I take photos with a pocket mirrorless, and take notes with a notebook. I tell time with a self winding mechanical watch. I pay for things at stores with cash instead of tap to pay. Like a cave man, I know.
I am reachable by internet when I am at my desk, and by landline when I am at home. In an actual emergency dial 911, not me. Otherwise it can probably wait until I am at my desktop or a laptop.
I was already sold on raising kids without smartphones on intuition and lived experience, but study after study point at us having access to all humans, all knowledge, and all entertainment at all times as leading to generally bad mental health and cognitive function outcomes. Our brains were simply not evolved for it.
Whenever I see parents scrolling, and handing a kid a phone as well to pacify them, I wish I could report them for child abuse. I feel like I am watching them be given whiskey or cigarettes, except it is socially acceptable and no one cares.
Consider that you might not have everything figured out for everyone. I'm glad you found something that works, but the will to impose your way on others isn't benevolent.
Oh my god that's so true!
<village opens its mouth>
Actually, screw the village
Yes, that's true. That /is/ how the OP feels about it. But at least they were able to articulate their point and get a message across, along with an implied (albeit weak) "call to action", not meant to be taken literally. Although I'm sure, if polled, the majority of folks in this thread would agree with the OP sentiment. I know I do.
> Your reply was next to meaningless
We’re on a discussion forum. “Here’s how I feel about what said” is basically the point.
1. I am entirely convinced minors should not have smartphones and every study supports this being a net negative.
2. I feel most adults are better off without them too, but it is an adult choice. For most I suggest deleting a frequently used app ever month until you stop seeing benefits.
To get to specific proof though, clinically in the way we could with other addictions like smoking, we would need to look at how individual applications that allow us to outsource various cognitive functions specifically impact our brains.
GPS is a well studied example. Humans that rely on GPS instead of their own brains end up with provably weaker hippocampus.
https://newatlas.com/gps-spatial-direction-ucl/48529/
It is not hard to form a hypothesis from this how letting targeted content algorithms decide what you see instead of making decisions on your own could weaken the portions of your brain that make decisions in a similar way, and all studies we have seen so far seem to support this hypothesis.
I would of course like to see more brain scan research but when all data points to the negative on something only available to humans very recently, and your own lived experience of forgoing that something has had major benefits for your personally, it becomes easy to be a strong advocate for people trying out a reduction of that something.
And a long/annoying password for the "main" profile, with banking and all the other stuff maybe
It took a couple years to recalibrate my dopamine reward system gradually until I could enjoy just existing in my own thoughts and brain again while away from the internet, learn to navigate for myself, etc.
For "landlines" I just ported my families cell phone numbers (with their total consent and support) to a voip service, then got VOIP ATA boxes which allows plugging traditional landline phones, including an actual payphone for fun, via ethernet or wifi. Costs a couple dollars a month.
But don't take my word for it. In 2025, we now havea sea of well documented research that proves the extremely high cost we all pay (as a society) for damaging our kids this way.
The irony of posting scaremongering about video calls being dangerous on a digital forum while claiming to be offline to avoid scaremongering.
> If enough pressure is applied
You cannot force the rest if your community to align with your personal viewpoints. There is no amount of “pressure” that is going to bend society to your will.
Nowhere in your comment is there any indication you are running some sort of community initiative or anything else that might lead to actual change. Campaigning for a spot on the school board to advocate for banning cell phones in schools might be a useful strategy, for example. Telling parents who ask about FaceTime between friends that tablets are evil seems as effective as telling random smokers on the street that it’s going to kill them.
Like this sounds awesome but being offline for 23 hours in the day is unmanageable here, unless you live a very solitary life.
I have tons of friends and a very active social life - in person.
I bump into friends in town, at the ski hill, at the bar and grocery store.
I ask people for the time, directions and how their day is going. I’ll never have a phone.
People expect to be able to reach you…
SoftTalker: "We managed healthcare before antibiotics, antiseptics, germ theory, sterilisation. Hah, gotcha."
And if your kid needed to go home and sleep in bed, you had to take the day off instead of home office. There was price to that.
Oh, and back then school did not expected parents and kids to have phones, now it does. Information about schedule changes, homework, what needs to be paid and such is broadcasted with the assumption that everyone has a phone.
