I hate my phone, the only reason I have it is because I need it for things like authenticating to the government and banks that I am indeed myself. In this experiment Thomas and I have put away our phones. This means that my phone is turned off for the whole day. I personally wanted to do this for a while, but after seeing this interesting youtube video and finding out that I can disable microsoft authenticator and using a normal one instead that I can commit to it. cause I needed the Microsoft authenticator for my school, and I need 2fa.

My goal here is to not need my phone anymore. This doesn’t mean I go without internet though, I still have my computer and I still have a job and school. I don’t want to be internet less, I want to not have a pocket sized computer with me that I unconsciously start using whenever I carry it. I believe that using the internet is a good thing, just not every moment of the day. I believe that Gaming is acceptable when you do it on a dedicated device.

Preparations

I knew for a while that I had wanted to do this so I already had a lot of notepads ready to be used. I never used my phone to wake me up so I didn’t need to replace that. The only real preparation I did was telling my girlfriend about it and that is about it.

Journal

I am writing about my experiences in this section. Things I notice about life that changes.

3. 2025-09-012

The unexpected expected happened. I am writing this at the moment that I am currently switching my phones. I got annoyed at the same thing as I did before, I have gotten extremely lazy, I automatically open Youtube, and automatically want to look at a screen once I go to the toilet, wait for something, or go for a short walk. So this had to stop.

This time I am better prepared, I have my own camera, of which you can see the pictures here. And I am running linux, which means I am more used to primitive ways to do things. yes you heard me say that correctly LOL. The only real reason I wanted to go back is because of the boardgame stats app of which I started developing my own web based version, but now that I am running Linux, I just realized I can probably just run an emulator.

And I also know that an a7 notepad is the size that fits in my pocket, so I’ll probably be ordering more of that.

So where does this bring me? Will I stay on this flipphone from now on? probably not, but for a while. And the only real option I see for going back to a smartphone for longer periods of time would be something like Graphene OS, which requires me to buy a new phone. So for now, I’ll just stay on a flipphone.

Oh and to the 1 person that wants to know which flipphone I am using, here you go: Nokia 2660 Flip - 4G Whilst googling the name, i found this cringe youtube video that uses way to many weird animations, and feels like an AI generated script / voice

Current TODO List

  • Buy A7 Notepad (as backup)
  • Install an Android emulator on Linux
  • Put my contacts on my SIM :3

3. 2025-07-08

I officially am using my smartphone again, after about 3 months. This is because I am almost going on vacation, and I’d like to keep in touch with my friends and family.

2. 2025-04-18

It is quite a different experience to eat breakfast without watching a YouTube video. I started noticing that I kept wanting to grab my phone, so now I am keeping count of this in my notepad. I turned on my phone to see whether I had voicemails, I did not.

1. 2025-04-17

It is the start of the experiment. At 2:37PM We started it. I haven’t noticed many problems, I have turned it off and put it away so that I don’t see it laying around. After dinner I was able to do the dishes before even eating dessert, we were done with the food and I instantly started doing the dishes. Normally I’d first wait 10m on my phone if not more just like the others. So that was interesting.

At this point only 5 people know about this, Thomas, my girlfriend, Emiel and my parents.