Bahaha that’s wild! I want to do more of it; gotta balance my stack of review units with covering more of these topics T_T
I’d be curious to see how that plays out!
Love a good necro thread. I think that was also the video that introduced me to your channel.
I myself have pretty much went through a process of “dumb phoneing” my iPhone over the past year or so. I don’t really feel the desire to go out and seek a new product to restrict myself when it isn’t the phone that’s the problem, it’s the way I let it rule my life. I purged nearly all apps that I found myself using way too much. Meta’s apps, TikTok, Reddit; any of that stuff that is engineered to eat my time has no place on my phone. I furthermore went through and retuned all my notifications. The only things that should send me a notification is the important stuff, which really boiled down to messages from loved ones and reminders for habits I’m trying to build. Ontop of that, I’ve made it a little more of an inconvenience to use with the eye sight distance feature, I get a pop-up telling me to get the phone away from my face anytime it’s too close/hurting my eyesight which is usually enough to annoy me and get me to put the phone down. Screen time has been down overall so it’s been a rather net positive without feeling like I need to go grab a different device. I’m not quite ready to give up all the benefits smart phones offer with all of the calendar, reminders, notes & ways I can sync that across devices.
I got a HiBy R1 over the holidays as I’ve been seeking to bring back greater intentionalality to my music curation and consumption. I used to spend hours browsing SoundCloud, sitting in Turntable.fm rooms, and flipping through my dad’s CDs in High School, which all would be focused into burning CDs for classmates, or for myself to pop in and out of my car radio. I lost that curiosity with the convenience of streaming, and have missed that part of myself.
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I have felt this about…. So many things I do with technology or online. I’m still trying to figure out if convenience of new things made that less interesting, if I just have less “bored time” as an adult so I don’t seek out that kind of activity, or if it got stale, etc.
I feel like the joy of just exploring any interest online was so much bigger at and I don’t know what changed.
I got really into music cassettes last year and it’s been very enjoyable for me. Don’t get me wrong, most anything you find at a thrift store is going to sound like ass compared to vinyl. But recording your own tapes on a decent tape deck is where it’s at - with the right player they actually can sound EXTREMELY GOOD. I think when I was a kid I never experienced anything better than a $20 tape player from K-Mart, so the ceiling really is a lot higher than I ever knew. (Alas in 2026 it requires buying from people who actually have their gear maintained by esteemed repairpeople, which is… not cheap.)
But boy oh boy, is it fun to spend the time and intentionality to make real honest to goodness mix tapes. Now if I only had someone else to share them with, hehe.
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If only most/all of the players being manufactured today weren’t based on the same low-quality hardware 
I know, I bought 5 different machines last year (don’t tell my wife lol) and all of them were from the late 80s-90s. Early 2000s really is the cutoff.
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as epos put it in one of his videos, im just trying to “quell the noise.” i love that video, and the ones attatched to this thread! im trying to decentralize my smartphone) and all online tech. ive been using a pocket notebook, an ipod, and a old digicam that was my parents back in the 2000s! been enjoying a life a hell of a lot more since ive made these changes.
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I’ve decentralized my phone for while now and so far it’s been enjoyable. I don’t use my notebook for notes as much but I do use the calendar I also have in it a lot more. I’m about to fully switch over from youtube music to my modded ipod. I still catch myself slipping into old habits like watching youtube a lot but I’m only human and try to do better about it. I’ve been replacing watching youtube tho with reading Manga on my lunch break so that helps out there.
Stoked to hear that you’re trying some stuff out & enjoying it so far. I think Digicam’s coming back into (relative) popularity is super funny, as a kid I always enjoyed a point-and-shoot over those (at least, up until the point you could no longer get film developed at the supermarket.)[Side story, my mother used to be pissed when she would send me off to summer camp with one, we’d get the photos developed and there was just a bunch of photos of flora. Go figure I love landscape photography nowadays.] Can’t deny the choke hold it had on scene & early social media culture though. Instagram really sort of killed that stuff off and ushered in the rise of phone photography. If you end up craving a focus or desire to share, flickr is still kicking around, as well as I imagine some of the more photography leaning threads around here would appreciate them too. Or, you can take the advice in this video and keep it to yourself.
Phone camera’s are something I’m totally good living with, super solid image quality for the size, it’s always on hand, file management is a breeze, and generally the UI isn’t too cluttered or distracting. But I also have a dedicated full body camera, which fulfills that desire to have a dedicated, peeled back device to help focus in and be more intentional with.
