NEW POST: The Schok Classic: Only what you need and relatively little more

A review of a flip/feature phone I bought about a month and a half ago

https://joebush.net/2022/02/22/schok-classic-review/

I should make a couple of things clear -

First, this is the best feature phone I’ve used. The AGM M7 has more features, but it’s such a hassle to make any use of them that I’d rather just not have them. In my experience, a touch screen actually makes a feature phone worse. It’s the dilemma of how sometimes trying to do something halfway makes the endeavour in and of itself seem pointless

Secondly, this will not save your life. There is sort of a pseudo-community surrounding feature phones online, on Reddit, and there is this constant phenomenon of people coming to the board, posting a topic in search of this perfect ideal of a feature phone for them that hits every possible thing they could want out of it, with this sometimes unstated but sometimes directly stated idea that purchasing the right product will solve all of their problems. This is not the case. This is not a panacea. This is just one thing, just a tool, and while I do believe that smartphones have caused and exacerbated a variety of social and personal issues. I have more time now, yes, but as I state in the post, I haven’t quite found how to use it best yet.

Regardless, I do genuinely believe that turning away from the smartphone can help with the sorts of addictive issues brought about by modern smartphones. Again, I could get into those, but there are so many of them that range from little personal mental tics to broad societal-level problems. For me, I would most obviously fixate on social media, “doom-scrolling” being the term for it, though I don’t love that term, and I don’t love it partially because it’s too accurate but simultaneously too twee. I also had that common issue I hear from a lot of people of “not living in the moment”, which hasn’t really paid off yet because I am finding that many of the moments in which I find myself are quite mundane. I struggle to romanticize the difference between looking at my phone in line at Chipotle and not looking at my phone in line at Chipotle, but being out anywhere sucks right now anyways.

I think it’s helping me get better, is what I’m saying, though I acknowledge it’s not by any means fixing everything.