Modern cell phones are a plague upon society. The human brain was not designed to cope with a limitless pool of knowledge and content at its fingertips, available all day every day. Add in modern techs obsession with occupying and monetizing attention, and the phone becomes a kind of cancer that sucks away time and energy into a limitless digital void, and gives nothing back in return. The average person now spends about five hours per day on their phones. Tech companies are waging a war for our attention, and they are winning.
But what to do about it? Aside from committing to the hermit's lifestyle and retreating completely from modern life, there are other options. Dumbphones are an obvious starting point; phones which do all the essential functions of a phone, i.e. calling, texting, taking pictures, etc., but nothing else. No internet, no app store, nothing that would demand your attention when you're not trying to use the phone for what it is. As promising as this seems, some apps like google maps have become essential parts to daily life, and losing access to them makes this option difficult to stomach. There are middle ground options as well, which use the dumbphone sensibility but keep the base functionality of some apps, however these options are often overpriced and have functionality issues.
Strangely, the solution to this problem might not require any kind of innovation, new technology, or radical lifestyle shift. In Japan, they've been using the solution for years without any kind of difficulty: Keitai.
Keitai is just a word for "personal phone", but it typically refers to something a little different than what you might imagine based on that. It's not like an iPhone or other smartphone, it's basically a smartphone's software crammed into a flip-phone's hardware. You might be asking, if it has all of the same capability as a smartphone, why is it any better?
The problem, the big problem, with modern cell phones is that they've been optimized to reduce friction. It's so EASY to pick them up and slide into video scrolling or social media or browsing the internet, or anything. The keitai solves this by introducing friction back into the equation. There's no smart-screen keypad that's easy to use, you have to type using the old style of buttons, the ones that have three letters per key and take forever. And you CAN browse the internet, or use apps, or anything really, but it will be on a small screen that's not really suited to them, so there's a lot less motivation to start doing that, or to keep doing it for very long.
All of that, and it comes in a package that looks like this -
When you look through the catalogue of them, you start to see an elegance to the designs; they're minimalistic, but still individual. You can customize them with charms or stickers, and make them your own. It's kind of the best of both worlds in as much as it's a technology that you can use as technology, that doesn't leave art and human experience behind, but instead becomes a part of it. It lets you choose, instead of choosing for you.
In the end I guess all I want is a phone that can fade into the background of life, instead of making demands of you, and I don't think there are any better options out there at the moment.
Sadly, in the US there are only a few keitai that work with the cell network, and even those are not exactly reliable or easy to acquire.
But, maybe someday...