Surviving Modern Life with a Flip Phone (Barely)
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Mama was right: Smartphones are frying our brains. App locks, screentime reminders, digital detoxes: we’ve tried them all. Nothing sticks because honestly? We’r

I’ve been using a flip phone as my daily driver for a while now. The smartphone is still around, but it mostly sits in a drawer until bureaucracy or banking apps force me to use it.

For me, the benefits are clear: less distraction, more focus, better sleep. But I know for many people it’s not so easy. Essential apps, social pressure, work requirements… these are real blockers.

I’d like to start a discussion (almost like an informal poll):

  • If you thought about switching, what’s the single biggest thing that holds you back?

  • Is it banking? Messaging? Maps? Something else?

I’m genuinely curious because if we can identify the main pain points, maybe it’s possible to work on solutions or even start a small project around it.

So: what would need to change for you to actually give a flip phone a try?

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    2 hours ago

    Going to a dumb phone feels to me like cutting everything off of my cat except her claws and her asshole. Everything I actually have this creature for is now gone but at least it still scratches and shits!

    I hate the telephone. It’s a technology our culture maintains specifically to grant Indian criminals intercontinental access to my pants.

    On paper, my phone should be a monumentally powerful computer. 8 core processor, multiple gigabytes of RAM, hundreds of gigabytes of flash memory, a suite of sensors, a suite of radio modems, an always-on connection to the sumtotal of all human knowledge, multiple high-resolution cameras, a battery that, when new, ran the thing for over a day, packed into a quarter inch thick rectangle of glass and aluminum I can carry around in my pocket. It should be an omnifunctional multitool, assisting my life in dozens of subtle ways linking my projects and communications together to save me effort, making me able to respond to ever more stimuli in ever more potent ways.

    I scroll Lemmy and watch Youtube on it. Sometimes I use it as a kitchen timer and listen to music. I might even use its calculator app instead of googling a math problem.

    The app ecosystem is dead because it’s designed mostly to promote advertising. I try extremely hard not to install apps on this thing because apps are tape worms. I do as much as I can through Firefox.

    It’s not the computer I want to gouge out of this device. It’s the corporate rot. That’s who makes the attention trap slop troughs. I want a “smart phone” or maybe a 5G PDA. I don’t want Google, Apple, Meta or Amazon involved.