Narrator: they were not.
Yeah not true at all. If you think you’re worse off for having a cell phone, the problem isn’t the phone.
No worse off for having it. Worse off if it controls your life
Skill issue. The phone doesn’t do anything on it’s own.
My grandfather owned a business, which meant he made and received a lot of phonecalls. I have no memory of him, as he died two months after I was born (on Halloween, in fact.)
However, my mother told me that he was also a diabetic and, for it, took medication that was a diuretic. That meant, in her words, that every morning he would take his medicine then “go pee for an hour and a half.” (I’m very ignorant of medicine so I can only parrot what she told me.)
The combination of these facts apparently resulted in him doing a lot of business (of both kinds) over the phone from atop the commode. He had a phone jack installed next to the toilet and got a phone specifically to keep there.
The phone was the same model as the one pictured in this post.
Bonus fun fact: it was long enough ago that the jack looked like this.
The only reason I know the story outlined above is that I, as a kid, did not know what that jack was and asked my mother about it.
Definitely not true, though. I don’t have any numbers but I would wager global slavery, as a percentage, has declined since 1876 with some bumps in the trend during WWII, as well as after the USSR and CCP took power respectively, when US privatized prisons, and when North Korea started existing and being awful.
People on their phones are conversing, sometimes indirectly, and that gives them more power than we give them credit for. At least until they devolve into worthless sloppers talking to walls.
99% of the conversing is nonsense and just a waste of productive time
As opposed to all the “productive” things people do when not conversing?
We’re social mammals and we will always spend large amounts of time engaging in social behaviour.
It maintains relationships, strengthens bonds, makes it easier to obtain aid, helps reinforce our positions within our identity groups, etc. etc.
Even when the words being shared are complete nonsense, conversing is never nonsense.
You’re a relatively large mammal. Your body is not designed to be productive all the time. It’s designed to have frequent periods of doing absolutely nothing. You’re also a pack animal whose survival depends on being social with other members of your pack.
So, wasting productive time by conversing nonsense? That’s how we evolved. It’s good for us.
Being productive all the time is for suckers with no actual lives.
Unless you count forming and maintaining social bonds as productive, which it absolutely is, in which case your point is just straight moot.
I remember having to wait to be alone, restricted hours and frequently waiting my turn to use it.
deleted by creator
