I have seen and heard and been subjected to so many cummies about how to defang your smartphone or how to digital minimalism slopify your phone or how to dedoomscroll your brain or whatever the fuck term is making the rounds on your internet antibrain propaganda network of choice these days.

I’ve engaged with some of this stuff in the past and I think most of it is cunt shit that isn’t really worth doing.

I have however hit on the one and only true method to take back control of your life and become the digitally detoxxed gigawhatever hackerman you wanna be.

Just put your phone in your bag, turned off.

Do you have an important call you need to receive, or need your phone semi regularly for some inane task? Just put your phone in your bag, but keep it turned on. Ringer on or off as needed.

Wow.

Shocker.

Everyone always wants to complicate shit, mindlessly slurp content about an optimal solution, when good enough is so simple.

You do not need a new phone operating system, or a new phone, or a second, simpler phone, or some kind of use monitoring app, or whatever the fuck.

Just put the fucking thing in your backpack, switched off, and don’t look at it.

You are not so important as to need to be reachable at less than a 30 minute warning. If you’re on call or whatever yeah sure put it in your pocket. Otherwise, backpack, take it out at lunch, check whatever messages, backpack again. Check it again outside your front door, then put it on your counter.

Listen I know this sounds really patronising but I need you to understand that I am trying to be direct without being mean. It sounds patronising because I genuinely think this shit is really simple and for some reason everyone overcomplicates it. Including me, I used to overcomplicate this.

Just put the thing out of sight out of mind and it will become out of sight out of mind.

If you are looking for a safe or healthy way to “take back control of your attention economy” or “engage healthily with social media” maybe consider that this is fucking stupid and is like trying to have a healthy working relationship with binge drinking or the surface of a running belt sander.

Take the apps off the phone then put the phone in the bag.

I need a phone, because I live in the modern world, but I don’t need a phone to look at youtube, or facebook, or twitter, or whatever, so I don’t use the phone for that. It comes out of the bag to do stuff I need to, then it goes back in.

Modern social media, youtube, content platforms, short form social mediafied news media, whatever, is genuinely demonic.
You cannot engage with it in a healthy way, if you think you can I think you’re just straight up wrong. ¹

If you have to, for some reason, that’s one thing, but don’t pretend a lil PPE makes playing with acid perfectly safe.

I feel a kind of contempt for the average phone user.
So many people are hopelessly addicted to using the internet, and so many of them are really really bad at getting anything of value out of it.
Contempt is generally a toxic, useless emotion and it probably is in this case too, but when I see a 15 year old looking at AI retouched softcore porntoks on his phone on the bus I assume he probably can’t read properly and that he’ll achieve nothing.

Not nothing of value, most of us don’t do that, I haven’t. I mean I think he’s turned himself into a kind of plankton, and may as well be dead.²

Don’t be like him.

Read a fucking book, any book, jack off to your imagination like God intended, look at the news for one hour once a week at your desk, and read it. Hot men/women with extreme politics and a tip jar are not your friend. People selling you a solution based on consumption are not your friend. Anybody that uses a pepe or a soyjack (or any of their woke diet coke alternatives) is not your friend, anybody that has ever done an ad read is not your friend.

Looking for a solution to phone addiction rooted in technology is like looking for a solution to drowning at the bottom of a well.

The only winning move is not to play.

Turn your phone off.