> The people who love being connected never let the thing leave them be it pocket, palm, face-down next to the fork

I'm tired of convincingly presented falsehoods. I hate being on my phone. I also can't stop being on my phone.

Like all addictions it's about habits and you compete with multiple trillion-dollar companies to shape your habits for you. Luckily, you are closer to where decisions are actually being made.

So the measures, in no particular order, but vaguely resemblign an escalation ladder:

1. Get a shittier phone. Something worth 100 eurobucks from aliexpress working on a slow mtk soc, outdated android and all that

2. Disable all notification forever, also incoming call ringtone with a voice mail saying you will return the call tomorrow

3. Get a landline or equivalent land-line like voip phone on a table in a hallway. With a voice mail of course.

4. Start leaving the phone at home when you go for a short walk or somewhere in a shop.

5. When you do take it with you outside, put it in a banana bag under the jacket instead of your pocket and then leave it in the bag when you get back home.

6. obviously remove all of the dopamine junkie apps.

7. don't look at the mail, chats, news, whatever is there before lunch, specifically don't let it be the first thing getting your attention in the morning.

8. doing a prayer 5 times a day and going to mosque or whatever you have to counter balance the influence of shaitain sitting your pocket for the last 10 years.

9. allowing yourself to use junkie apps for a dopamine hit when you actually need it but deciding the time and trigger yourself (separate phone with instagrahm turned off most of the time, only scrolling it while you are outside in the park in a nice setting after having a juicy piece of junk food, icecream or whatever, etc).

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lukan 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

"outdated android and all that"

But then don't do anything money related with it or use any important account details.

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Muromec 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

Well, that's the point. The actual money-controlling phone could be sitting in the drawer power off until you need to do something.

This also prevents spending too much money on impulsive purchases and take-away thai food when you should know better.

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edoceo 16 minutes ago | parent [-]

I was with you all the way until: less Thai food.

	▲	Muromec 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I did the numbers for the year 2025 and conclude that flying there will be cheaper, but then the orange monkey decided to do a short victorious war right in the hood of my favorite transit station to there.

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rcMgD2BwE72F 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Get GrapheneOS. Install FOSS apps whenever possible, via Obtainium. Signal if need be. A RSS reader. No social networks. Get a Kagi subscription to ensure no ads and bias.

Voilà

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Muromec 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

That targets a different thing IMO. You can aim for privacy or you can aim for the thing being slow and irritating to use to disrupt the habit. If tech companies spend money to make their apps smooth to use, you can aim for the opposite and inject friction and reduce the amount of high you get from it and making it slower to reach so you can have a chance to take back the executive control over the task.

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alerighi 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Except it's impossible nowadays, since most apps require Google Play Integrity attestation and doesn't work on GrapheneOS.

And if it wasn't for these apps (for example banking apps, since someone decided that it's now impossible to use your homebanking from a PC since it's not secure enough) I would already use a Nokia 3310.

	▲	rcMgD2BwE72F a minute ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not true. I'm a customer of 3 top French online banks and of two top global brokerage cie and the apps work great. I have no issue whatsoever except with one health insurance app but their Web app is better anyway. Only thing missing is contactless payment but there are European banks that support GrapheneOS without Google Pay so there are alternative. And I can use Garmin pay with my watch (and offline and without Garmin Connect thanks to the FOSS GadgetBridge appp) if that was necessary.
	▲	TFNA 7 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Loads of banking apps work fine on GrapheneOS, and the vast majority of non-banking apps require even less attestation and so work on GrapheneOS like on any other Android with Play Services present.
	▲	dwedge 28 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Harder, not impossible. I've only experienced one banking app that doesn't work (and I didn't try disabling the security for it). I have another AOSP without google services and it's a bit worse but half of the banking apps work. Uber doesn't. Not sure where you live but in the EU I think you can ask for either SMS or hardware token verification for the bank website. The most annoying thing for me is "magic links" apps send via email to login. I don't have email on my phone.

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ElevenLathe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

What is a "banana bag"? I only know it from the medical usage, and don't seem to be able to find anything about the phrase otherwise.

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Muromec 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

Random link from google, normally costs less than that: https://trakke.co.uk/collections/all-products-in-stock/produ...

	▲	ElevenLathe 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		For other speakers of Generic American, it apparently means fanny pack.

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nirava an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

when reading personal blogs, it's best to assume any statement as a reflection of their experiences and world-bubble rather than as verified facts. This is a blog, not a technical doc. while your frustration may be well founded, it's also self inflicted to a degree, you're expecting the wrong thing from the wrong place.

	▲	cryptopian 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		While we're on the subject of gripes with the modern internet, the fact that most social media sites that publish to a single feed flatten reality into a single format. People then apply uniform judgement to content with wildly different purposes (and subconsciously people ascribe more purpose to posts that happen to rise up the frontpage, even when the blog in question was just some thought somebody threw out in ten minutes)

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allknowingfrog 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My phone is pretty much always in my pocket, both in the sense that I always have it, and in the sense that I rarely use it.

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lirolero 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

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pixl97 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It's the same group of people that say being overweight is a lack of willpower.

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Nux an hour ago | parent [-]

Yeah, re eating, smoking etc it is a question of willpower in most cases. Ay least there's now a pill/injection for it.

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Tade0 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Quite often it's really a question of gut flora and lack of knowledge regarding good eating habits.

Also fat cells are endocrinologically active, so they try to compel the person to, well, get fatter.

I've been doing this the hard way lately and there's still much that I don't know, because food and lifestyles used to be different, so my parents only told me what they knew from theirs.

To illustrate just how different, my great-grandmother reportedly disliked food that she described as "rich" - too calorie dense for her taste. By this definition cottage cheese was "rich".

	▲	talon8635 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The gut is an interesting component we are learning more about, for sure. But as an addict, it still comes down to changing your habits, which indeed fixes the floura. I’m not sure I can really believe the often cited claim that a major component here is a lack a knowledge. Does anyone truly believe Cheetos are as good or better for you than broccoli? The most obvious explanation to me is that we are just flooded with addictive food and bombarded with ads to entice us. That and healthy food presents more friction in terms of having to buy the ingredients and prepaid it, and we are all short on time and overstressed.

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duskdozer 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I doubt it. I've never been overweight in my lifetime. I have never had to put any effort into that. I simply cannot relate at all to the food-related struggles I sometimes read about overweight people having. It would be silly and condescending of me to claim that I simply have more strength of will here than they do. On the other hand, I struggle heavily with some things many/most people do not, and this is often blamed as a personal failure and weakness of mine. So I wonder if it's just that people who don't have any similar struggles think they are just superior beings with superior willpower.