Every app now believes it deserves a push notification. A weather app that pings me about tomorrow's pollen count is not providing a service, it's competing for attention with everything else that's decided the same thing.
I've turned off notifications for everything except messages and calls. The silence has been, genuinely, an improvement — not a dramatic life-changing one, just a steady reduction in the number of times my phone lights up for something that could have waited, or that I never needed to know at all.
The apps that push hardest for notification permission are almost always the ones with the least urgent actual content. A banking app asking about a genuine transaction is reasonable. A shopping app asking whether I saw that an item is "back in stock" is not, and yet it's the shopping apps that ask most persistently, often re-prompting after being declined once already.
What's changed for me isn't that I've become anti-technology or nostalgic for a quieter era that probably wasn't as quiet as it's remembered — it's that I've stopped assuming every app's request for attention is made in good faith. Most of them are optimising for engagement, not for actually being useful to me at the moment they choose to interrupt.
Badge counts I've left alone, mostly because they're passive — I can check an app when I choose to, rather than being told to right now by a buzz in my pocket.