How easy is it to be part of society without a phone? The way people communicate, organize, meet, is all via these devices.

Yes, whether to have these devices is technically a choice, but when the social cost of choosing not to have one is so high, the choice is made for you.

Dont be so dramatic. You can have a phone and leave it at home if your gone do something where you don't want to get tracket. Thats just the most simple option. Its not a binary choice.

I don't want to be tracked when I go to work (or ever), but I have to bring my cell phone to work because I need it to do my job.

So, yes it's a "choice": I can have my privacy or I can have my job.

Get a dumb phone for work.

Dump phones still allow tracking you.

That doesn't solve any problems.

For people on Hacker News? Easy as shit. You have employable skills and Internet access. Life will be strictly better than it was when you didn't have a smartphone fifteen years ago.

It is fairly easy. I have a fairly dumb feature-phone I almost always leave at home unless I want to be reachable away from home. During work hours I work on a computer connected to the Internet, and can be reached quite reliably via e-mail, or via my employer's office phone.

You do need a mobile phone these days because (in The Netherlands) the government requires SMS authentication for some services, but I don't feel the need to own and carry a smart phone with me all the time.