If it’s a real emergency Call 911. They’re better trained than me.
When people ask for my number and I say I don’t have a phone, 99% of all people say very passionately “omg, I wish I could get rid of this thing”. Most people don’t like their phone, which confirms my belief it won’t make my life better.
Except when you are offline together.
You can get landlines (via a VOIP conversion box or otherwise), and beyond that what do you really need if you are honest?
> it’s not manageable to be offline all the time here
> it is if you’re all offline together
> but everyone doesn’t want to be offline with me
> just be offline by yourself; what’s the big deal? <— you
The big deal is all the stuff called out above. My kids school, child care, my work, pizza delivery, everyone has built up infrastructure that assumes virtually always online.
If it works for you to just not be online anymore, cool. But it’s not trivial for many people to make this change.
This is not some crazy sci-fi lifestyle experiment I am running for the first time. I just live mostly like all industrialized humans did before 2009.
People did all of these things before smartphones and all those methods still work just fine today.
As has already been pointed out to you here before, these social moves you fear are awkward or impossible were EASILY handled by generations before you... and all without cellphones. Go figure.
Good luck living in London with cash. I guess a plastic credit cards is allowed
You can top-up Oyster with cash at machines and counters. Oyster cards are better as they are ~500ms quicker when tapping !
Cash is still pretty viable in the UK. I can't think of a single place the past decade where they've not taken cash and I've been sad about it or massively inconvenienced - but then again I don't get out much ;)
If a restaurant thinks it can get away with just tiny text on a menu informing that it's cashless, you could give them a lesson in the law.
I also pay with cash for privacy, and to use my privilege to constantly demand it as an option so the unbanked who cannot advocate for themselves can still participate in society.
Somewhat privacy. When you take cash out of an ATM, surely the serial numbers will be recorded as being dispensed to you. And when the shop pays those notes into the bank, they will be connected to the shop's account. "lrvick took this note out November 4th on Main Street, Pretend Grocery Store on West Street paid it in on November 7th". Maybe the note will be given in change and pass through a few places, but over months and years, you and Pretend Groceries will be more and more strongly connected.
"Yesterday Dad went out to buy a hardcover novel. He said he wanted to read something long, rich and thought provoking for a change. He also said he was going to buy the book with cash, so nobody could trace the purchase to him and exploit his interests for commercial purposes" - Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson, December 1993.
https://featureassets.gocomics.com/assets/d0f4d450df96013172...
For large bills that is true to some extent, but having worked closely with secret service in the past at multiple points, they have confirmed my suspicion that $20s and below are virtually impossible to track and they do not bother unless they are specifically giving you marked bills because you are already suspected of a crime.
Also avoiding tracking by a governments and tracking by surveillance capitalism are very different threat models.
Getting down to 0 tracking is of course impossible, but the less data we leak the less clear of a picture third parties get on how to predict and manipulate our behavior. Why help them?
Good for you! I so wish more people would think and act this way. Most people don't realize that in a world without cash, government and large businesses can shutdown your entire with the push of a button without any sort of due process.
As a former professional magician with a background in studying mentalism, I can assure you ALL of us can be manipulated and distracted by entities that have enough seemingly small and insignificant bits of information about our daily routines in their widely sold and cross-indexed databases.
The less data you give these entities, the more boring targeted content and ads become, and the more attention you will have left for things that matter.
I'd feel more confident about the results of this research if it didn't entirely depend on self-reported data from a survey. At least in this case it was a phone survey and not just an internet questionnaire posted to social media sites. I'd put more faith in a much smaller sample of young people being professionally evaluated for memory problems.
The survey asks the question: "Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, do you have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions?"
It doesn't ask what physical/mental/emotional condition they have, or even if they were diagnosed with it by a professional (although it does at one point ask if a doctor has told them they have a depressive disorder).
Some years the survey included optional questions (which people may or may not have been asked) that asked if they were taking medicine or receiving treatment from a doctor or other health professional for any type of mental health condition or emotional problem, but again, didn't ask what that condition was.
If you told me that there has been a surge in young people over the last ~10 years who self-identify as having a mental or emotional problem that they themselves suspect has caused difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions I wouldn't be at all surprised.
I'd be more curious to know if there were a surging number of young people who were being diagnosed and treated for serious memory disorders recently.