Regardless, that’s all to say that it’s awesome that you’ve found some joy in these more dedicated devices, and that it’s brought about a positive impact on your life thus far.
Really good outlook on it. When I first sort of kicked off all of these changes I’ve been making, I was reading a rather popular book called Atomic Habits, which I think did a really good job of addressing “cheat days” or lapses in habits. The quote is roughly along the lines of missing doing the habit once is an accident, but missing it twice is the start of a new, likely negative habit. I think it’s great to give yourself some leeway, but equally important to be aware of how & why a new habit may be forming.
Similarly, I’ve also found replacing scrolling with reading has been incredibly successful— as long as I also maintain the habit of packing a lunch. But that’s probably more of a subjective situation rather then objective.
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I have Atomic Habits on my shelf, I’ve been meaning to read it soon. I’m a slow reader so it just takes me forever to get done reading a book sadly. But I read a book a friend gave me called Irresistable by Adam Alter and it helped me realized how addicted I was to my phone so I started to make these changes. I’ve also wanted to read stolen focus but I’m too far deep into my Manga right now lol.
Atomic Habits is a great read, and if you’re in this season of wanting to change some stuff about your day-to-day life, I think it’s worth prioritizing. A lot of contemporary discussion regarding habit forming (and the many ways that it can show up and apply in niches) really seem to draw conceptually from and apply within the niche what’s outlined within the book. I think a lot of it just makes sense, since habit forming really just boils down to “just continue to do the thing”, but it goes into some great detail on how you can build support systems for yourself that make sticking with your new habits feel easy & effortless.
For example, as I mentioned prior, my lunch break reading is dependent on me packing a lunch. I’ve made it easy to read by ensuring I have the time to both eat, and have enough time to burn through a few pages. Reading alone has always seemed conceptually simple to execute, but I always struggled to do it. Ensuring I have the time to do it in a pocket in the middle of the day by packing a lunch has made it much easier to stick with it. May sound silly to some, but it’s what’s worked for me so far.
If you’re interested in reading some more life improvement books, consider making manga the reward for reading other things you want to accomplish. Something as simple as setting a 10 minute timer, read the one book, then afterwords give yourself an out to swap with manga for the rest of the time could be a helpful way to start getting the ball rolling. 
Epos has some similar discussions in a handful of videos too that touch conceptually similiar some of the ideas in the book with the videos on session gaming (can’t remember exactly which video), seasonality play, & reducing the friction, if I’m recalling their contents correctly.
Awesome, I’ll for sure give it a read and look into the other sources as well. I’ve been trying to read a chapter a day of a self improving book mainly before bed but I’m also trying to get through a lot of backlog manga and Persona 3 Reloaded at the moment. After I finish my current manga series (I’ve only got 10 volume to go), I do plan on picking up one of my self improvement books. I tend to like to read one thing/series at a time, makes it easy to pick it up and not have to think about what I wanna read on my bookshelf.
I’m very much the same way, and funny enough I think that video about gaming in the spring also covers pruning back & reducing choices so you’re not in decision paralysis. Although, it’s easier for me to apply that with reading as it’s mentally easier for me to say that I want to focus in on one subject/concept at a time as opposed to video games, where there’s a lot of “brain off” or quick repetitive run style games (looking at you, my growing inventory of rouge-lites) that I love to jump between during my available sessions of play.
I think we’re probably due for a dedicated book thread with some of the yapping here & mentions in Epos’ videos, I’ll spin one up and link it in an edit here in a little bit. Would love to be able to talk about what you’re (and others) are reading as time goes on.
Edit: And here we are, new thread over this way → What Are You Reading?
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sounds like a good idea I’ll be sure to reply to that thread here soon then.
I noticed that I was sharing random things about the games I am playing online, without rhyme or reason or to anyone in particular. So I got an A6 pocket notebook instead.
I use it to note down what I have done in games, any thoughts I have about what I am playing, passwords and general notes to refer back to when playing (objectives, hints, that sort of stuff).
I will still talk about games with people online, but I want it to be a more nuanced conversation instead of just dumping my thoughts into the void.
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@PocketEleri For what its worth I always found it interesting to read your thoughts on the games you were playing as you would post about them!
@Scootsyy On here I do try to be more nuanced (so as not to dominate the thread), it’s elsewhere that’s the issue.
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i’ve taken this step as well! it’s actually very refreshing and I find it to be similar to texting a friend, just without all the distraction. i did it on a whim just to try it and it works very well. glad you are still providing your input here too, ive read some posts and they are very cool!