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One year with the Light Phone 2

It’s given me near-total freedom from my smartphone.

If I felt anxious or bored, reaching for my smartphone was an automatic reaction, to the point where I sometimes didn’t realize my phone was in my hand until I was 10 cat videos deep on Instagram. The Light Phone 2 had the right lack of features: no email, no social media, no internet browser or any other apps, so it made the first step in my process easy to achieve. This one sentence in his introduction brought everything full circle: “They agreed with my arguments about office distractions, but as they then explained, they were arguably even more distressed by the way new technologies seem to be draining meaning and satisfaction from their time spent out of work.” Someone finally put into words the deep pit of despair my smartphone dragged me into.

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