Honestly, I wouldn't be sure how to answer some of the questions.
In a 15 minute doctor's appointment I was "diagnosed" and medicated for bipolar. In another 15 minute appointment with a psychiatrist, we added OCD and general anxiety as well.
We stopped medications shortly after and it has been 20 years.
There has been a lot of discussion about self diagnosis, but I have the opposite problem. How can you decide a diagnosis with 10 questions and some pills?
Note that the effect was stronger with wealth, as expected for performance- and excuse-seeking behaviors in high-achieving households.
I'm sure it's a legitimate disorder in the most severe cases as well, but like most psych quackery, there are way too many doctors and patients (80%+) too eager to self-diagnose and put people on a prescription and call it a day.
Doctors get money from pharma and people get to use their "disorder" as a convenient excuse for everything. That's what we call incentive alignment in economics.
This has got to have a strong selection effect.
Reminds me of that bit from yes prime minister https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GSKwf4AIlI
It also assumes the finding is negative, which is more subtle but similarly problematic. Decline in memory might just mean that our brain is reallocating capacity for something else. It could also mean that the nature of what we're trying to remember has changed and it's now more difficult (e.g. There's more entropy in the data, or the data is changing more often).
Research good, article reasoning sloppy.
Memory works like a muscle - use it or lose it.
Using the dialpad instead of the Saved/Favorite Name in the phones is an interesting habit I built up even for most used numbers such as my wife, sister, and even the neighbors. I remember quite a few numbers; even if I cannot say it, I can look at a keypad and the muscle memory kicks in.
This is the same for some key Passwords, I quite often just type them out. Again, I might not remember but my fingers just glides through the keyboard. I remember it being handy at a hospital making some large payment saving my brother’s family from malaria in a Hospital in Bombay.
Btw, it is also fun to no look at Map on the phone for most journey that I already have an idea or traveling for the 2nd time and henceforth.
When I was given these instructions, I realized it's been many years since I had to memorize anything of meaningful length. I spent the first 20 seconds trying to remember as much as I could about how to memorize things, and the rest of the time actually memorizing. It truly is a muscle, and I was very out of practice.
Since "A variety of memory systems are regulated by dopamine in the brain." [1], being force feed stimulation after stimulation will affect memory due to the diminishing release of dopamine of less stimulating events.
Being from the first year of Gen X I lived both of these lives. I remember reading newspapers on the subway going to work in Manhattan, having to focus to scan the small stock market print. Yes the news was stimulating, but comparatively slow and limited. I could never read the news at work, but in my later years, working in tech, it was a constant thing throughout the day.
Dopamine if the fuel of capitalism, even illegal capitalism, like the drug trade. This is not dismissive of capitalism, it is just a truth. The only thing that changed is that humanity has found a newer, stronger way to milk dopamine out of the human brain.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/edited-volume/...
“It’s not X, it’s Y” is a turn of speech that has to be consciously removed from a polite society.
Please retain this turn of speech that helps autonomic (carbon) and automated (silicon) filters.
Took me a bit to figure it out too
I'd bet $1000 bucks that these people don't have actual memory problems.
> The increase in disability prevalence from 2016 to 2022 is likely attributable in part to the long-term effects of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Most people have been infected at least a couple of times may this point, and at this point it’s very well documented to cause lasting cognitive decline.
Substantially:
We've been eating "low quality" food of one type -- ultra-processed food -- since at least the '60s, so what's your explanation for the recency of the effect?
And some time earlier than that -- very roughly the 1920s and earlier -- we were eating "low quality" foods of a different type: spoiled, adulterated, and questionably-sourced food products, so do you claim that we started with poor concentration then, got better/had a heyday in the mid-20th century, and now we're declining again?
In short: what's your evidence to support your claim?
* Improving diet (primarily avoiding refined foods and sugar) generally improves my energy levels.
* Cutting out social media mostly improves concentration.
* Trying to avoid rumination such as problem solving or rehearsing arguments through meditative practices reduces stress levels, makes it easier to be present and react to things in front of you.
* Sleep is also pretty big for cognitive clarity. Having a consistent sleep schedule and not drinking coffee past noon helps with sleep.
