The Second Phone

I tried. I really tried to overcome my internet addictions via my phone and yet every attempt was met with my inability to exercise proper self-control. No matter what I've done, it's been near impossible to quit using my phone during all of my free time. It's gotten to a point where I feel like I'm barely participating properly in my own life and instead have been trying to live mostly online... it's a sad sort of existence when you begin to live in such a manner. So I started looking online to see what kind of options I have. The concept of a "dumb phone" came up several times and so I decided to look further into them. My mobile phone carrier does not sell dumb phones and you would be hard pressed to find any in-person store that would, due to how unpopular they would be to sell. Perhaps I could buy one online instead, but I don't trust like that, plus I would need to find one that would be compatible with my mobile carrier in order to get any service on it. For these reasons, I decided to just get a second smartphone; the cheapest and smallest one I could acquire in a store.

I now have two phones. One would be for personal use while the other would be for work. I suppose I could still end up falling into the same traps that I did before with the personal phone, but I still wanted to give this a shot. Besides, now if I want to leave one phone in a "cold turkey" sort of way, I can do so without worrying that I'm going to miss out on important phone calls or texts from work that would be time sensitive.

For my detox phone (aka, the work phone), I'll be adjusting it to be as simple as it can possibly be. I might even set some kind of parental controls on downloading apps on the phone. I'm the only one who would be using it, but it would add an extra layer of security to stop me from downloading apps that I absolutely do not need.

I'll be researching other ways in which I can dumb my phone down more, but hopefully in time I would be able to completely transfer myself to the work phone and stop paying for service for the personal use phone. Both come with unlimited talk, text, and data services, but if possible, I want downgrade to a more minimalist and basic phone plan. Perhaps there would be a limit on talk, text, and data, and while that could be a struggle, it would be more affordable and it would discourage me from being on my phone as often. It would force me to interact with the world more directly, and in the end that's what I really need.