Escaping my phone

2025-11-05 - Because I feel like a slave to this tiny screen way too often nowadays

I've recently become disgusted by how much I use my phone.

Probably has to do with the YouTube algorithm having decided to serve me a lot of these "switching to a dumb phone", "I went x days without my phone" type of videos. Though I hate to be trendy, it made me think.

Most of these types of videos specifically mention the big social media platforms as the culprit of this. Maybe in combination with an onslaught of notifications that the average person gets on their phones, from each and every app they have installed. Advertisement, news, algorithmically optimized content.

But I've already moved away from a lot of these things years ago. I don't use TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, BeReal or whatever else might be the new hotness. Sometimes I realize how disconnected I am from mainstream media and opinion.

Yet, I am happier this way, because none of this actually interests me in any way.

So what is it instead, that keeps me on my phone for way too long?

I've narrowed it down to 3 things. One of them is the only algorithmically driven platform that I still use: YouTube. It's very easy for me to get lost in a series of similar videos. Most of the time they are by small creators and I really like to discover these people. Yet I have to recognize that this isn't really a good use of my time and should probably do it less. (I've already exiled the YouTube app from my phone and only use it in a browser)

Another one is the Fediverse. When I initially setup my Mastodon server in December of 2022, as a part of the first big Twitter exodus, I could never have imagined that I would find the first social media platform that I actually liked. Driven by values I support and full of people that are interesting to me. I love scrolling through my feed and seeing what people are up to. But if you follow about 400 people, most of which are pretty active, you don't need an algorithm to keep feeding you posts, a chronological timeline works just as well in keeping me glued to a screen. This one is the hardest for me to find a solution for. For now, I've started to cut down on the people I follow, to make sure that my timeline is only what I really want to see. I also want to try and steer more of my fedi interactions towards the next thing.

And that thing is: Direct communications with people. While shouting into the void and seeing what other people shout into it, with the occasional reply conversation, is very fun, nothing can beat this for me. Whether it's family, friends, or people from the other side of the world, that I have sparked a conversation with purely online. These are conversations that make it possible to really get to know a person better and they are quintessentially what I love about the internet. So this, if anything, is what I want to have more of. I just need to make sure to not let a conversation accidentally take over my day. And I want to achieve this by

just doing more things on the dang computer, instead of my phone. For me, one of the core problems of the phone is that it's always available. It's easy to just take out of my pocket at any time and use it for distraction. So if I move more activities off of my phone and onto my computer, they are on a device which requires a more conscious decision to use. Even my most compact, portable and convenient laptop is better suited in this regard, than my phone (And it has many pretty stickers on the back of it :3).

Optimally, I would want to not even need a smartphone. It's a device that is a jack of all trades, yet a master of none. I've seen enough people separate out the tasks their smartphone fulfills for them into distinct devices again. And often that leads to an overall better experience. I really want to try this, but it's a slow process for me to figure out all of the individual things that I actually need and then to figure out how else I can and want to fulfill them. But I'm making some progress.

Pre-publish update

I wrote everything above yesterday, after which I got sufficiently annoyed to once again just shutdown my phone and banish it into a corner. I know this won't stick, because, as described above, I'm still figuring out all of the different replacements for it. But it's helpful to just put it away completely from time to time, to more figure out more quickly, which important aspects of it I have not considered for a replacement yet.

What manages to surprise me every time is how, initially, I regularly get surprised when the phone is not in my pocket. The amount of times that I instinctively reach for it is scary high. Plus when I eventually end up in a situation where I feel like my options are to either grab my phone or be bored, being forced to be bored feels weird. I'm just not used to it anymore. Today, I kinda enjoy it. But I know that this will change.

I'm curious to see how long this attempt will last and what I'll take away from it this time.