Hi, my name is Jason and I struggle with nomophobia.
I struggle living with smartphones.
I struggle living without smartphones.
I know the research and claims: smartphones are designed to keep users engaged, and social media has negative effects on self-esteem.
I have set my iPhone, iPad, and Mac to grayscale to make them less appealing.
I have tried to remove the apps that suck my attention.
I have tried to put my phone in the other rooms.
I have tried, and found success in concentrated moments, yet something always happens.
I need to see an image in color to understand if it is what I am looking for.
I need to use one of the apps I am on far too much.
I need, simply, to use my phone.
I hear my mother telling me it’s all about my willpower, and I will concede she has a point. Yet, with some iteration of an iPod in my hand since late middle school, how were any of us to know the unintended consequences espoused by doomsayers.
I think Brick is both the solution in the short and long term: the bandaid and the medicine.
I have thought to go the puritan route and return to the days of old with a flip phone: to join the dumb phone revolution. But, I know that buying a dumb phone is no different from deleting the apps: something will happen where I need to use the thing I just got rid of.
So what options are there?
I have seen friends, and students, have others set a password locked screen limit on apps.
I downloaded Opal: an app designed to do something very similar.
The app allows you to set schedules where certain apps can and cannot be used.
Depending on which type of schedule you set, during those seat hours, you can
1.) Pause the restrictions anytime.
2.) Take timed breaks from your restrictions, with each new break taking a longer period before the app allows you to take another.
3.) Not have breaks from your restrictions at all.
Taking after its namesake, Opal, gives you digital gemstones based on your progress. It takes the aspects we crave in our smartphones, colors, reward, competition, etc., and it flips it like any disruptor would do. It looks at the issue and tries to invert the problems to be the solutions.
Opal just asked me to focus on the app its rewards, not reconcile my relationship with technology, however.
The other issue was that after your one-week free trial, you can no longer reach level three, no allowed breaks, without paying: $99.99 a year, 19.99 a month, or $9.99 a week.
I liked Opal as a concept, and I think it is a great tool, yet it stopped short of really doing anything to combat the larger issue: having some level of addiction, or lack of conscious thought, with my phone.
Unfortunately, as I sat in a coffee shop, re-listening to the Scary Hours Edition of For All The Dogs and realized I missed a song in my post, my heart dropped beyond my stomach and onto the floor.
I had to rush to take the post down from my phone, deleting the app to bypass the restrictions.
Poof, the mystique was gone.
Now, it is not Opal's fault. Any app like this, even Brick, can be circumvented. But, when you have the option to take breaks or delete the app, in some way you are letting your habits win.
Be it the shame I carry as I do not have the willpower with this as I do in other areas, or paying a recurring fee, I could not bring myself to buy the $100 a year, $20 a month, or $10 a week premium fee to just transfer my addiction to another medium.
I have toyed with a dumbphone, but the tools a smartphone provides are worth keeping.
I usually live recklessly and dive fully into whatever it is I am doing, yet I am also practical in my pursuits.
So, what do you do?
You make your phone a brick.
We can debate the ethics of algorithm based ads later, but, like Opal was introduced to me via an ad on Instagram in the same way the Huberman and Goggins clips were presented to me via the algorithm on YouTube, Brick was presented to me via an algorithm.
The story was compelling.
As two recent college graduates who've grown up with smartphones, we realized that more often than not, the distracting features win out. Whether at the library, the office, or dinner with family, these devices are constantly pulling us away from what matters.
While the simplest solution we found was to simply stop taking our phones with us everywhere or switch to a flip phone, we quickly realized how important smartphones have become. We use them to hail a ride, document our days with pictures and notes, get directions, and countless other things that truly enhance our daily lives. By giving up our smartphones, we would be forced to give up these luxuries we so take for granted.
Faced with this problem, we decided to build our own solution: Brick. Now you can decide which tools you'd like to keep with you, and then tap your Brick to ditch the rest for a bit. Because it's a physical device, you'll have no temptation to use the distractions until you come back to the Brick (whether that means across the room or across the city). (WHY)
Now 4 days with Brick, with one tap of my phone, I can limit my access to a set list of apps until I return to tap my phone again.
