I recently watched Henry from Techlore's response to the Wired article, Dumphone Owners Have Lost Their Minds.
At 35 minutes, the response is thorough and nuanced.
That video prompted me to write about my own experience using a dumbphone as my daily driver from about 2021-2024.
Originally, I had intended for this to be a single blog post. Then, I started writing. As I wrote out each of the points and sections I planned for the individual blog post, it primed related thoughts. So I kept writing. For some sections, the sub-sections alone could be their own post. Therefore, rather than trying to condense that three to four year journey into a single blog post or torture you with a wall of text, I decided to turn it into a series.
My plan is for this post to serve as the introduction to the series and in subsequent posts, I plan to explore different parts of the journey. I want to be able to give the ideas and each of those sections room to breathe and stand on their own.
Some of the things I plan to talk about during the series include:
- How the journey started
- What my setup looked like
- What I enjoyed about using a dumbphone
- What was hard to do with a dumbphone
- Working around the hard parts
- Pleasant surprises / unintended consequences of using a dumbphone
- The role of community
- My journey back to a smartphone
As it happened when I originally started writing this post, I'm sure more topics and ideas will surface. This series is not meant to be followed in chronological order as I myself don't remember when certain things happened and can only remember general timelines.
My goal for this series is to reflect on my unique perspective and personal experience. In doing so, hopefully I provide a glimpse into how I discovered alternative ways of doing things without a smartphone. Also, I think it's a nice way for me to pad the number of posts on my site. I haven't done a lot of long-form writing on the website in some time. It's something I've been wanting to do for a while and this is a great opportunity.
Despite “dumbphone” being in the name, this series is about much more than a phone. The device itself faded into the background fairly quickly. Removing the smartphone introduced enough friction to slow me down and make me question assumptions I hadn’t noticed before. It created space to experiment, to question defaults, and to discover different ways of engaging with both the digital and physical world. The dumbphone was simply the constraint that made those explorations possible. This series is less about a device and more about the unexpected paths that opened up once I gave myself that space.
In the posts that follow, I’ll explore how this experience shaped my thinking and perspectives along the way. I’ll see you in the next post.