18.oct.24 dumbing down :P

so the last few days ive been writing up a post for the blog on my website but the usb with all my files on it is across the room and im too lazy to get it. I'll probably post to my site eventually but for now i thought its a good enough excuse to post here for once. as this was meant for my site blog i make references to an old post there  but for the most part its not a necessary read to understand what im saying here. uhhh anyway here's the post, sorry for the long read T_T :

A while ago now I talked about discovering the dumb phones subreddit and I think its maybe time for an update. There's a lot of friction amongst members of r/dumbphones about the point of the subreddit. I specifically remember seeing a post expressing concern that people were replacing their social media addictions with gadget collecting addictions (I may be mixing the wording with some comments I saw on another dumbphones post but the point still remains that this is a view held by a handful of people). This comes from the fact that on r/dumbphones its common for people to post pictures of their every day carry (or EDC), and for some people this includes carrying all sorts of items to replace the functions their smart phone could do but their dumb phone can no longer do (typically cameras or mp3 players and such, but even down to non 'gadget' things like notebooks and reading books). And as many people see loosing their smartphone as a move to minimalism (many minimalist EDCs simply contain a phone, wallet and keys for example), they see large EDCs as antithetical to their ideal of owning a dumb phone, they make the argument these people are doing dumb phone-ing wrong. To this I saw people responding that going dumb is about digital minimalism, not simply minimalism, and that the two were quite different things. This is how I discovered the term 'digital minimalism' and I've come to learn it more broadly describes the lifestyle I'm becoming interested in.

So what is digital minimalism? Perhaps I'm narrowing it down to how I view it a tad but I'd say digital minimalism is about deliberate and conscious use of technology. Many people on r/dumphones seek a digital detox and I think most people have been fed this idea (probably by old people) that technology = bad so therefore just don't use technology, but this obviously just doesn't work in a world where being constantly plugged in is the norm. Digital minimalism falls somewhere between 'the norm' and total digital detox, acknowledging the difference between the useful, sometimes necessary use of digital technology, and the over-reliance or over-consumption of it. As I mentioned in my last dumb phones post, my motivations to dumb down are driven primarily by aesthetics and I must admit the aesthetics and resulting nostalgia from 2000's tech (or sometimes lack thereof) continue to play a big part in my motivation. I want to live that experience of not being online 24/7 (by having the internet in my phone which I carry with me all the time), and just getting on the internet as a special treat when I get back to my computer at the end of the day (or lets face it, even in the mornings because I will use it first thing when I get up in the morning). When I think of that, it almost makes me feel weighed down by my phone in comparison, like unplugging while I'm away from the computer would make me feel so much freer (gee that's cliché but how else am I meant to put it T_T).

And I want to make clear before future me potentially gets called a liar, I've no idea how far into this stuff I'm gonna get or how committed I'm going to become, but this is just something I really want to try right now. Maybe I go back to how things were before I discovered dumb phones, that's up to future me and I don't want myself or anyone else to look back on this as some failed experiment if I don't stick with it. I've already learnt things through what I've done so far and I think its unfair to suggest that they have no value if I don't commit.

So anyway what have I done so far? When I last left off in my blog, I said I'd deleted tiktok and instagram, and I wanted to dumb down my existing smart phone. Since then I've also deleted twitter, and just while checking I had deleted that, I've just discovered I still had tumblr lurking in my apps, which I genuinely didn't even know I had (dumbing down must be working I suppose but that's now deleted too). I still have all my mobile games but I don't play them very often at all (to be fair most of my time wasting habits are on the internet not mobile games).

I downloaded an app called olauncher (I'm on android, dunno if iphones can use different launchers?), this is meant to be a minimalist launcher, and while I'm not big into minimalism it does exactly the job I want to do in this case. It lists a maximum of 8 apps (10 if you count left/right swipe gestures) on the home screen in plain text, and the rest of the apps are listed in an app drawer which you can search through by keyboard instantly, or you can scroll through them manually and even turn the automatic keyboard function off. I prefer the keyboard function because I forces you to decide why you're looking for another app, its harder to get distracted by something you didn't want to get distracted by. Olauncher also has the advantage of being able to hide apps completely from the app drawer, which I've used to hide all the google apps that I don't use but cant delete from my phone. The apps I chose for my home screen are phone and camera on swipe gestures, messages and discord for messaging, a music app while I don't have an mp3 player to replace it with, firefox for internet (more on this later), an app to clock into my work, my bank app, a weather app, and my phone settings. These apps I have deemed 'essentials' or in some cases like discord or my bank app 'semi-essentials'. Basically if I moved to a dumb phone, these apps are what I would need from it, and semi-essentials being more for convenience rather than needs. I've renamed some of them to be more simple as a personal preference because the default app names are ugly.

