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.
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.
Oh my god that's so true!
<village opens its mouth>
Actually, screw the village
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.
If you modify your preferred lifestyle in any way for work during personal time, you are still working.
If a company wants you to be reachable 24/7 then they need to give you a pager and a salary based on a 168 hour work week, not a 40 hour work week.
Just because everyone else lets themselves be exploited does not mean you need to. Make the ~40 hours count and work circles around everyone else, then disconnect.
And a long/annoying password for the "main" profile, with banking and all the other stuff maybe
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.
Except when you are offline together.
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.
People did all of these things before smartphones and all those methods still work just fine today.
I am specifically opting out of cellular networks for this reason, though open hardware/software wifi and meshtastic solutions I am always open to.
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'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.
Note that the effect was stronger with wealth, as expected for performance- and excuse-seeking behaviors in high-achieving households.
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?
This has got to have a strong selection effect.
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 also very difficult to claim to be a victim if everyone still remembers what you did.
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.
It was a good experience as it's prompted me to get more serious about cutting back sugar, implemented as long term, achievable habit change.
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-...
Not whatever we have in the modern / food pyramid diet.
See:
Novelty and Dopaminergic Modulation of Memory Persistence: A Tale of Two Systems
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.
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.
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.
The problem is completely reversible if you stop electronic screen usage and stick to traditional education (nature, friends, books etc)
“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.
Who would have thought that bread (fast food) and circus (smartphone) would dumb them down. /s
