If you feel comfortable answering: what type of career are you able to sustain? When did you begin this career? If you did not already have your current set of occupational/professional contacts, how plausible would you guess it would be to come by them in the present day within your current lifestyle?
I am a post-doc in academia, which probably helps with the no-smartphone thing because people in academia are quite accustomed to communicate by email anyway (I’ve never worked outside academia). Absurd as it may seem, me not having a smartphone is surprisingly difficult to notice, because even if someone notices that I never extract smartphones from my pocket, no one is going to directly ask me why I don’t obsessively check the phone. I know many people (colleagues included) who are probably still assuming that I had a smartphone, even if they just know that I don’t use their favourite message app. And I don’t deliberately lie to them; I just avoid to introduce myself as “weird person without smartphone” from day one.
As for the third question, most of the professional contacts in academia are from in-person networking at conferences, and of course I go to conferences (maybe I told a small lie, it’s not literally true that I never buy anything online… I make a small exception for air travel tickets and reservations in foreign hotels, since they are very difficult to purchase offline and I can’t avoid going to conferences, but these are expenses that I must report anyway to get the refunds).
I’m also a postdoc, and my institution more or less requires having a smartphone because you can’t do anything without their proprietary 2-factors authentication. The other proprietary thing that seem mandatory is Zoom, have you found a way to escape from it?
Well, I actually don’t have the first problem since my institution still uses the old username + password login procedure (for other things needing 2FA like Protonmail I use a free desktop program to generate the keys). They also prefer Google Meets or MS Teams to Zoom. Both are nonfree, but at least they work directly in the browser and I don’t have to install nonfree software on my laptop.
If you feel comfortable answering: what type of career are you able to sustain? When did you begin this career? If you did not already have your current set of occupational/professional contacts, how plausible would you guess it would be to come by them in the present day within your current lifestyle?
I am a post-doc in academia, which probably helps with the no-smartphone thing because people in academia are quite accustomed to communicate by email anyway (I’ve never worked outside academia). Absurd as it may seem, me not having a smartphone is surprisingly difficult to notice, because even if someone notices that I never extract smartphones from my pocket, no one is going to directly ask me why I don’t obsessively check the phone. I know many people (colleagues included) who are probably still assuming that I had a smartphone, even if they just know that I don’t use their favourite message app. And I don’t deliberately lie to them; I just avoid to introduce myself as “weird person without smartphone” from day one.
As for the third question, most of the professional contacts in academia are from in-person networking at conferences, and of course I go to conferences (maybe I told a small lie, it’s not literally true that I never buy anything online… I make a small exception for air travel tickets and reservations in foreign hotels, since they are very difficult to purchase offline and I can’t avoid going to conferences, but these are expenses that I must report anyway to get the refunds).
I’m also a postdoc, and my institution more or less requires having a smartphone because you can’t do anything without their proprietary 2-factors authentication. The other proprietary thing that seem mandatory is Zoom, have you found a way to escape from it?
Well, I actually don’t have the first problem since my institution still uses the old username + password login procedure (for other things needing 2FA like Protonmail I use a free desktop program to generate the keys). They also prefer Google Meets or MS Teams to Zoom. Both are nonfree, but at least they work directly in the browser and I don’t have to install nonfree software on my laptop.