PDFs and allow for marking up with a pressure sensitive pen.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  > It took until 2017 to have a consumer product like the ReMarkable that's large enough to comfortably display PDFs and allow for marking up with a pressure sensitive pen. It blows my mind just how good the reMarkable is, and how long it took to happen.
  - filoleg 6y ago
    I was seriously considering purchasing one, as it seems to tick off a lot of boxes for me, including hackability and a rather significant open-source enthusiast community around it. The lack of a simple feature that is backlight killed it off for me though. After using ebooks for the past decade, I cannot go back to using one without a backlight. I still use backlight at a bare minimum, but a complete lack of it seems like a serious oversight. Looking forward to remarkable v3, as I expect them to address this, given how simple and requested this feature is.