It's Only Been Two Weeks Since I Sold My Smartphone.

It’s only been two weeks since I sold my smartphone. It feels much longer than that. Slowing down the terrifying passage of time was one of the big reasons I wanted to get rid of my smartphone. I want to actually be here for my life. I notice my thoughts much more and actually have more thoughts which can be good and bad. Thoughts can be troubling, but I’d still rather be present with troubling thoughts than have none at all. I also still have entertainment outside of my own head. I now have my tote bag always ready to go filled with a few handy things like a notebook and pen, and my old, jailbroken kindle. It moves extremely slowly, but I like the slower pace. I also put downloaded music and podcasts on my dumbphone, so it works like an mp3 player or ipod as well.

I also have a small TV in my bedroom. It’s not a smart TV, but it did have one of those little smart TV boxes plugged into it. This would be fine if it weren’t for YouTube. YouTube as a platform is one that I’ve had a love/hate relationship with. I have spent literally thousands of hours of my life using it. It has taught me, inspired me, and entertained me, but most of all, distracted me. It’s one of those apps that you delete, but like a cockroach that can’t be squashed always ends up back on your screen. Long story short, I put the smart box thing in my closet and replaced it with my DVD player. That way if I’d like to I can still use the TV in my bedroom to watch movies or TV shows from DVD. It’s just completely free of addictive algorithms and ragebait content. Also full disclosure: I do still have a smart TV in the living room where I do still watch some YouTube. It’s just less accessible and thus less attention grabbing.

The last thing I wanted to mention here is my computer. I haven’t gone full August Lamm or Robin Greenfield yet, and I do still have a computer. This is due to two things:

1. I don’t want to make online purchase like booking flights using my card on public wifi and visible to anyone walking past.
2. I also don’t want to do my banking at the library as well for the same reason.

I know there are other workarounds to this like doing banking in a physical location, and buying airline tickets using a travel agent or by calling the company. I’m just not there yet. I’ve been pretty happy and content with the results so far of dumbing down my life. My computer is also very old and very broken. It only functions right now as a desktop computer, so that’s been nice. I still probably will eventually go completely home computer free though. For now I am experimenting with cold turkey. My idea is to block the entire internet and whitelist only the absolute barebones essentials: banking, email, maps, and travel booking. Essentially turning my computer into an offline device except for extremely minimal usage for these basic websites. I’m thinking of locking this block with only the ability to unlock it at a very inconvenient time, that way if I ever changed my mind about it, I could unlock it by staying up till 2AM or something like that. I haven’t worked out the details yet, but using the computer for just these basic sites makes me feel like I’m living during the time of the old internet when it was really just a tool, and that feels good.