I switched to a flip phone in 2021 // Nokia 2720 KaiOS // Digital Minimalism By PG Blanks

Oh, hey yeah, have you heard the new evanescent song bring me to life? It's so good, oh by the way, I still owe you a testimonial on Friendster yeah I'll get to that. Once my mom gets off the phone. I don't have internet right now. Anyway, do you want to play NBA live 2004 on Saturday, sick, see you there bye. I know what you're thinking did I just break the space-time continuum by traveling to the mid-2000s. No, I actually bought a flip phone, something that I did voluntarily in 2021 and here's.

Why? So I like a lot of many people nowadays, I'm tethered to my phone whenever I'm not sure about what to do. I always just default to picking up my smartphone and scrolling endlessly. If my brain could talk during these scenarios, it would say Facebook, WhatsApp, google, Instagram, YouTube YouTube studio, fantasy basketball. I think you could really say that my phone was controlling what I was doing over this period. These top tech companies, their measure for success, really is tied to how long they're able to keep people on the platform, especially those who are able to make money off of ads, and so they have thousands of the smartest people in the world.

Just breaking down all of your data just trying to serve you all the most relevant content to keep you on their apps and so obviously the end result. There is that you don't really fully feel in control of what you are consuming. Your brain is just filled with an endless rush of notifications of relevant content, especially now in a tick-tock era, once you're done with this exciting 20 second clips here's another 20 second clip and for me, I ran into a couple of problems there. One is just on the productivity side. It's just been so hard for me to work from home in this day and age, without being completely distracted by a smartphone notification and, interestingly, on the fun side as well, I haven't been able to consume all the content that I wanted to consume on my own terms.

So, for example, I haven't finished the latest Pokémon game, which is surprising, given I'm a super Pokémon fan just because I would get so distracted by my phone. While I was playing that I would I just sort of lost interest in it, because my phone would provide me with a more satisfying dopamine rush. I also haven't finished the book in years and I think it's really affecting my intelligence, because again I get so distracted. I have a large backlog of unfinished Netflix shows as well, and while I understand these aren't really productive things per se, there's still content that I wish I could have consumed on my own terms, but because our smartphone apps right now are so good at delivering us content. Already, I've been feeling like a bit of a slave to my notifications, like honestly when's the last time that you've gone and said: hey.

Maybe it's like Monday today on Wednesday. I want to watch this movie. It's been a while right, because usually how it goes is hey. What's on Netflix, oh, this is exciting I'll, just watch this tonight and this tonight and this tonight it's really actually taken a lot of the choice out from our hands, which brings me to the primary reason I'm doing this. I just want to be able to control my content consumption where I'm consuming things intentionally and with purpose, rather than just being a slave to my notifications on my phone.

So I am planning to switch to this. This is the Nokia 2720, it's a flip phone, obviously, and it's sort of like in between a dumb phone, brick type of phone and a full-fledged smartphone. It has smart features like WhatsApp, Google Maps, Facebook, but much crappier versions of the original and make no mistake, even though it has those apps. This is still a very, very slow phone. I'm not going to do an in-depth review of this now because I'm not really a tech channel.

But if you are interested, let me know down below for now. I am going to instead link some videos of those that I found very helpful when I was looking into this phone there's this guy named Jose brines, who covers digital minimalism overall, and he's an expert on these phones there's also, this channel called man discovers tech where he did this experiment for 30 days when he switched to a flip phone. I'm going to link his journey down below as well. He has some great videos there. I mean the other really cool thing about why I chose this versus like a normal candy bar type phone, as they called it before is the flip.

So, as I embark on this journey, I think there are just two things I'm worried about right now. One is just. I don't want to get fired from my job, so I work in tech and I work in a role where anything can really blow up at any given point. I need to set the expectations of my team and my manager that I may not be as available on our Slack channels whenever something blows up overnight or over the weekend. We all communicate via slack, which is an excellent tool, but it's also a very always on type of tool.

So I just need to set on my slack profile that hey, if you need me, call me on my phone, I'm not going to be using a smartphone anymore. The other thing which is a bit more minor, is that some of the apps we use require authenticators, and I think it's only something you can get on a smartphone. Maybe it's something you can get from a laptop. I need to look into this. I'm not really sure.

The second thing is that there might be some compliance issues where I might be breaking the law. So, as we all know, qr codes are all the rage nowadays we use it for checking in to shopping centers to restaurants and all that I've tried this out, and it doesn't really work great with those types of qr codes. So I just need to figure out if it's actually a legal requirement for me to carry a smartphone to do this or, if not, maybe I can just either use my partner's phone or I can maybe ask the staff hey. Can you check in for me, and then I was just thinking about it like the other stuff, is just more quality of life convenience issues like mobile banking, for example? I don't really think I would need to do an on-the-spot transaction with my phone. I can just do that.

Online. Google Maps are probably going to be the hardest one because I'm so spoiled with turn-by-turn navigation, and I was never the type of person who remembered routes very well, so I might have some challenges there were either, I might need to really study the routes ahead of time, or I'll need to borrow my partner's phone, so we can actually go places so the ground rules. For my challenge and my workarounds. I will be using this Nokia 2720, primarily as my only phone. My sim card is already in it.

I'm going to take my smartphone with me to work just power it down. The reason is that I don't think it's going to be fair on my colleagues or my manager. If I'm like. Oh, I can't do this. I don't have a smartphone it'll actually affect my performance and people around me, so I don't want to be a pain there.

What I'm going to do, though, is just keep it off, keep it in my bag, unless I actually need it. When I get home, I'm going to keep my smartphone powered off in my bag. The only reason I'll need to take out my phone is for situations like this when I'm filming, because I'm actually filming all of my videos on my iPhone 8 plus at the moment. I think it would be counterproductive if I bought a new camera just for this challenge. Lastly, I'm not staying fully offline and disconnected I'm actually going to be using this nexus 7 as my primary e-reader.

It does its job, it's a ancient tablet. I think this was back from 2013-2014, really that's a bit of a blessing in disguise, because a lot of apps don't run on this anymore. It just works mostly as a reader, and sometimes I just use a web browser, but it's painfully slow, and so I'm not really tempted to spend hours and hours on this, which is good because if I moved away from my smartphone and all of my screen time was just on this tablet. That would be counterproductive. So all in all, my main goal here at the end of the day is to take control of the content.

I want to consume and no longer be a slave to the notifications of my phone. So hopefully, with the help of this, I am able to finally finish that one video game I've been trying to finish I'll, be able to finish that one Netflix series I've been trying to finish, and I'll be able to finish a book, and really I'm not sure how long I'll be doing this. For I know some people have done this on a 30-day challenge on a seven-day challenge. I think I'll be running with this. As long as I can as long as it keeps me happy and content, I've been on this for two days now and honestly, I haven't felt deprived at all, like I've lived the first 20 years of my life without any sort of mobile internet.

So why can't I go back to that I'll, be chronicling my experience with this over the next few videos, if you have any questions about how I'm going about it or if you've done this before and have some recommendations for me. Let me know down in the comments below I'd love, to hear from you. If you want to see how I go with this subscribe to my channel and hit the notification bell, so you don't miss out thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video bye now.

Source : PG Blanks