[i_c_b]

Back in the late 90s, when I first entered the video game industry to work (when it was quite scruffy, countercultural, and populated by some pretty odd people), one of the first things I encountered was a new co-worker who, next to his giant tower of used Mountain Dew cans, had a black and white TV in his cubicle. This struck me as very odd at that moment in time - as I understood things, obviously the point of work was supposed to be that it was a place where you worked, not a place where you watched TV. (Now, granted, everyone else was playing the recently released Diablo on their work PCs during lunch in network mode, and we were a game studio after all, so my reaction wasn't totally coherent). Still, no one else had a TV, and that guy was young and single with no work-life balance, he was a recent transplant, and it still seemed unusual at the time.

Fast forward 28 years later, and now everyone has an amazing TV in their pocket at all times when they commute, sit in their work space, go out for coffee or lunch, or go sit down in the bathroom, all with a near infinite collection of video via youtube, netflix, and even massive amounts of porn. How little did I know. And that's to say nothing of texting and twitter and reddit and instant messaging and discord and ...

Several years ago, I was working on a college campus, and there were giant corporate-flavored murals beside some of the city blocks students walked, full of happy multicultural clip art people and exciting innovative technological innovation, and adorned with the message, "Imagine a borderless world!" Clearly that message was meant to be rhetorical, not a call to reflection, critique, or reevaluation. There did not seem to be the suggestion that one might imagine the borderless world and then, having done so, decide it was a problem to be corrected.

I wonder a lot, these days, if we're not deep into a Chesterton's Fence situation, where we have to rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors, communities, and communication pathways to facilitate all sorts of important activities that simply don't happen otherwise - something like borders and boundaries as a crucial social technology, specifically about directing attention productively. Phones and tablets are, in their own Turing complete way, portals to a borderless world that pierces the older intentional classroom boundaries.

[RegW]

In my first job out of university in the 80s, I spent all one night playing Knight Lore on the Spectrum with friends. I failed to get up the next morning. My boss drove across Leeds and to bang on the door to see if I was alright. I needed that job so I stopped playing computer games.

In the 90s a later boss called me out for spending my days attached to the Slashdot firehose. I had sort-of known that it was a wasteful time sink, so I resolved to completely stop using the social media of its time, and have avoided most incarnations of it ever since (but here I am).

As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves. I know that some simply won't finish school without strong guidance, but delaying exposure to this might just be worse in the long term.

[Aurornis]

> As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules.

In my experience with mentoring juniors and college students, it’s common to have some wake-up call moment(s) where they realize their phone use is something that needs to be moderated. For some it comes from getting bad grades in a class (college in the age range I worked with) and realizing they could have avoided it by paying attention in lectures instead of using their phone. I’ve also seen it happen in relationships where they realize one day that their social life has disappeared or, in extreme cases, get dumped for being too into their phone. For others it shows up in their first job when someone doesn’t hold back in chewing them out for excessive or inappropriate phone use.

In the context of high school students, I don’t see this happening as much. A big component of high school social structure is forcing students a little bit out of their comfort zone so they can discover friends and build relationships. The default for many is to hide, withdraw, and avoid anything slightly uncomfortable. For a lot of them, slightly uncomfortable might be as simple as having to make casual conversation with people around them. A phone is the perfect tool to withdraw and appear busy, which feels like a free license to exist in a space alone without looking awkward.

So while agree that most people come to terms with the problem themselves as adults, I do also think that middle and high schools deserve some extra boundaries to get the ball rolling on learning how to exist without a phone. The students I’ve worked with who came from high schools that banned phones (private, usually, at least in the past) are so much better equipped to socialize and moderate their phone use. Before anyone claims socioeconomic factors, private high schools generally have sliding scale tuition and a large percentage of students attend for free due to their parents’ income, so it’s not just wealthy kids from wealthy families that I’m talking about.

[testing22321]

> I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves

That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies.

What makes you think this is different?

[sapientiae3]

The main challenge is that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control and other things, only fully develops around age 25.

The problem with that is without some explicit instruction or guidance or invention before they have full control of their impulses, not everyone tames the beast unscathed.

[bigC5560]

As someone who graduated from high school in 2025 I completely agree with this. I am glad I had to work it out on my own, and I don't think this is a place that a school should take control. If I had to figure this out along with the stress of college, I don't know if I would be able to handle it. I also think that it has helped with my overall time management skills and prioritizing my time.

I know not everyone will have the same experience as me, but I just feel like learning to manage it on my own was overall beneficial for me in the end.

[AuthorizedCust]

> As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually…

Fellow Scouter here. Lots of Scout units in the USA have cell phone bans. That’s such an obsolete policy. We need to help the Scouts model good choices, and that doesn’t happen when decision opportunities are removed.

Also, if they are buried in their phones, take that as feedback on how much fun they are[n’t] having in your Scout unit.

[lo_zamoyski]

Part of the lesson is understanding how we got here.