With the Brick being magnetic, it sits eye level on my front door, so as I leave, I tap my phone to the brick and my phone itself becomes a brick until I return to tap again. It’s risky. It’s reckless. It’s practical.
There is no password. There are a limited amount of emergency exists. You only pay for it once.
If you are wondering, yes, you have to live the next 12–14 hours with your phone as a brick. Your phone will not unlock the apps until you tap your phone again: unless you use one of your five emergency tokens. It. is. won.der.ful.
Not only are you more intentional in your use of your phone, but you are hyper vigilant as to what is on your phone as well: what you want to have access to, and even what has access to you.
The reality is, society has progressed to a point where to live without a smartphone is a deliberate choice to inconvenience yourself in more ways than one.
One only needs to look at how inconvenient it is to live in a modern city to understand this phenomenon. As cars became common place, cities became designed for car ownership. With public transit an option, often inefficient and unreliable, to forgo a car is a choice to inconvenience oneself due to a system created for car dominated transportation. I dream of only needing a bike, but I live in Houston, TX, not Amsterdam or Boston, MA.
Though many have rung the bell on the myth of progress and technologies impending doom of necessitating itself into our lives, we have allowed our lives to require our phones.
Much like the impending climate crisis, because of the actions carried out by those years before many of us were even a thought, this is not directly our fault, yet we are left to figure out how to exist in the issue.
Everything comes with tradeoffs.
I do think the smartphone is great, but I also I find myself picking my phone up, opening an app, closing the app, opening another app, locking my phone, putting my phone down, picking my phone up again and repeating the process. I have done this to a point where I know what apps I will open, in what order, and when I will set my phone down: it's unconscious, the system has been created, and I am part of the system.
I think Brick is both the solution in the long and short term: the bandaid and the medicine.
Different settings call for different apps, so I have added four different settings that I typically find myself in order to allow the right access at the right time: default, work, writing, and social.
What I have found is that when I do pick my phone up, before opening it, I know it is a brick and whatever I am planning to open may not be accessible.
In just 4 days, Brick has brought an awareness to my relationship with my phone. An awareness that has been lacking for sustained periods for a quite a while. It is easy to hone in for a specific amount of time to work on grading, homework, writing, or the like, but once the moment has passed and the focus has waned, things are different.
Day one, with my phone bricked, I did struggle a bit, as my first guess as to what I did and did not need was a tad off. However, the forced inability to use my phone provided moments of stillness, moments of deep clarity, moments of hope.
My hope is that as this newfound awareness creates a habit where I will eventually maybe not need the Brick. I’m hopeful but not expectant.
At $54 in total, this is a far better, easier, and more controlled way to solve the short and long-term effect the smartphone has created in my life.
This hope does come with some hesitation.
First deals with how data is stored: the site states that all data is currently stored on the iPhone. I am not a tech wiz, and I clearly cannot bemoan targeted ads too much, I am just aware of allowing this indiscreet gray block access to my phone with a simple tap. I am curious as the company grows if this key word, currently, shifts.
Moreover, a flat fee with no subscription-based payments, they also state that is for now. With video games to car manufactures relying on microtransactions, I wonder how much longer this will last.
But I am not here to do a technical review of Brick, but to say, if you struggle with how to live with your smartphone in a world the necessitates it in some way, Brick may be the way.
I am not sponsored or affiliated with Brick, in the same way I do not know Isla Rose, the Lapse app, Jhung Kim, Drake, Andrew Huberman, or David Goggins.
I just think if something is beneficial, it is worth sharing.
Feel free to email me with questions on my experience, or reach out to the guys over at Brick. Based on the handwritten note they sent with my package that thanked me for joining early in their process, they seem like wholesome guys: I may just be biased because their LLC is from my home state of Wisconsin.
Either way, we all lust after the 80s in some way, might as well bring back the brick phone.
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