My brain without a smart phone

Lately, I’ve spent roughly 3 to 5 hours a day looking at my phone. Classic doom scrolling: watching reels, sending reels, laughing at reels that my friends sent me. Reading the news, online window-shopping, curating my mood boards — while algorithms were curating my mood.

This was a problem.

I did not think the smart phone itself was such a big issue, but I did not function in a way I would have liked. I was tired all the time. Fake-painfully aware of the areas of my life that needed improvement, but lacking the time or energy to act on them.

I knew I was spending too much time just sitting on the couch with my phone in my hand, staring at content spoon-fed to me, but I had no idea how powerful it would be to just stop doing that.

The problem with algorithms, or, things were better before

I strongly believe that personal technology^[1] peaked in the early 2000s, when portable devices were small, did one thing, and did it well.

Phones were there to have actual, real-time conversations. Texting had a limit due to cost and typing speed,^[2] but this limit encouraged creativity with written language.^[3]

Music players had an intention behind them. You could show music to your friends. You had an actual, curated-by-you, thought-over selection of limited music on your tiny device. You could make the choice of quality versus quantity.

This all needed consideration. Intention. Preferences.

Streaming services and social media do the selection for you. They take away the freedom of exploring, the excitement of discovering something new on your own. All of this at our fingertips, 24/7, with practically unlimited data, feeding us the same echo-chamber-curated content anytime, anywhere.

We rely on these algorithms for our daily dopamine rush. It’s a vicious cycle — we need a lot of it because we are deprived of it: we don’t eat well, we don’t sleep well, we don’t move enough. And as long as we are addicted to our screens, we won’t, either.

Plus… where’s the intention? Where’s creativity? Where are interests that differ from one friend to another? Where are beautifully weird personal websites? Being human?

I tried to improve things.

I tried to limit screen time, but I bypassed my self-imposed limits all the time.

I set my phone to greyscale. Try it — when you switch back to colour, you’ll find the screen harsh, almost yelling at you, the colours jumping at you aggressively, trying (and, on the long run, succeeding) to keep you entertained.

I deleted most of my social media accounts^[4], and asked my friends to call or text instead (they could still WhatsApp me — but I could not guarantee response times.)

These measures helped somewhat, but the smartphone is a powerful mind-hijacking machine, engineered by great minds who know more about how our brains work than we do. I needed more drastic measures.

Enter the dumb phone

The first modern dumb phone that really fascinated me was the original Light Phone, which only made phone calls. That’s right: not even text.

I do find texting very practical, so that was a must. I started researcing dumb phones.^[5]

I bought a Punkt MP02 (this was a few years back on a previous let’s-go-low-tech rampage), on which you could probably only text if you got to your teens before smart phones became ubiquitous. It has actual buttons, no touch screen. It ended up in my drawer because, despite its nice shape and tactility, it was not pleasant to use. It runs a horribly done Android clone with the failed promise of a messaging app,^[6] and some quite ugly ring tones.

Then I found it: a tiny E Ink device, the Light Phone’s successor, Light Phone II.^[7]

You can only do a few things with it: make calls, send messages, get basic (text-based) directions, listen to music,^[8] take notes, and look at your calendar. I love it.

The Light Phone II’s main screen

Going dumb-phone, no-social-media changed how my brain and body works.

I feel less tense and more chill in general. Because of less blue light exposure during the day and especially in the evening, my biological clock went back to a more natural rhythm in just a few days. I can fall asleep. I wake up between 6–7 am on my own, without an alarm, every day. Energized.

I am productive in the morning. Not productive like society expects me to, rather in a way that makes sense for us as humans. Sometimes I play an instrument, I read or write for an hour or two, I listen to a record while ironing, or I re-pot some house plants.

And I enjoy all of these things immensely. I don’t get bored that easily.

I was over at a friend’s place the other night and she asked if I was tired — I didn’t feel tired, but it was already dark outside, so I had started to slow down.

So… just living a more natural rhythm. It’s like my brain is on a sabbatical.

What now?

I still have a long way to go: about an hour of screen time on my iPhone for various purposes (mostly WhatsApp and admin tasks.) Deleting LinkedIn. Deleting Instagram (not just the app, the whole account plus my dog’s account. I know, it’s bad.)

So, for the foreseeable future, this website is my online presence.

Now go, delete your socials, or at least read some Jaron Lanier.