The answer is, of course, liberal hyperindividualism. By that I don't mean "liberal institutions" or respect for the individual person especially in the face of collectivism, but an ideology of antisocial atomization of the self that thrusts the self into subjective godhood. Paradoxically, this makes people more susceptible to control in practice.

Now, ideological and political programs don't fully realize the consequences of their premises instantly. It can take years, decades, centuries for all the nasty errors to manifest and become so conspicuous that they cannot be ignored. The Enlightenment program in our case. And so, in this hyperindividualism, the social order - its layers, its concentric circles, its various rights and demands on the individual that precede the consent of the individual - is all reduced progressively to not only the consensual, but also the transactional. Social bonds and structures evaporate or become fluid and contingent merely on the transactional; commitment and duty are a prison. Consent as the highest and only moral law leads us to relativism, because if all that is needed is consent to make an act moral and good, then naturally what is morally good will vary from person to person, and even minute to minute for a given person. On top of that, consent can be attained through manipulation and power, and so now individuals joust for power to manufacture consent in order to bless their exploitation of others.

The self cannot be limited in any way according to this program, and any residual limits are the lingering chains of some ancient past.

Perhaps most amusing is how so-called "countercultural" movements are anything but. These are typically just advancing the ideological program, not rejecting it. Contradictions between such movements and the status quo often come in the form of a tension between residual cultural features of an earlier age and the greater faithfulness to the trajectory of the program among the countercultural. Typically, conflicts are over power, not belief. And sometimes, the internal contradictions of the program lead to diverging programs that come into conflict.

[silisili]

Leaving out the word liberal as I don't really understand its context here, individualism was at one time a boon for the nation/economy. People move out of their family homes early, start their own family, chart their own path. Good for capitalism. And good for lots of things, really, a lot of America's success can be traced back to it.

But man, social media and the internet age have really exploited it to an unhealthy and unproductive point.

I remember going to college for the first time in 2000, and having an absolute blast meeting the people I was by circumstance forced to be around. Went back in 2004 and it was completely different, everyone was on their phone, maintaining their personal bubble in what should have been an age of exploration. That made me rather sad.

Today it's even worse, but at the risk of being an old man yelling at clouds, I won't drone on. I mostly wish my own children could experience the upbringing I had, as I find this one rather dystopian and depressing.

[kragen]

The older wisdom was that you worked on the farm with your husband and children for your entire life, breastfeeding while you peeled the potatoes, putting down your spindle to comfort a crying child. Millers lived in the mill; even blacksmiths lived at their smithies. Except for rituals, separate spheres with separate hard constraints was a novelty of the Satanic mills where the Victorian proletariat toiled.

[Ferret7446]

They still had clear boundaries. They slept in the sleeping place and at the sleeping time, they worked at the working place and at the working time. See, they didn't have smartphones to fiddle with in bed.

[nicbou]

I'm trying, but it's so hard!

I put my phone in a drawer. Everything's in silent mode. I have a fully disconnected, distraction-free iPad for reading and writing. Work only happens on the computer. There are no emails on the phone.

Yet, I can't fully disconnect. Every device, every account, every app mixes work stuff and personal life stuff. And software is so sticky! I can't just check one thing without my attention getting stuck on a notification badge, an email, a feed or some other thing that I should not pay attention to right now.

How do you people handle it?

[ben_w]

I also struggle with this, but I have found some metaphorical band-aids that help a bit.

My phone's SIM no longer has any credit on it. I actively cannot browse mindlessly in a lot of places. Doesn't work perfectly, half of public transport around here has free WiFi, as do some shops, but it helps.

I have three laptops. One with the games on (Steam, Windows and nothing much else, no passwords installed except Steam… oh and Discord but I don't actually log in because the content was never interesting enough to get addicted to in the first place); one as a work machine (mac with Xcode, claude etc. installed); and one as a down-time machine (also a mac, but only co-incidentally).

Facebook itself isn't installed anywhere, though the Messenger app is for family I otherwise can't reach; various time-hungry sites (including FB, X, here*, reddit, several news sites) are blocked as best as I can block them (harder than it should be: on iPhones the "time limit" tool doesn't allow "zero" and reflexes to tap "ignore limit" are too quick to form, on desktop it's increasing ignoring my hosts file).

YouTube has so many ads, it's no longer possible for me to habit-form with it. Well, that and the home suggestions are consistently 90% bad, and the remaining 10% includes items in my watch-later playlist that I don't get around to watching.

* see my comment history for how well that attempt at self-control is actually working.

[mghackerlady]

I started by just turning off notifications for anything that isn't needed for important people (eg: friends and family) to reach me. I got rid of most social media[0] a little while after that. Another thing I did when I still used a smartphone was remove all the apps from my home screen. At least on iOS, notification badges don't appear in their slide-out app tray thing. For quick access to essentials I used an app that provides a widget for hyperlink like launching of apps

[0]HN, Reddit, and Tumblr are the exceptions for me. I have notifications off and those platforms tend to invite more nuanced discussions and be less distracting over all

[dfxm12]

The first step is to understand why you can't disconnect. Ways to handle it will be different based on that.

