the hour i cheated on my dumbphone and immediately regretted it
Ahoy there!
I have a confession to make. For the last hour I used a smartphone... I'll wait a second for the gasps and the one person who fainted reading that. Jokes aside, it was a really interesting hour and a half (roughly)... and not in a good way.
why did you switch to a smartphone?
I've been wanting to get my hands on an Xbox One for a while (the old one not the Series... series), and being the impatient yutz I am wanted to do it during my lunch hour while I was wfh. My wife also asked me to grab a couple things from the store, so I figured "eh why not".
I was paranoid about Teams narcing on me for being afk for more than an hour and a half and someone reaching out to me.
So I hot-swapped my SIM card from my dumb phone into my iPhone 13 (the one with the busted wifi/bluetooth chip so I can only get access to internet on it if it has a SIM card) that I had laying around (which probably sounds privileged to all hell that I just have a several-hundred-dollar smartphone just laying around), wrote down the directions to the retro game store, my wife texted me what she wanted from the grocery store, and took off.
so why do you regret it?
For the most part, I didn't really use my smartphone at all. I wrote down the directions and they were simple enough I could just rely on my memory.
The first thing I noticed was the damn thing kept slipping out of my pocket while driving, which was mildly annoying. I'd occasionally check my phone to see if I had a notification, but nothing.
I didn't actually start using the smart phone until I went to the store to grab the items off the list... that's when it hit me.
I'm walking around the store, phone in hand, reading the list and trying to find what was on it and through it I noticed a stark contrast.
I felt myself getting almost disoriented and overstimulated by my surroundings which isn't really normal (at least not for casual shopping). It was like someone kicked my ADHD to 11, I could barely concentrate what I was doing in front of me. It was like I got hit with the Orb of Confusion for a little bit.
I texted my wife some questions because the store was out of things, and felt my fingers jabbing harder onto the screen. I'm so used to my tactile dumbphone at this point I'm used to pressing harder, so I'm basically just finger-punching this screen (not really important just something I was aware of).
I've gone to the store plenty of times without issue. The only differentiating factor now was this little metal rectangle I was holding in my hand. I can't help but feel like this was the culprit for my overstimulation because when I put it away and got in the car it slowly started to subside a bit, but it wasn't till I got home and that I started to kinda go back to normal. So, either my smartphone was contributing heavily to my overstimulation, or Wal-Mart had a gas leak.
the siren song
I won't lie, it was slightly (only slightly) enticing to go back to my iPhone. There was almost this pull to try and convince myself of it.
My wife sent me a picture (the ones that kinda move when you press and hold) of our daughter at her first day of day care this afternoon and I caught myself thinking "oh man, I kinda miss these little video-photo-thingies", to which I immediately remembered that I never really used this feature when I did daily-drive a smartphone.
There was some other minor stuff too, like the prettiness of the UI, being able to send my little green heart as a reaction to my wife etc.
I do like the new UI with the newest
It's not a strong pull, but it's interesting I felt anything at all.
what this experience reminded me
Using a smartphone was really odd, it's like those jokes of introducing a Victorian Child to a Sour Warhead, except now I'm the Victorian child.
I told my friends on the Gazette discord server about it, and my friend Suliman reminded me:
smartphones overstimulate you with colors, options and moving things. this is natural especially in a stimulating environment like a store
This actually makes a lot of sense. Before I switched to a dumbphone I used the phones built-in accessibility to change the phone's color to greyscale. When I switched it back to normal it looked so wrong. Overly saturated. I opted for a middle-ground and just lowered it to what I thought was normal.
I spent some time on it upgrading it to the newest version of iOS with Liquid Glass and changed out some of my wallpapers to give it more of that iOS 1/frutiger aero feel for the whole 2 minutes a day I use it to load up my sleep aid videos on VLC or use my 2FA app for work.
In that time, I felt after putting it down it gave me that same sensation you get when you've spent too long in VR and you still feel like you haven't quite gone back to the real world.
It's weird too because I don't have this issue with my iPad or my 3rd Gen iPod touch. Maybe it's just how it's in this weird middle zone size-wise that my brain doesn't quite get used to, like people that get car sick sitting in the back of the car, but not the front. Or maybe it's just the form factor mixed with the way-too-buttery-smooth UI and colors Or maybe I'm just tripping, idk.
Anyway, after this, I'm more resolute in keeping up with my dumbphone. On my drive home I couldn't wait to put the SIM card back into my dumbphone and put the iPhone back on my nightstand relegated to being nothing more than a vessel for sleep aid videos to play at night.
Anyway that's it, gonna go set up my Xbox now.
Pirate is wearing white Ed Sheeran Loop Tour concert tee, blue joggers
Pirate is feeling overwhelmed
Pirate is listening to Living Things (Album) by Linkin Park
Pirate is playing Minecraft: Xbox One Edition
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