On using smartphone for things that make sense

Thursday, 08 February 2024

What a time we live in. Every one of us carries an insanely powerful pocket computer at all times, with access to the cumulative knowledge of all humanity.

Yet most of us don’t take advantage of that - myself included. Instead, we mindlessly scroll through kilometers of feeds on so called “social media” platforms.

I was thinking about this on a flight recently and realized that one cause of that – in my case – is that I’ve come to associate my phone as a device for low effort, passive content consumption – that only when I’m using my laptop, only then I’m able to be productive, to create content. And since it’s so much easier to use a phone – it’s always a hand move away – I tend to spend way too much time on low effort content consumption. I tried to combat that by deleting Facebook, uninstalling the Twitter app, and so on. Yet I still find myself spending too much time on platforms like Reddit (and HackerNews, but that’s a different topic, hah).

I’d like to change this. I’d like my wonderful phone – the device I love and I’m happy I could afford it – to truly be a “bicycle for the mind”, as Steve Jobs once rightfully called a computer.

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