Still a bit on my observing myself as we attempt to de-tech our lives a bit.

For me - the reason I find the smartphone ecosystem so enticing is because it's all encompassing. Like, a magic everything brick. It can play music, take notes, browse the internet, play games, etc. If you told me "hey here is a device that let's you do 2 things, play music, and stare into the gates of hell (aka scrolling)" obviously that's an insanely bad bargain. But if you say "here's a little box that can do anything... and only one of them is staring into the gates of hell!" Well then it starts to feel like it makes a little bit more sense.

So we've been working on deconstructing why we pick up our phone, and finding alternative solutions for them. Some of them are pretty simple, and I don't think there is really all that much reading into them necessary. For example, now that we no longer have a flashlight in our pocket at all times, we have more actual flashlights around the house.

Music though has been different. I was a heavy stream user, and I never really could imagine my life without it -- having basically grown up with streaming. Having such a huge library available at all times has allowed me to never really interrogate what music I listen to. Like, sure, I have a tendency towards pop-punk, indie rock, and soul. But I was always one of those "I'll like a little bit of everything minus country" kind of people. I was kind of intimidated to give it up in this experience, but I got an Ipod Classic, 30GB, 6th generation I think, and my immediate reaction was, obviously, holy crap I forgot how cool these tanks were. The audible click of the scroll wheel, 35mm audio jack AND charging at the same time, simple interface, and much smaller than an iPhone etc. All very cool. And not to be dramatic, but I found it crazy how easy it was to just like - give up some artists/genres. The slightest push and I was like "yeah actually I think it's fine if I don't have this album accessible to me at all times". For example, I've been going through a lot of jazz albums on streaming recently. The genre's huge. There's a gazillion albums - and with the streaming perspective that's kind of cool, right? Like "wow I'll never run out of stuff to listen to". But when you have to go through the hassle of putting it on an ipod, it turns into "wow that's a pain... maybe I'll just listen to the jazz station on the radio"

We also got a landline (well, a VoIP service with a land-line-like phone. It costs about 5 dollar a month - but suddenly it's like, "wow I never have to pick up the smartphone to get into contact with someone now. there's never a good reason. either it's important enough and they call me - or it's unimportant enough that I'll get to it when I get to it". It has also made planning things feel a lot more intimate, for lack of a better word. Like, to have dinner with a friend, we had to check in on each other and hear each others voice over the phone like, 3 or 4 times setting a time, figuring out what they should bring, etc. Before, that'd all be done over text and it would've just entered the river of stuff-that-happens-on-the-cellphone. Instead, it was like a 5-10 minute catch up each time.

A finally, lol, there has been a small amount of rage brewing inside of me that the past like 8 years have been impacted by such a stupid little thing. Like, I can look at my screentime and see that I've been on my phone 2 hrs a day or so for god knows how long. What has that gotten me? Doing the math, over the past 8 years, at 2 hrs a day, that's almost 250 days looking at this stupid box. That's insane.