One reason might be some kind of physical/psychological addiction (either to apps themselves or the act of looking at your phone). One reason might be that what you're doing is more boring than what you normally do on your phone.

[matthewaveryusa]

Honestly, I don't. I go through phases. I have a tampermonkey script that blank-screens sites and that's been very effective. Reddit is a tough one because there's a ton of useful information on there, but once you're on it it's easy to start scrolling. You could be extreme and get a device just for work, perhaps with google voice and wifi only to save on a membership fee

Here's my script: https://gist.github.com/matthewaveryusa/8257de0083abdecc612c...

[Aldipower]

I learned to hate smartphones, so I threw it literally away. People can write me an email or call me on my landline. On the desktop I am using Debian with WindowMaker. This is enjoyably distraction free. I am a free man.

[rootusrootus]

I had an early experience with a Palm III and a cell modem strapped to it. It was intoxicating. I still find the pull of the phone to be very strong sometimes. It's an ongoing battle to maintain a healthy relationship with it. Such a useful tool, but also a massive time suck if you let it.

[oasisbob]

Ooh, I remember the Palm + modem + mail sync combination for sure. Was absolutely engrossing.

[ChrisArchitect]

Your Phone Isn't a Drug. It's a Portal to the Otherworld. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46115659

[gulfofamerica]

Great article. Probably not cynical enough for this crowd though.

[greg_V]

We were promised a borderless world and instead got one without boundaries.

[Cthulhu_]

And now we're clamouring to reinstate them. Not just digitally (in the form of e.g. limitations and boundaries on attention demanding apps and activities), but politically / internationally as well, if you lean that way.

[aa-jv]

I've always had a TV or screen of some sort, devoted to background music or light films, just to fill in the void between lines of code. For some, having such light stuff going on is a productivity booster. I once got a dev team that had been struggling to get things finished, well and truly over the finish line, by putting a fat TV in the room, and giving folks the ability to line up their playlists for the day, as long as it wasn't too violent/inappropriate for the workplace.

We side-watched a ton of stuff together as a team - it was great for morale - and we actually shipped stuff, too. Of course the TV eventually became a console for the build server, but it was always available to anyone to put something on in the background, if they wanted to. Definitely a nice way to get a team to be a bit more coherent - as long as whats being played isn't too crazy.

[throwawaylaptop]

I work in construction saas of a certain kind, and when I visit customers there is a very very clear difference in quality/size/revenue in companies that allow headphones and those that don't.

I'll let you decide which ones you think are doing better.

[IAmBroom]

That is an amazingly vague post. You've convinced me!

[agumonkey]

You could even argue that society is incapable of not running into these cycles of building wisdom and losing it. Our minds are differential.. things that are here have less value, we seek newness no matter what.

[georgeecollins]

I am also older and I see that my kids don't have certain things that I perceived as disadvantages at the time but may have helped develop useful habits. These things include quiet and boredom, which helped with focus; lack of ready answers or information, which may have helped imagination or generative reasoning.

I think we can recreate these things if and when we need to, but that recreation may be for the elites. I heard an interview with a professor who said he had to reintroduce Socratic exams to get around chat bots and the fact that kids now have very poor handwriting. At an elite school you can do that.

[somenameforme]

I don't think this is something just for elites at all, because so much of this happens at the home. So for instance I completely agree on the boredom and have factored into how I raise my children. Similarly, I also agree on the importance of not having answers simply handed to you. Another one as well is realizing that not everything you're told is true, which is a big part of the reason that I ultimately decided that Santa exists for them. And it makes me wonder if that wasn't the point all along, because it doesn't feel right to lie to your kids for years.

[patcon]

> rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors

This is something I also believe. Thanks for saying it.

I've been thinking and reflecting a lot on what I've been calling for myself "generative constraint". It's sure as heck not something that is the same for everyone, but I think we all have a set of them that might help us be our best person.

We've universalized constraints and expansivenesses in a way that seems really poor judgement. And yes, there is a capitalist critique in this too, as any good theory should have :)

[cal_dent]

I think of it as "introducing friction". There's a lot things that we do now which is largely as a result of frictionless ease of doing it. Smartphones and social media are the obvious one, but it applies to many technology/digital driven behaviour (pay with face id/touch and people end up consuming more for instance). And it's no surprise to me that what works for a lot of people is putting their phone somewhere else in their house. Essentially introducing artificial friction.

My slightly cynical view is for many of us we're more often lazy than not and default to doing the most frictionless thing. Introduce friction and very quickly I find it forces you to think about what you're actually doing

[imgabe]

For certain tasks for me, having a movie running while I'm working is more productive. It gives something to take your attention when you have to wait for something without getting sucked in to endless scrolling.

[protocolture]

"What if coworker I disapproved of but society"

[calderwoodra]

Article about smartphones being bad? Right to the top.

Generic comment that would fit in the comment section of any of those articles? Right to the top.

I get baited into reading these posts and comments every day - why can't I stop? Probably for the same reason these posts and comments get up votes.