I call BS. I think this is something that people like to think that they believe, but they really don't.

The first time they found themselves standing in the kitchen and thinking, "How long am I supposed to cook chicken?" and realizing the only way to find out is to clean up, get dressed, drive down to the bookstore and find a cooking-for-beginners book, they'll be right back on board with the digital age.

Like, go watch early-seasons episodes of The X-Files and realize how many of the plot lines only work because the show started in a time that was pre-mobile phones, and then realize that kind of hilariously stupid and inconvenient situation was just, like, everyday life for everybody not so very long ago. Plan to meet a friend for lunch but they don't show up? You can decide to wait and risk eating alone, or go home, because there's literally no way to find out if they're just running a little late or if they're completely unable to come or what.

Sure, social media is a bit of a hellscape, but there is so much convenience that people take for granted that comes from cell phones and internet. I just do not believe more than a single-digit percentage of people would seriously enjoy going back for more than a few days, tops. No more than a camping trip.

I bet this is more about the stress of being constantly available to your boss, your parents, your teachers, your neediest friends than about wanting a world without technology.

Do people not realize they can just log off? Go watch TV, it's still there. Turn off your phone, it has a power button. Read a book or go outside. None of the pre-internet options have gone away.

Do people really want to go back to the dark ages before Wikipedia existed? I know I don't. Knowledge is power, and the Internet is a treasure trove of it, if you know where to look.

That said, I do want to go back to computers that obeyed only their users and no one else. Malicious hardware like TPM and Pluton is really scary.

This is also pretty common. People tend to think like that about everything they had in their formative years.

It's nostalgia plus a realization of how entrenched tech bureocratic processes have penetrated their lives, oftentimes making them worse, not better (many of the improvements are taken for granted).

But my point is you can take this "old times were better" in most of every case when doing these surveys. About music, TV and everything.

What people really want are the benefits without some of the cons that they've very willingly accepted out of laziness and/or ignorance.

They've lost a ton of privacy and rights and ability to discourse and act by being so heavily surveilled and "panopticon'd" into superficial uniformity of opinion.

Many of the things they complain about they can still do "non tech/non online" but it requires more effort than pretending that there should be just one way so they don't have to choose.

I agree with the commenters who said people miss certain things but forget about convenience of the connected world. I wanted to add that people likely misattribute their nostalgia to unconnected world because they were kids. It felt great being a kid not because we were pre-internet, but because we were kids. We had no bills to worry about. We’d always have food. And that was the only food we ever knew about so we loved it. Our worries were to just have enough time in the day to play all the cool things with friends and explore the world. We didn’t feel guilty for just playing video games the whole day or hanging out with friends the whole day. Our bodies could fall from a tree and our bruises would heal in a week. We’d find a motherfucking ant and be fascinated by it for hours! Have you tried staring at ants now? It’s mindnumbingly boring. Of course we miss the way we felt when we were kids. Technology ha nothing to do with it. Every generation misses being a kid.

"middle-age Americans (35-54 years old)"

35 is middle-aged??

I like having the internet and technology. It's the abusive use of it that I don't like.I am also one who wishes phones were of no necessary use. Why do I need a phone number to sign up to an online service? Why must I have an email address and internet access just to see what lab results came in from the doctor's office? What use is my email address being "real" to some online community and services? I would be okay in a world where the phone and emails were just a nice thing to have and not required. I understand that everyone is saying "just turn off the phone, watch tv, unplug the computer"... But with how just about every company in the world requires this to even function, it's a lot easier said than done. I think the real thing folks on surveys like this are looking for is a world where the internet, phones, computers, etc are nice to have but not needed to live a life. Or maybe I'm just unique in how I feel, dunno, just had to share my thoughts lol.

I like the internet. It's been integral in my life becoming myself. I've met some of my favorite people through it.