Moving forward I'd like to remove even the convenience apps from my phone. For starters I already carry a digi cam with me nearly everywhere and would like to shift to using solely that in future. It would take a little more effort to upload and send photos anywhere but perhaps that might be good for me. Discord would be another app I'm considering parting with. The only people on discord who might need my immediate attention are my friends who all have my number. I'm waiting for a response to see if their phone plans all support free calls and text (which mine has) and if so I don't see any harm in asking them to contact me directly if I'm away from my computer. Next would be my music app, as I mentioned above an mp3 player or ipod would suit me just fine. Internet access is an interesting one I'm still going back and forth on. I could probably survive without it during the day but it's certainly still handy to have. My ideal dumb phone would probably still need hotspot capabilities which I imagine implies internet access on the phone itself anyway? Again I have more thoughts specifically about limiting web browser access which I'll get to later but for now we'll consider this a keeper. My app to clock into work is unfortunately a necessity. If I make the switch to a dumb phone and still have this job, I'm willing to carry my smart phone with me to work and hotspot from my dumb phone as needed. Until then it stays with me. My bank app is something I could probably go without. I think I'll start a system of checking in the morning on my computer and tracking my spending on paper if I'm really concerned about money. If I'm expecting to move money around while I'm out (which is rare) then I'll just bring my smart phone with me for the occasion. My weather app could also probably go, I just have a habit of checking the weather and then immediately forgetting what I saw and checking it again later. I do rely on knowing the weather since I walk a lot and don't want to get caught in the rain or something like that, but again this is just a check in the morning and make a note kind of situation. Finally my settings app, this is pretty self explanatory, it comes with the phone, nothing to really make judgements on here.

And with that, that's all my apps that I need and my plans for them in future! But that's not all I've done to dumb down my smart phone. Since I keep mentioning it I'll cover it now: cutting down on internet browser usage. So after cutting out so much doomscrolling in the form of deleting social media, and then discovering r/dumbphones, I ironically started doomscrolling r/dumbphones. But as I mentioned above, the internet's still useful out and about so I didn't want to get rid of it completely. So after doing a bit of research I found a firefox extension called 'distract me not' to block certain websites and it's so far worked pretty well for me. It can be manually toggled on and off but you can also set timers and schedules. At the moment I only have reddit blocked since there's nothing else I know of that I should need to block but maybe time will tell.

I still have youtube and pinterest as apps on my phone. I should eventually get rid of them with the rest of the apps I deleted, but as mentioned in my last post (pinterest + youtube my beloveds <3) I really do love them very much. For now I'm at least trying to limit using them on my phone so at first I used my phone's 'digital wellbeing' settings to set time limits but I found that didn't work too well for me, so I've since switched to using a thing called 'focus mode' which when active blocks set apps completely. This is also a pretty recent change but so far it seems to be working better. While setting up all this I decided to try some other settings on my phone and things I've seen suggested. One is setting text size bigger, I honestly think it's a little ugly looking and I've no clue if its helping in any way but I'm choosing to keep it for a little longer just to keep things looking fresh. Another setting I see mentioned all the time is changing the screen to grey scale to make things seem unappealing and discourage phone use. I couldn't bring myself to ruin my beautiful wallpaper and other aesthetic customisations this way, but since it already comes inbuilt in my phone's 'bedtime mode' I thought it wouldn't hurt if only for a few of my waking hours do I have to see my phone in grey scale. In all seriousness it has so far helped me to take more notice of the time and make better decisions about if I need to be on my phone before bed or first thing in the morning.

One final small detail, I saw someone talk about how such over-reliance on our phones causes us to look to it for even small things like checking the time. Sure thing there's nothing wrong with using your phone to check the time but it did make me think, and before I knew it I got myself a new watch! It's fun, it's stylish and I don't have to reach into my pocket, or sometimes the bottom of my bag, just to get the time! I think when I get more money I'd eventually like to get a digital watch, one with a timer and an alarm, but the ones I saw at the shop were both expensive and ugly.

Anyway I think that's as far as I've come for now, might make another update if I get any further but from here I'm not sure there's much further to go for now. Might come back and add some photos later though, well see how I go :P