- Joined
- Jan 22, 2023
All modern android phones have a "color correction" function, it's mainly to cater to the different types of daltonism that exist, but there's also a pure grayscale option. I was made aware of this by a youtube video that mentioned othwr similar measures to make people that are forced to have a smarthphone (because of work for example) begin to emulate a dumbphone experience. In my case I don't use any social media, the only app I consistently use is NewPipe to listen to talk shows or look up tutorials for the different hobbies I have, but newpipe doesn't have support for an account (does let you make local playlists though) and that's glorious.
I was skeptical that just going colorless would change anything, but I tried it anyway and decided to commit to a few days.
It's worked. This simple change made my phone boring. I slowly reverting to the ol look up something on the computer then turn it off and go do something else. It's amazing.
Next step was to change to a launcher that didn't make me stare at a wall of colorful sloppy attention grabby app icons or a list of apps even, since that was another thing that distracted me for my main purpose of grabbing the damn phone in the first place. I switched to this launcher called CCLauncher, available in F-Droid since it's open source. You can set it up to have no app list whatsoever, just swipe up and show you the keyboard to make you type the name of the app that you need, without showing the coincidences. You can adjust the search to be fuzzy or expect the exact name, and that already gives you an extra mental step, which is remembering the name of the app you needed.
I might seem silly, imposing all of these hoops to jump through, but it's really making a change in my relationship with this hellish device that has over the course of a decade made me dumber, made me easily distractable, and has had more cons than pros overall, and I ended up like this without having social media accounts of any kind. I can only imagine the damage done to someone that was foolish enough to sign up for sns.
Let's talk about phone addiction and how we are beating it.
I was skeptical that just going colorless would change anything, but I tried it anyway and decided to commit to a few days.
It's worked. This simple change made my phone boring. I slowly reverting to the ol look up something on the computer then turn it off and go do something else. It's amazing.
Next step was to change to a launcher that didn't make me stare at a wall of colorful sloppy attention grabby app icons or a list of apps even, since that was another thing that distracted me for my main purpose of grabbing the damn phone in the first place. I switched to this launcher called CCLauncher, available in F-Droid since it's open source. You can set it up to have no app list whatsoever, just swipe up and show you the keyboard to make you type the name of the app that you need, without showing the coincidences. You can adjust the search to be fuzzy or expect the exact name, and that already gives you an extra mental step, which is remembering the name of the app you needed.
I might seem silly, imposing all of these hoops to jump through, but it's really making a change in my relationship with this hellish device that has over the course of a decade made me dumber, made me easily distractable, and has had more cons than pros overall, and I ended up like this without having social media accounts of any kind. I can only imagine the damage done to someone that was foolish enough to sign up for sns.
Let's talk about phone addiction and how we are beating it.
