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.
> No one gets to decide your lifestyle but you. Make them adapt.
Make them adapt is some nonsense. You’ve made multiple comments that through sheer force of will you can make other people align with your choices. You’ve posted zero evidence, or even claimed, that you have succeeded in doing this yourself.
Is there actually a pizza place that refuses to bring a pizza to someone without a cell phone app being involved? Like they have no phone number you can call from a landline or a website where you could place an order? Odds are good that you could get by just fine letting your kids school/daycare know your email address/landline phone number. Some people's work is much less flexible, but everything else should be accommodating people without cell phones.
Part of my problem with the claims that cell phones are the problem is that the answer often seems to be a landline that you’re still available on. If you replace one phone with another, what’s the difference? This isn’t a sarcastic question, either. The differences are key.
No one worried about the impact of dumb cell phones on our kids. Maybe the texting was a bit annoying but that’s all. What really changed is smart phones, the Internet in your hand all the time. The doomscrolling Instagram or TikTok and completely disconnecting from the real world most of the time. The Facebook-type sites that enable anonymous bullying.
It’s important to understand what the actual problems are because abstaining from phones entirely is just not realistic. Possible? Yes. Realistic? No.
My point was that the person I replied to ignored the entire chain to reply as if they were actually answering the question, which they were not.
I agree this is not actually impossible. Is it an overall positive change? That’s debatable.