It's my hope that the era of social media comes to an end and the internet transitions back to how it used to be pre 2008 or so (iPhone and Facebook changed things), less centralized and all-consuming. A return to smaller communities as opposed to these larger algorithmic, advertiser-servicing platforms. Discord servers and focused forums. Communities of friends over public places to chase clout. In addition to handy services like shopping, banking, maps, etc. In essence, the internet as a tool rather than a social expectation. Because in many ways it is a really powerful tool, and I don't want to see that go away and I don't think it ever will at this point.

There are cracks showing in the social media model, Twitter and reddit in particular at the moment, but it yet remains a hope that we can turn it back to a more positive thing in our lives.

(TDLR: Technology (in its infancy) was something new, exciting, fun and enjoyable. Today, it is manifested more as an overlord whose primary capacity is to spy, intrude and take your personal information in order that they might gain from it.)

I grew up in a world before all of the modern day technology took over. They were good times, but when technology did eventually begin to develop, it effects were initially benign. It was initially adopted by those who were considered 'geeks' and people who were willing to spend money on it (even IBM clones such as the Tandy 1000 were going for $1,000 back in the day).

I remember when pagers were coming on the scene and allowed people to reach out to each other if they weren't at home or at work (which were the only places they had access to a reachable phone number). It gave greater freedom for those who were in positions where they were on call 24x7 - it allowed them to go places and still be reachable instead of being stuck at home and waiting for a phone call that might never come.

Of course, things grew from there which provided many other benefits including access to a huge repository of information. Nowadays, that access to information has become a means of harvesting information from the very individual seeking to obtain it. The innocence of what was once revolutionary has been been upended by and ideology that has figured out and embraced how to consume its own consumers.

I spend more time today figuring out how to keep my data and personal information private and secure. Using Linux on my computer, running GrapheneOS on my phone as well as other considerations all in an attempt to keep at bay invasive companies and their ever evolving techniques in order to pry and spy upon me. It's a shame that what was once fun and exciting is now something to be feared.

I feel like, for the 35-54 bracket at least, this must be less about giving up all the modern conveniences we have today but more about wishing they could raise their children in that simpler time. You don't want your kids to be left out of what's new and cool but you also don't want them exposed to EVERYTHING these platforms bring. It's a tight rope to walk and I'm not looking forward to it when my kids are older. I know a lot of people who have gone down the road of, "I didn't have a cell phone growing up, my kids won't either." But it's not very realistic in today's world.

If you are longing for a world that you never lived in, there's probably some "grass is greener on the other side" in play. The world before smart phones was considerably worse. I bet that most of the people who are asking for this don't know how to read a paper map and have never seen a phone book. They aren't considering getting lost or into a car accident and needing to find the nearest house to ask a stranger to call emergency services on their land line.

The good news is that, if you don't want to use a smart phone, you can just... not. Nobody is forcing you. If you really wanted a world without smart phones you would already not be using one!

I don't think people actually would, if push came to shove. They're just expressing nostalgia for a simpler time, which is pretty easy to understand, given all the dystopian effects of social media and smartphones.

I think smartphones have done a lot of harm, but they've still done far more good, which is why we use them. Especially in poorer countries where smartphones are often people's only access to the internet.

That said, there's nothing stopping any of these people in the article from being the change they want to see in the world. Not to send anybody to Reddit, but r/dumbphones is a fast growing subreddit for people that want to try that. A lot of the users are Gen Z who never got to try them and want to give it a whirl.

I have trying to find the poll by following link and found nothing but this.

According to a new Harris Poll shared exclusively with Fast Company

So there is no actual source, no ways to check if the poll actually exist or not, no way to check if poll's question phrased in a way to get certain response, how many actually responded to the poll, etc. And, compare to most big news published poll result, a confidence and margin of error.

There for, I simply view this as click bait article to generate engagement, which it did.

I've been saying for a couple of years now that I think within the next decade there's going to be a resurgence in "dumb phones." And other methods of disconnecting from the web as people start to get fatigued from being connected to everything constantly.

Everyone can do it for them-self, just don't use a smartphone or a cell phone if you want to go more hardcore.