It feels a bit off chopping and quoting a PG essay on his site but this bit stayed with me. I may have been thinking along those lines when I read it:
"the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40… …as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal" is statistically normal…
…someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly..."
…People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.
… Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you.
This topic is very fertile for insight, personal or general. Most people would probably figure something out if they started writing about it. I think the crux is that surprisingly little of what we do is deliberate, and underexamined. Your choice of university or job might have been a grand crossroads choice that you made deliberately but many more choices are not. Impactfulness isn't really the trigger for deliberation in most cases, immediate commitment is. Choosing one book over another only impacts a few hours and a few dollars. A decade of book choices affects your personality, the things you think about and the way you talk.
Many of our major maladies and deficiencies are related these undeliberate choices. I agree with PG on his insights about technology and "accelerating addictiveness" and the distillation of less addictive predecessors." Even more insightful is the idea that we can't rely on society and culture to guide us in the right direction concerning new things.
That's probably where these dumbphone people are coming from. Sensing that there are cumulative bad choices related to carrying around a smartphone and making a deliberate choice to avoid them.
While I wouldn't downgrade to a dumbphone just yet, people keep poking fun at my old Blackberry. I do hate it a lot of the times when it crashes, when the GPS signal fails, when my thumb has to cover 500m distance on the annoying little square to read one webpage. However, it does (barely) what I would like my gadget to do: calls, emails, occasional map check and sending of a dropbox link.
The experience is painful enough, that I don't treat it like a toy and hence feel no compulsion to baby it in my hand all of the time.
Sometimes I feel like I miss out on all the apps and general development in the area, but that hasn't gotten acute enough yet for me to get a smartphone.
"the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40… …as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal" is statistically normal…
…someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly..."
…People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.
… Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you.
- http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
This topic is very fertile for insight, personal or general. Most people would probably figure something out if they started writing about it. I think the crux is that surprisingly little of what we do is deliberate, and underexamined. Your choice of university or job might have been a grand crossroads choice that you made deliberately but many more choices are not. Impactfulness isn't really the trigger for deliberation in most cases, immediate commitment is. Choosing one book over another only impacts a few hours and a few dollars. A decade of book choices affects your personality, the things you think about and the way you talk.
Many of our major maladies and deficiencies are related these undeliberate choices. I agree with PG on his insights about technology and "accelerating addictiveness" and the distillation of less addictive predecessors." Even more insightful is the idea that we can't rely on society and culture to guide us in the right direction concerning new things.
That's probably where these dumbphone people are coming from. Sensing that there are cumulative bad choices related to carrying around a smartphone and making a deliberate choice to avoid them.