But really, all of these seem to tie into each other. If you want to improve your diet, it's much harder if you are tired from lack of sleep or overstimulation. If you want to improve your sleep, you can't be scrolling social media all day. Mental exhaustion also makes awareness/meditation harder.
And the reason why isn't clear. So the most likely reason is that we're doing what humanity has done repeatedly and endlessly throughout history and likely accidentally poisoning ourselves with some thing or things -- things that we believe to be completely safe. So a precautionary principle approach to consumption is to consider what we evolved with and sugar definitely wasn't that. Sugar only really took off in the 19th century. And various further refined sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup and other such things only took off in the late 20th century.
[1] - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2294757/Bear-ly-con...
[2] - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-...
We have evidence that apiculture has been a thing for well over 8,000 years.
Our bodies literally love to burn glucose as fuel and we perform better physically (and mentally I assume) when glucose is readily available.
We have literally evolved to be sugar burning machines.
Just don’t eat too much of it and you’ll be fine.
Not whatever we have in the modern / food pyramid diet.
Cue universal freak out in the parents’ WhatsApp group.
Apparently, sugar:
- causes cancer
- causes autism
- causes hyperactivity
- causes blindness
- makes children indolent and lazy
- will permanently ruin a child if they even look at it
Perhaps it’s because she’s physically active - the rest of her cohort are pretty much forbidden from walking or running as those pose risks, and children must be sheltered from all conceivable risk so that they grow up into independent and capable adults.
I would argue that that - physical activity - is far more important than what you shove in your face.
There have been repeatedly, credibly and demonstrably shown to be significant benefits to not spending your entire life sitting on your ass - but I guess it’s harder to get off your ass than to proselytise about sugar being an evil and artificial harmful chemical that has no place in the human body - despite it literally being what we run off of.
No, it bloody is not.
I used to drive a bicycle for 6 - 12 hours ever day while working in the delivery. I also didn't watch what I was eating.
I ended up getting fat and with haemorrhoids. So I had to quit cycling.
Then I spend some time (years actually) researching and slowly improving my diet.
Result? I lost weight, my haemorrhoids (and several other health issues) stopped acting up, and I am overall much healthier despite most of my physical activity being walking.
Yes, exercise is important. But it won't help you if you eat massive amounts of garbage food.
So stop talking stuff you have no clue about.
Also, we do not "run off of" sugar. Human body can run off sugar, or fat, or a combination of these. And argument could be made that running off fat is actually healthier. Body can in fact produce all sugar it needs with absolutely zero need for dietary sugar (note that doesn't mean you should go zero carb, just that carbs / sugars are not a metabolic necessity).
As for this: "who even already have rotten teeth at two, despite their sugar free diets. They feed them simple carbs almost exclusively, and are oblivious to amylase."
Uhh... carbs ARE sugars. It literally doesn't matter that you are avoiding "sugar" if you end up eating bread instead.
It may or may not affect peoples weight (which is aesthetic issue on itself), but in terms of health improvements it is one intervention that consistently works.
They are not saying kids should be 8 hours on bikes whether they feel like or not. They are saying they should run around with other kids which something entirely different.
See:
Novelty and Dopaminergic Modulation of Memory Persistence: A Tale of Two Systems
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35052867/
But of course something introduced between 2013 and 2023 that gets your cells to manufacture spike protein, with no way of regulating the spike dose, couldn't possibly be connected with memory decline.
It's a symptom of society barrelling toward exponential progress more than a pathology imo
(there are other behavioral and disease-related dangers but they're not as appropriate to this metaphor)
I think the more alarmed voices in this comment thread are not reacting to the change or "exponential progress" but are instead concerned about the impact of becoming reliant on something else to do our remembering.
This last part is anecdata (but no worse than the survey data in TFA), I think smartphone users have not really lost the ability to memorize, in general, but that the things being memorized are different. If the memory test (mentioned in a cousin-comment) had a set of 20 memes instead of 20 words, I expect most study participants would be a lot better at recall.
I suppose the question of "is this like junk food, though?" may be relevant.
It's also very difficult to claim to be a victim if everyone still remembers what you did.
The problem is completely reversible if you stop electronic screen usage and stick to traditional education (nature, friends, books etc)
Who would have thought that bread (fast food) and circus (smartphone) would dumb them down. /s