social media, the internet, and dumbphones

i figured i might as well start writing stuff, since i've always wanted to run a blog (and starting to watch sex and the city probably spurred me on too), but anyway!! the main reason i'm writing tonight is because i'm getting a new phone tomorrow - or, a "new" phone. what i'm getting is the TTFone 970 flip phone, which (as you can see by the name) is a flip phone, and what's called a "dumbphone".

the reason i'm changing from my current smartphone to one of these is for a similar reason that a lot of people use stuff like spacehey, or neocities: splitting from the modern web and social media. in the past couple of years, i've experienced a general dissatisfaction with how i use my phone, in that i had the common problem of a lot of people my age, using my phone and social media waaay too much. this has led to a lot of issues that i'm sure many of you are likely intimately aware of, like aggressive doomscrolling and self-image issues. social media is written specifically to lock you into the algorithm, keeping you on as long as possible, but everyone knows this already so i'm not going into it. either way, this caused me to be locked into my phone for most of the day, and i'd just waste hours of time scrolling and watching things i wouldn't even remember afterwards.
additionally, growing up trans my view of myself was already fragile, and social medias are built to prey on people's personal issues, so i generally felt pretty shit all the time.

recently though, i've been trying to improve myself with this aspect - i deleted all the social medias i didn't "need" (like reddit, twitter, etc) and set timers for everything i did "need" (for example, i kept instagram because i talked to a lot of my friends on it). as well as this, i cut down on the games on my phone, and tried to keep off everything online as much as i can. and it helped! even if the restrictions i had were pretty lax, i felt so much better already. i was generally way happier, so i just kept cutting down. this week i entirely cut instagram use from my phone, and i think it was one of the best decisions i've made.

you may be asking "what about the phone though?" (if you weren't, please ask "what about the phone though?") i figured that to completely cut my reliance to my phone and the internet, i'd downgrade to a 'dumbphone' - a more simplistic phone, such as classic flip phones, or modern minimalistic phones. my choice was the TTFone 970: it's much smaller than a normal phone - both physically and digitally. physically, it only has a 2.8" screen (and a 1-9 keypad), and it only has around 8gb of storage, which means it really has no space for a huge amount of games or a ton of social medias. this is probably gonna get me off my phone way more, because it'll be infuriating to type out a full instagram post lol it still supports actual apps so i can get whatsapp and spotify so

my only real issue is that i don't know what albums to download... i use spotify (i wish i could cut it off totally and swap to MP3s fully, but the ease of use is so much higher, and now with this smaller storage size i have to be really careful lol)  so i need to decide which albums to have properly downloaded...

anyway, i'll keep updated on how it goes, i'm hopefully ordering it tomorrow (4th)!