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feel almost naked without their phone somewhere near their person
Just yesterday, my wife was downtown, and for some reason, her phone wasn't picking up the cellular network; when she went to pay, she couldn't manage it at all... she was literally left "naked" without her phone. Luckily, she had some cash on her—money that, according to her, had been sitting there for three years, ever since we first arrived in Brazil and didn't have bank accounts yet.
how long a lack of major infrastructure downtime
I think we've reached the point where normies are so accustomed to using electronics to pay for everything that the habit is lost for a good portion of society. So yes, definitely many people have been conditioned to live digitally. Hence I mentioned a natural disaster scenario as a reminder of the strong utility of cash.
With that said, there are segments of society, typically "working class", that have strong intuition to preserve cash usage. It seems like many even insist on using it out of ideology, as a "dumb" way to retain some type of self sovereignty.
yes, you make a good point. But how long a lack of major infrastructure downtime in the developed world is necessary for the short-term thinking public to simply lose the habit of cash?
The memory of the public seems short. I definitely see people happily abandoning cash for card and phone payments. I suspect most people in the developed world feel almost naked without their phone somewhere near their person. That incredibly strong emotional feeling was created in roughly fifteen years. We could easily forget cash in such a timespan.