My first smartphone was a hand-me-down Droid 3. One of those ones with the little slide-out querty keyboard. It was, in all honesty, mad convenient; once, during my sophomore year of college, my laptop broke and I was able to compose a lengthy essay entirely in the body of an email to my instructor (who accepted it, thank goodness). It gave me something to do on the bus. Something to do between classes. Something to do at home. Something to do at work. Something to do in the middle of doing other things. You get the picture. My second smartphone was an iphone, and really all I remember about it was Candy Crush.
Fuck, I played so much Candy Crush.
The thing is, while the entrance of smartphones into my life was absolutely the beginning of a horribly mismanaged and addictive relationship that I am only now starting to break after twelve-ish years (oy), it's not like I had a great relationship with technology before that. I got a laptop in high school and if I was home, I was probably on it. It was a thing to disappear into, and while I don't want to bog this down with the why, suffice it to say that I had a lot of reasons to want to disappear. That tendency followed me into young adulthood; how many days, weeks, maybe even months of my life have I spent passively scrolling down my Tumblr dashboard (is a question I absolutely do not want an answer to). I'd gotten out of my parents' house, but still had a lot of disappearing to do. A lot of time to kill, as if time isn't the only thing we really have.
Sorry, that was a little naval-gazey. I promise I'm almost done. Let's skip ahead a bit.
At time of writing, it's early 2025, I am a 33 year old man with a husband and a toddler and a constant drive to distance myself from, uh, myself. I don't have to get into why that's bad or why it's relevant to this topic, because the point is: I've spent years of my life disappearing into my phone or my computer, scrolling and scrolling, passively ingesting. It used to be more of a give-and-take. Ten years ago, scrolling Tumblr also involved a lot of posting my own things, having conversations, sharing my thoughts. At a certian point, I guess I stopped doing that. Really that's how it was with all of my social media; at one time, I shared. I put something of myself out there, you know? And then one day I woke up and realized that I'd stopped doing it. That I couldn't remember how to do it anymore. I wasn't making posts, I wasn't even really reading the posts I saw, I was just scrolling. Waiting for The Algorithm to bring me something so I could feel a brief moment of something else, and well. You get it. You're on Neocities, I'm sure you also have some capital-T Thoughts about the modern internet.
Eventually I got sick of it. But, well, you know that thing about how smokers have to quit on average like seven or eight times before it finally sticks? Except that for a lot of them the number is closer to thirty? And they don't even have to deal with their work email making them smoke a cigarette to prove their identity in order to log in! I mean, fuck.
A couple weeks ago, I quit weed. It's actually probably less than that; I don't know for sure, my quit date is in an app on my phone, which is in the other room. And I decided to quit my phone at the same time (more or less). I put some comic books in the bathroom, set up a desk with my laptop, and here we are. Here I am. I am here, right here, in this plushy orange rocking chair that my cats have scratched the absolute shit out of, typing onto a decidedly not-ergonomic bluetooth keyboard directly into the edit page of my neocities. Here I am. My legs are cold and I am here.
Okay! Fair enough! My very disjointed and largely unfiltered ramblings here are all just contextual preamble so you, whoever "you" are (probably just me in a few days, few weeks, etc.) know where my head is at when I tell you that I'm working really hard to tear myself away from, y'know, [gestures vaguely]. The stuff. The shit. Smartphones, social media, scrolling, and overall just that whole thing of passively pointing my eyes at the pretty light and letting it melt my brain. The key factor there being "passively," which is something that I really dig about neocities (and is part of why I'm writing all this cringe shit at all - for the sake of putting something out there, anything at all.
ALL OF THAT IS TO SAY... I just ordered a Light Phone II and I am STOKED about it. And I've been working on finding ways to divest from some of the bigger tech corpos, finding ways to replace things I use with open-source options. Which is tricky, because I am not a "tech guy." But I'm doing what I can.