Defoned

I have seriously decided that excess phone use is a scourge and while I can't change the world, I am going to do my best to change myself. This is going OK:

- keep phone out of reach of bed, ideally and usually in a separate room (unless I need the alarm) (this is the easiest but most important one)

- don't take phone on walks unless I have a specific reason

- avoid reflexively scrolling phone while waiting for something eg. in a MD waiting room

- only watch YouTube on "the big TV", it's hard to never watch YouTube but I feel like only doing it on a real TV naturally limits it, somewhat. For me personally, YouTube is by far the most addictive corner of the internet. I naturally get tired of Facebook after a few minutes.

I really want to delete SM from my phone, but to do this effectively, you have to install blocker apps. It's no problem to remove apps but blocking web sites is unreasonably difficult (why isn't this a basic feature of Chrome?). On a real computer you can easily block them in DNS (and I do) but AFAIK there is no easy way to do that on a phone.

I don't trust blocker apps to not steal my MFAs, which I consider sacred. Maybe I am too paranoid. But also, I can't bring myself to pay a (typically) monthly fee, however small, for something like that.

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Sometimes I listen to those podcasts of the "10 things to make your day better" variety. I have big doubts about how much I should listen to some random podcaster, but, sometimes they have mildly interesting suggestions. It strikes me how often their advice boils down to "use your phone less".

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If I were to be responsible for a young child, I would struggle with how to approach phones. But absolutely not allowing them until high school, at least, seems like a decent starting point. Seeing a little  kid with a phone (or, more often, tablet) is truly ... discouraging.

I have no data on this whatsoever but I feel like this might possibly be one place where we have a tiny edge over China. Ben says TikTok in China is all math videos, that tracks but I'm not sure if it's actually true.

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