“She plans to use the time gained from quitting her smartphone to read and sleep more.”
That’s all I do on my phone...read. What’s the difference between phone and book?
I am reading this on my cell phone.
It’s a tool.
I find it very useful - Gaia GPS, scribd for audiobooks, email :-(, driving directions, free republic.
The trick is to avoid getting sucked into constant social media nonsense. For instance, I gave up on trying to use facebook on the mobile app years ago. It was a resource and performance hog. Also, turn off notifications for most everything.
But as with all things, make it so you use the tool and not have the tool use you.
I had to get rid of my texting flip phone which I loved.
Verizon would no longer support it.
Modern life, in general, is filled with so much minutiae to preoccupy our minds. It causes us to focus in on little picture issues, and discourages us from focusing out to ponder big picture issues.
In the pre industrial age, people were more likely to question the meaning of life, how we got here, what happens to us when we die. In the modern world, asking those kinds of questions can get you dismissed as a frivolous dreamer.....”why don’t you do something constructive like organizing your spread sheets!”
Modern life has made people less religious, less respectful of God. The cellphones and social media are just pushing us even more in that direction.
My last year in the corporate world, my wife bought me a flip phone for business, calling her, and the lack of phone booths in N. California.
I was working with my sales manager, and he didn’t know that I had a cell phone until I used it several times reconfirm appointments or to cancel them.
He wanted the number to my phone, and I said, “No! If you want me to have a cell phone, you buy it and provide the service.
A couple of weeks later, I had even higher up managers and top dogs working with me. Again, I refused to give them my number. We had bought that phone and a billion $ corporation could buy our phones and pay for their use if they wanted me to use one.
A top dog in our company needed to call the home office and he couldn’t find a pay phone. Finally, I let him use my flip phone to make a key call.
Two days later, that company was ordering 1,000 flip phones for sales reps, their managers and other people who worked out of the office.
I got kudos from some sales reps and boos from others.
Even then the non trusting managers figured out how to monitor their reps and managers in the field from the phones.
In the meantime my wife got addicted to using my flip phone for general use when not in her office.
When, I took early retirement, my flip phone came back to me and we got a small one from Trac phone for her personal use.
It didn’t have a camera and only made and received phone calls and no texts.
When she retired, our adult kids bought her a Trac smart phone.
She was a little hesitant to use it until she used it to line up a birthday party for a family member. Instead of calling everyone, she texted and got it arranged in minutes while I went into a store to buy something. She was hooked.
She became the texting and emailing Granny after that. I think that she is on her 3rd smart phone. I got her a small chromebook, and she prefers her smart phone for most uses and communication.
I set her up with a few contact lists for texting, calling or emailing.
Neither of us have any need/use for Facebook.
She is a rabid reader, and she has a Kindle paper white and a Fire tablet and her Chromebook for her e books.
I have not ditched my smartphone, but 99% of the time, it is in my purse. I mostly take it out, just to charge it.
I cannot stand seeing everyone always so consumed by whatever is on their phones.
I’m about ready to go back to the flip phone.
I have a smartphone and the only time I get on it to do anything is break time at work. I prefer the PC. I don’t understand why its so hard not to be on it all the time
We are all being tracked and monitored via our smart phones which we use for convenience sake. Just having traveled, the phone was very useful for getting automatic updates from the airlines, getting directions to unfamiliar areas, finding nearby restaurants, etc.
However, for privacy sake, I can see the need to have a “dumb” phone in the future that only allows calls and texts for regular usage.. I would purchase this type of phone.
For me, the most offensive thing about Android phones (and possibly Apple phones?) are all the buried settings designed to mine your personal info and disregard your privacy.
I have a smartphone. To me, it’s just a phone.
Too much of my life is on my iPhone. No way I could survive today without it.
I still have my Mitsubishi analog brick phone from the 80’s!
I’d love to turn that back on.
I hate the spy on ourselves devices we have to carry around now. Can’t believe how much privacy we have lost.
I prefer my landline for long, intimate conversations. While my smartphone comes in handy, talking seems shallow.
“switching to an old Nokia phone that could only make and receive calls and text messages.”
I don’t think that will be possible once 5G kicks in, from what I’ve read. Aren’t the old phones 3G which will be deactivated soon?
The only new flip phone DH could find is Android based — nothing in the older platform. So ... smart phone that flips.