There is a quote I keep coming back to, from someone called Jake Rhodes:
"It's not that 'phone bad' — it is exactly the opposite. The Phone is too good. The phone is better than mountains and rivers and lakes and oceans and soaring birds and wild horses. But it is better in the same way that doing heroin under a bridge alone is better than family dinners."
I hate how accurate that is. The phone wins. It wins against mountains, against oceans, against the people sitting across from you at dinner. And the worst part is it does not win because it is meaningful — it wins because it is engineered to win. Every notification, every scroll, every algorithmically timed reward is a deliberate design choice made by someone whose job is to keep your thumb moving.
That is what pushed me back to retro tech.
The web stopped being interesting
I work in web development. It used to feel like a craft. Now it often feels like assembly work — put together a site whose only job is to hold attention and extract money. We have layered so much abstraction, so many frameworks and build pipelines and dependency trees, that the fun has been systematically removed. Building for the web used to be a puzzle worth solving. Now it is mostly optimizing for conversion.
I am not romanticizing the past — early web was often broken and inaccessible. But there was something genuinely interesting about figuring it out. That spirit is mostly gone from the mainstream.
What I actually changed
I still use AI. I still use my iPhone. I am not pretending those things do not exist or that they are not useful. But I use them under strict rules.
I use an app called Freedom to block apps on a set schedule. It runs automatically — I do not have to make a decision in the moment about whether to open something, because the decision has already been made. Worth noting: Freedom has a tier that does not use a subscription model, which I appreciate.
When I want to use a device, I reach for my Blackberry instead. It has become my media and notes device. I can take a few photos, jot things down, check the weather. Yahoo Weather and Moon Reader are the apps I use most. I also built myself a small resource page so I can access sites that are actually worth visiting on older hardware.
It took a few weeks
Finding a rhythm with this took time. The first few weeks were uncomfortable — I kept reaching for something that was not there, or finding that a workflow I had taken for granted no longer existed in the same form. That friction is the point, I think. It forces you to be deliberate.
Eventually I found my way. The Blackberry is not a replacement for a smartphone — it is a different kind of device for a different kind of use. And that distinction, it turns out, is exactly what I needed.