Oof. What a convoluted title, but the topic is quite simple. I want to present to you my current lifestyle and how I could imagine making improvements to it. I currently live with a dumbphone (Nokia 225 4G) and I own a MacBook Pro from 2015 (I like those devices due to perfect Linux compatibility, high resolution screen, good keyboards and great build quality) and I’m running macOS on it, the reason for which I’ll get into soon.

For communications I don’t rely on any Instant Messaging services and not on any obscure messaging standard that nobody but me and 2 other people use, I only use E-Mail. It’s wonderful because an E-Mail is usually composed similarly to a handwritten letter. It’s something that you think about when you compose it, you try to put as much information in there as possible because E-Mail programs are not very nice to use to write a heap of 1-sentence messages. That makes it much more thoughtful to interact with people. It also enables you to still interact with most websites when you have to order things online because they’re not available locally, and everything ends up in one central place. For people who don’t like messaging through an E-Mail client, I always recommend https://delta.chat because it works like any traditional IM App but interacts with your pre-existing E-Mail account, I personally don’t use it, but lots of my friends I communicate with do. You might say that you don’t have group chats that way but that is just not true because you can easily do mailing lists, but things like Discord or Matrix chatrooms probably aren’t the best to regularly hang out in as they just disconnect you from the real world (in moderation it can definitely be beneficial though). Also, social media, no matter what, FediVerse, Nostr, GNU Social, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and the likes all aren’t in your best interest, there is little to no value and it’s just too much effort to keep them alive and interact with it, the key point is you want to try and reduce the amount of things you can keep in your mind and go “oh let me check that”. These things can be YouTube, Odysee, Mastodon or any other form of social media or feed that can be updated, I instead recommend using RSS Feeds for news and things that interest you and try to stay on those unless you want to discover something new on purpose. This way you can most likely evade doom scrolling and hogging your mind with useless things that don’t even affect you.

For internet I would recommend going with a LAN-Based Cable internet without any Wireless functionality, because you really don’t want that radiation around you at all times realistically. I currently don’t have that sadly because my computer doesn’t have a LAN-port and my internet contract is a SIM-Card one because I didn’t think about that beforehand (realistically it doesn’t make that big of a difference because I life in a multiple-story building and I’m surrounded by approximately 50 WiFi Networks in close proximity but nonetheless one fewer is still one fewer.

I also recommend getting one single PC that you use, try to avoid using multiple devices and try to tailor them to what you need. For me that is an older MacBook running macOS because I also have an iPod that I want to effortlessly sync Podcasts and Music to, I also don’t do a whole lot on my computer anymore so I can just block out most of the tracking and be fine, I hope I’ll find a way to do it on Linux to the same standard at some point. Also, reduce the blue-light that is emitted by your devices, on macOS I use grayscale + Night Shift almost all the time (except when I’m shopping because then I need to see the colors) and it has heavily reduced eye-strain for me and also helped me get to bed earlier and sleep way better.

I hope that this could inspire you a bit to get started with your own smartphone-less life. Have a nice day :)