GoKawiilLast year I got a brand new iPhone 17 shortly after it came out. It was a bit ironic to spend that much on a phone just to build the thing that would slow it down.
Slowing down your own phone on purpose sounds… unconventional, but I had a good reason for it.
For a long time I struggled with doomscrolling. I tried the usual stuff (cold turkey, app blockers) but they didn’t address the craving, and they were easy enough to bypass on top of that, none of it worked.
A thought experiment about cookies.
How far would you go for a chocolate cookie?
If you had a little machine in your pocket that baked a fresh one any time you wanted, you’d eat way more cookies than you do now, probably one every time you got mildly bored.
But if the closest cookie were a four-hour drive away, you’d eat almost none, even if you love cookies.
Or if there were a cookie in your kitchen, but it was stale, you’d mostly leave it alone.
The phone, of course, is the cookie machine in your pocket. So how do you make the cookies harder to get, or less appetizing? Slow it down!
Making the phone slow
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