RE: Escaping my phone

Escaping my phone

I've recently become disgusted by how much I use my phone. Probably has to do with the YouTube algorithm having decided to serve me a lot of these "switching to a dumb phone", "I went x days without my phone" type of videos. Though I hate to be trendy, it made me think...

Read the Full Post by Jana on Jana's cozy corner

I’ve seen many posts recently dealing with this theme lately, which tends to show up over and over again. I literally wrote about my phone usage earlier this year.

Thomas had a very interesting take, not blaming smartphones—since they are really good tool in the right hands—but the attention-seeking design behind apps fueled by greed and algorithms, and Ava says she doesn’t care about screentime at all, since she simply uses it for practical purposes—which just happen to require the screen to be on.

However, the conclusion I’ve reached is closest to Jana’s.

I am not addicted to doom-scrolling, I am not addicted to algorithms, I am not addicted to AI slop, I am not addicted to posting random stuff online—other than this blog, but not microblogging-style posts.

I simply enjoy chatting with people a lot, I guess.

Signal, XMPP, Discord and Tusky remain at the top for me, even Matrix shows up sometimes. Jana says:

Whether it’s family, friends, or people from the other side of the world, that I have sparked a conversation with purely online. These are conversations that make it possible to really get to know a person better and they are quintessentially what I love about the internet. So this, if anything, is what I want to have more of.

And well, that is pretty much it.

I hope you don’t analyze every single stat I share on this blog too much, but to give you an idea, the month I posted about how I use my phone too much (July 2025), I used Signal alone for almost 48 hours.

Obviously not every single chat I’ve had is the most thought-provoking thing ever, but it’s still something I get joy out of, there is real people on the other side of the screen, after all. I have reached out to many people in the past, and continue to try and do so today, and it has been a pretty fun and engaging experience.

The thing is, I can’t do what Jana does, I can’t just use my computer instead, because most of my phone usage happens at work! I already have a bunch of screens in front of me with work stuff—I simply keep on chatting alongside doing other tasks at hand.

Of course, talking with people and staying focused on real life is still a goal of mine, and I try to leave my phone aside during those moments. There’s a part of me that tells me I should focus more during work hours too—guess I feel a bit guilty—but honestly, work is not something I do out of love but necessity, and if I can get away with doing non-work stuff at work while still fulfilling all of my tasks and getting paid, I’m going to do it.

In the end, even if it’s not “productive” or whatever, I think I’ll just accept I’m the kind of person with 7 hours of screentime a day, and as long as I’m not missing out on the good parts of life (a.k.a. not work), then it’s all fine by me.