How I finally managed to be on my phone less
You might not remember the phone sex dead cat jump scare, or the vow of silence in retaliation to getting divorced if you haven’t seen Her since 2013. It was a different time, when tech guys hadn’t yet become the most fervent backers of new fascism, and instead did, well, vows of silence. Digital detox retreats. Back then, that sort of thing was quaint, and we didn’t want to get of our phones. Not yet. In defense of our past selves, I think it’s important to remember that phones used to be the next big thing, and for good reason. It’s completely incomprehensible that so many things should fit into so small a device, and yet here we are, growing disenchanted with them.
This isn’t because phones are the second worst at a great many of the multifarious things they do: That’s part of the deal of having a handheld portable computer with near constant internet connection. They’re not the best for reading, but you can read on the subway. They are the second worst at these things, because being the worst at them would mean not doing them at all, though your mileage may vary. Most of a phone’s uses are like this, because they have small screens, and no keyboard. Some things, they’re essentially the best at, like being phones, or GPS.
No, phones are a lovely backstop to have for a great many things, in case the way we would actually like to do them isn’t portable. It’s a computer, in your pocket! How delightful. No, being the second worst isn’t the issue. The problem most of us have with our phones is the things we do on them that we rather we weren’t doing at all.
These things are intimately related: By being available to use for almost anything, phones become the first stop for many things. And even though they’re our computers, they don’t entirely act like they’re ours. Moving right past tracking and privacy, the heart of the issue is notifications and their ilk. I’m a very, very social monkey, and I’ll never give up near instant global communication with loved ones while all lobes in my brain are unharmed. Navigation is a close second, search a close third. Unfortunately, this leaves me vulnerable to checking the time, seeing a notification, and not looking up for an hour. These are the measures I have taken to extricate myself from that bind. I’ve been trying at this for a long time, and this is what worked.
I got a wristwatch. This, I confess, was entirely by accident. I wanted something that would yell at me when I’d been sitting for an hour (it doesn’t). I got something that tells me the time without showing me my e-mails. Fair enough.
I jailbroke my kindle. This, I confess, was mostly unnecessary. I was already managing my e-books using Calibre. The more important part was digging out my old kindle and using it to read again, as opposed to using my phone. Used kindles go for as little as 15€, and you’ll never need to give Jeffrey Bezos a dime.
I dug out my old phone. Are you noticing a theme yet? Basically, I’m using my old phone for entertainment, i.e. reading social media. Other times, I do that on my PC – it’s impressive how big a difference a page down button makes. But while I’m home, I never use my phone for anything entertaining.
I bisected my new phone. I’ll confess, I haven’t gotten rid of any of the entertainment apps on my new phone despite banishing them to the old one. Instead, I’ve got two different looking “lauchers” i.e. home screen managers on my new phone. An austere one, all squares and black, that I use at home, that doesn’t show me anything besides calendar, communications, recipes, the sorts of things which will not yank my attention away from me. The other one has everything, and I basically just turn it on when I’m out and about, and have some time to kill on the subway. To preserve separation, none of the entertainment apps may send me notifications, ever.
I extracted the communications part from social media apps. Are you at risk of fomo if you can’t get into your instagram DMs? I had this issue, but with discord, where you have a DMs app welded to a social media app. However, there is an app called “Beeper” which lets you a) centralize your DMs from a bunch of different messaging apps in one and b) lets you access them without being in the app that’s trying to get you to scroll endlessly.
Frankly, it’s not very sophisticated. It simply boils down to using separate devices for separate tasks, and usually, those devices are better fits anyway because they’re not wearing every hat in the book. And, when I leave home, I can still turn on the omnitool if I need it, or if I’m bored. It just boils down to not letting your monkey brain get hijacked all the time, by letting it know where it is at any given time, as opposed to being in the everything place constantly.
There is one more thing, but I can’t promise you it’s related: I’ve also gotten rid of every algorithmic feed, period. Only chronological social media, a browser extension that nukes all video recommendations on youtube (and no youtube app on the TV), no TikTok, and so on. Maybe that helped, maybe it didn’t, I can’t say for certain. It probably didn’t hurt.