I chose a worse phone on purpose
Recently I got a brand new second hand iPhone SE 2020 with nearly 80 percent battery life. It is now my main phone, even though I also have a fully functional Samsung that has worked perfectly for the last three or four years.
What the hell am I doing
I hate big phones.
Technology kept evolving and screens kept growing. I will never forget the first time I saw a phablet on a bus trip. A phone bigger than my head. Today that looks almost normal. Phones are now gigantic seven inch brainrot machines designed to consume time.
A quick search on YouTube or Reddit shows a growing movement toward digital minimalism. People turning their phones grayscale, using minimal launchers, carrying physical notebooks, trying to escape doomscrolling. There are niche e ink phones and even attempts to revive physical keyboards.
On paper, a modern Blackberry running Android would solve all my problems.
Could it? Really?
Ignorance is bliss - Cypher, The Matrix (1999)
I am not an Instagram user anymore. My Twitter is collecting dust. I mostly rely on YouTube for cheap entertainment. I tried most of those minimalism techniques. They help a little, but digital addiction is real. Everybody is hooked in their own black mirrors
New tech does not fix inner problems. Even if a Blackberry or an e ink phone could make me less obsessed, reality looks like this..
- I cannot afford an e ink phone. 1.1. They suck.
- We are still far from a good blackberryish device on the market.
So I got the iPhone.
Setting barriers on purpose
Less battery life. Smaller screen. Still compatible with my banking apps.
It is bad for YouTube, which is exactly the point. It is good enough for reading blogs and the occasional Reddit scroll in communities I actually care about.
An old phone will not make me eat healthier, train harder, or read more books. But it can pull my attention away from YouTube Shorts.
And for now, that is enough.