26 JUL 2025
This past week, I finally moved my phone number onto my new phone, a Mudita Kompakt. It's a fancy e-ink dumb phone. It can text, call, check the weather, has GPS, and I was already able to sideload Signal onto it.
So far, I feel mostly relief. There is a little bit of FOMO still, but honestly I've been pretty depressed lately and been feeling more anti-social anyway, so it works out.
The day-to-day differences are mostly in trying to remember what I need to bring with me and making sure things are charged.
I'm going to get into my list of new gear, but for context let's start with why I'm doing this.
I really hate how I feel when I'm on my smartphone. I know I'm addicted to it. The more I learn about how everything about smartphone culture is engineered to latch onto our brains, destroy our attention spans, and ultimately reduce our mindfulness and critical thinking, the worse I feel!
I was telling Kurt how it felt earlier and this really resonated with him.
I made the analogy to how our animal bodies react to junk food. Remember the media obsession with how junk food is engineered to be addictive? The root cause of it is pretty much that our animal bodies are used to essential nutrients like salt, fats, and simple carbohydrates being exceedingly rare. So when we encounter a food that has these things in high concentrations, a cascade of hunger hormones activates that drives us to consume as much as we can. It's survival! But our human bodies aren't evolving as quickly as what we create for them, and now this survival mechanism can be seen as dysfunctional as it contributes to cardiac disease and diabetes without the body stopping the cycle (although, in my opinion, it's the food that's dysfunctional, not our bodies).
Well, I think the internet does a similar thing to our brains. It's been well-documented that social media apps of all flavors are eroding our attention and critical thinking. When I imagine most of humanity's natural history, we have never had this much information or stimulation available - not in this quantity, and not at this speed. We are pattern-seeking creatures, again, this has contributed to our survival as a species. Maybe having access to such an intense depth of social connection, information, and general mental stimulation is like my beloved Cheetos to my brain. Hell, I can distinctly remember noticing my attention span worsen when I got a laptop in middle school. My parents only let me have a cell phone with calls, no texting, and I was for sure blocked from all social media (for good reason - Sorry I was so pissy about it at the time Mom, you were right). Even so, I dove into forums about my favorite books and YouTube analyses of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and I noticed my attention and focus worsening within a year. I think I'm still decent at being able to focus, but it's definitely not the same and probably never will be.
And it's been getting worse! My attention, the FOMO, the way that social media feels like it should curb feelings of social isolation but doesn't actually provide meaningful human contact, and especially the way I feel like I am constantly performing.
Social anxiety has always been a problem for me but lately it's been the worst ever. Everything I do, every photo I take, every event I attend, every friend I hang out with, I have the dread in the back of my mind that if I don't put it on the internet in a timely manner, somebody will be upset with me.
All of this has worn me down so much and I don't even enjoy being on the apps I frequent because of the anxiety. Gradually I got to the point where I felt like I just need to let it go.
My ultimate goal is to break out my smartphone back into its elements, so that when I want to listen to music, I don't get distracted by an Insta post for a cool show this weekend that I don't have time for but will go to anyway and be stressed about, or when I want to text a friend I don't space out and wake up 10 minutes later deep in the comments of some stupid r/AITA post. I want to be set up to be intentional about the ways I am spending my time.
My secondary goal in all of this is to increase my technological independence. This one is a lot more intimidating. I have never been great with computers, I'm average for a millennial I would say. My brother picked up coding as a hobby when he was young and it's always been a black box to me. I read biology textbooks for fun and grow a slime mold in my basement, but computer science is a completely foreign subject to me. I'm intimidated, but reminding myself I won't learn everything in a day, and with time I hope I'll become more skilled (spoiler alert, I'm already learning more than I thought I could).
So with all that in mind, I have fed my smartphone to Neptr (JK, I turned it off and shoved it in the back of a drawer, he would love that though) to be replaced with the following items:
The Kompakt, Walkman, and Techo go with me to work every day (I also usually bring Kurt's Kindle, onto which I have loaded the entire Animorphs anthology). If I'm going out, I trade the Techo for the camera and rarely the Walkman depending on how long transit will take. The Kompakt/Camera combo fit really comfortably in a small hip bag. The Techo is a little too big to fit in a fanny pack, so I've ordered a simple minimalist nylon wallet that should be coming in next week so I can keep essential cards (ID/credit) and some cash in the hip bag too.
I think the most unexpected joy so far I've found with making this switch has been maintaining my music library. That's the kind of task that usually makes me want to bang my head against the wall, but it's been exciting to really choose what I have available rather than *checks Spotify* uhhh, everything ever? I've gone back and listened to some choice albums from way back which has been a real treat (thank you MCR for existing). It's also easier to enjoy my favorite ambient artists, most of whom are only on Bandcamp. That app being separate from the rest of my music on Spotify was enough of a barrier to keep it out of sight/out of mind a lot of the time!
My most annoying frustration so far as been the battery life of these things. The Walkman battery is drained from a day at work if it's a desk-heavy day and I'm listening to music most of the time. The camera, I have used way less. The battery drained pretty quickly the first round out the box, but I did get it used, so I am not sure how charged it was when it came. It already died on my while trying to take a selfie of me and a friend on our way to a show yesterday, and at that point it was dead weight in my pack. Ugh! I think it's just another thing to keep in mind though.
I do feel like there is more space in my head, especially with transitioning from Google calendar to the Techo. Looking at my Google calendar is something I used to do all the time and would almost always fill me with dread, realizing how busy I was and realizing that yet again I left zero time to relax, recuperate, exist. The physical planner is just more pleasant and calmer to look at. It's easier than any mood-tracking app to track my mental illness symptoms at the top of each page, and easier than ever to correlate this data to what I did that day.
Overall I am optimistic that this switch will stick, even though it felt a little drastic at first. I am also optimistic that this switch will continue to clear space in my mind and allow me to establish the routines I so desperately need. I'm feeling good to demonstrate to myself that I am not dependent on Meta, Spotify, or any technological monopoly.
I'm starting to learn actual Python too! Maybe I'll write about that next, who knows.
And anyway, who am I writing this for? Myself? You? Who are you? I have no idea. I am probably going to post this and not tell anyone about it for at least a week. I simply haven't thought farther than writing this entry yet. And that's what I want, to be living in the present.