Naomi's Precious Little Blog

Why does it matter…?

Whenever there is any moment to breath I instinctively go to check my phone and start the cycle of hopping between my frequented apps, never having time to just let my mind rest, causing me to become more stressed. Due to my work being in IT and my main hobbies all being digital related a vast majority of my average day is spent using devices, which is not helped by filling every gap with needless information on my phone. I feel that this over use of technology is having a negative effect on both my attention span and overall mental health, not to mention the countless wasted hours per day from mindlessly using it after waking up and before going to sleep :p

Some of my failed attempts to fix the issue

Re-purposing old smartphones

One thing that I have tried a few times during the past year or two is reusing old, slow smartphones I’ve obtained over the years as my daily driver to help deter my desire to use them. Often I would limit myself to the “core” apps I relied upon however I still found that I would spend considerable amount of my time using it despite the limited app pool and sluggish performance. These experiments proved that I would need to do more to fix the overall issue and made me appreciate a bunch of cool old phones (most are surprisingly usable, especially if you flash a custom rom :D)

Creating a restricted profile on my main phone

Recently I attempted to solve the issue once and for all, the plan? Create a separate profile on my phone that stripped it down to the bear essentials that I needed from my phone, and to ensure that it wasn’t pleasant to use for long periods I put a grey-scale filter over it. As you can guess by the category this is in it didn’t work out to well >w<

Ultimately it failed for the following reasons:

• I would need to re-enable colour for certain things friends sent to me and I would forget to turn it back off.
• I could stomach not having colour surprisingly well.
• When I needed something from the main profile I would often switch back and then remain on it.
• It was more cumbersome than being on the main profile and no youtube during dinner D:

Why dumb phones don’t work and a solution is difficult

After reading all of this you may be thinking that the solution to the issues I’ve had is simple, lock away every smartphone I have and pick up a cheap flip-phone that can only do the core features like SMS and phone calls (dumb phone).

However, smartphones are to deeply integrated into our modern lives for someone to be able to simply remove them without causing a large burden for themselves. Here is a brief list of the core uses of a phone now:

• Messages
• Phoning
• 2FA
• Ordering food and making reservations
• QR Codes/App restaurant menus (why does this even exist i hate this X3)
• Music
• Banking
• Camera
• Photos
• Notes
• Shopping
• Researching
• Entertainment
• Social Media

And this list is the main reason I believe that dumb phones are not a viable solution. Switching to a dumb phone means giving up all the daily utilities we all rely upon, causing the switch to feel like a giant burden, not to mention the social isolation it can cause by limiting how you are able to contact your friends as most do not chat over SMS or regular phone calls.

What Solutions are there?

My attempts made me realise that this parasite is too deeply integrated into modern life to truly remove without damaging the host (i like being dramatic :3). Not all hope is lost however as there are many viable alternatives, I’ve seen some people mitigate the lost functionality of a restricted phone by replacing each use with its pre-smartphone equivalent, such as mp3 player for music and a physical notepad to take notes in. While I like the idea of this I feel like it is to cumbersome and too big of a leap to immediately make, a big thing I’ve realised is that the more friction there is switching the more likely you are to give up, meaning a slow and steady approach is likely the best option. As such I plan to replace the parasite with a less invasive one…

What am I going to do from here?

It is clear now that I need to find a good middle ground for myself if I want to lower my reliance on a phone. As such I plan to use the busted up Samsung S10 (with lineage OS 22.2), that is photoed below as its giant black spot and the blistering cracks makes it inconvenient for consuming media, which will hopefully deter me from using it as much (i will also configure it like how I did with the restricted profile on my main phone for maximum discomfort :D). Along side it I will use my Thinkpad yoga 12 to act as a dedicated device to watch media on to try to reduce the chance of me falling back onto other phones, reduce mindless scrolling and make me think more consciously about what I want to do/watch. This blog is a commitment that I will fix my horrible habits! I may make a follow up to this blog in the future.

Ending rambles

WOAH :0 you reached the end. Thank you for listening to me ramble, I plan to make more blog posts in the future of varying topic and style so make sure to check back in every once in a while ;3. This is the first time I’ve written anything that isn’t documentation or shitty essays in a long time and it was pretty fun :D If you want to reach out or discuss anything my discord username is naomi.the.ashen.one