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having the right mental narrative and expectation setting when you do something seems extremely important. the exact same object experience can be anywhere from amusing to irritating to deeply traumatic depending on your mental narrative. some examples:
a minor inconvenience like missing your bus when you're not in a rush can be much more irritating if you're having a bad day and you have the narrative of "everything is going wrong for me today"
something going wrong during travel can be a catastrophe if you're expecting the perfect vacation but it can even be a fond memory if you're just viewing it as an adventure (and a bonding experience if travelling with others)
not getting to do something you wanted to do hurts a lot more if you feel like you made a deal with yourself that you'd get to do it in exchange for doing something else you didn't want to do; whereas you might not even really want the thing that much otherwise.
expecting something to happen soon and having it gradually delayed further and further into the future is a lot more irritating than already expecting something to be delayed a lot.
tbc, the optimal decision is not always the narrative that is maximally happy with everything. sometimes there are true tradeoffs, and being complacent is bad. but it is often worth shaping the narrative in a way that reduces unnecessary suffering.
a skill which I respect in other people and which I aspire towards is noticing when other people are experiencing suffering due to violations of positive narratives, or fulfillment of negative narratives, and comforting them and helping nudge them back into a good narrative.
this is another post of something that is obvious intellectually and yet I've failed to always do right in practice.
I'm not sure what you're hinting at, but in 99.9% of cases when I'm out of the house, I do carry a smartphone around. If you mean that it's annoying when the display gets confused by water, then I agree that's a real disadvantage (but I doubt people's attitude towards being exposed to rain changed that much between 2006 and today, so there certainly is some severe general dislike of rain independent from smartphones). If this is not what you mean, then please elaborate. :)
1Amalthea
Sorry if that was weirdly obscure. I was asking because the principal reason I go out of my way to avoid rain is that I'm worried my phone would get wet and potentially die (and I've been somewhat sad about having to forego the experience of braving the rain at points). But it's possible that this is not a big issue with current devices (and maybe never was)!
it is definitely not a problem with current devices. my phone has gotten quite wet hundreds of times and still works perfectly fine. note that this is different from survivability fully submerged; my guess is your phone could probably survive being submerged for a few minutes in a pool or something but if you left it there for a day it would be dead.