When you work for someone, that respect is genuinely hard to come by, and it is not because the people are bad. It is because of how companies are built. The structure itself makes respect difficult to find.

Nobody Screens for This

In a healthy world, companies would recruit with extreme care. They would screen the owners, the stakeholders, the shareholders for narcissism, for the darker traits, for the things that make a person impossible to work with. Almost nobody does this.

The advancement paths we have had for the last thirty or forty years were never designed to ask whether someone is decent. Nobody really cares if a manager is brilliant at the job and a nightmare as a human being. And when a team gets put together, nobody checks whether the new person’s character will leave everyone else feeling valued.

On top of that, companies are built so that everyone is replaceable. That is not an accident, it is the design. If the company stops working the moment you quit, then from their point of view the company was built wrong. You being replaceable is not a flaw in the system. It is the feature they were aiming for.

The Real Transaction

Here is the part that took me years to see clearly. Within a month, three at the very most, you learn the real transaction behind your contract. And it is often nothing like what was written down and signed.

Maybe you were hired as an assistant, but in practice you are a stress evacuator for your boss. You are not assisting anyone. You are absorbing someone else’s aggression so it does not land somewhere more expensive. Maybe you were hired as a programmer, but in practice someone hands you an AI tool and your real job is to review whatever the machine spits out. Translators learned this one recently. Over the last five years, many were quietly pushed from translating into proofreading, which is not the job they signed up for.

I learned it myself. When I was an IT director, I thought I would architect systems and teams that helped the business do well. Instead, thirty or forty percent of my time, I was simply the person being shouted at because someone’s device would not cooperate. That was not written in my contract. It is not something anyone should have to absorb, and it is not something I wanted to do. The real transaction is almost always less glamorous than the one on your contract, and a great deal less glamorous than the one on your LinkedIn profile.

When You Can Walk Away

Run your own business and the whole equation flips. You can still end up working with a client who is a narcissist, or worse. The difference is that you can withdraw. You can simply say: I will not take another project from you, because you do not treat me with respect.

That only works if you build the thing properly. If you make podcasts or videos for companies, and one client turns out to be full of difficult people, you let that client go and the other nine or ten keep your business standing. That is the whole point of building your own thing instead of betting your entire life on one employer.

Your mistakes become survivable too. You might aim at the wrong market. You might start out with clients who are a poor fit. All of that is reversible, and usually quite easy to navigate. Compare that to an employee who needs one or two years to pivot from one industry to another. That slow, expensive pivot is the real risk, and almost nobody names it out loud.

It Is Not the 1980s

This is why, in 2026, I find it genuinely hard to understand anyone still hunting for a traditional job. The transaction on offer is so lopsided and so risky. This is not the 1980s, when respect at work was closer to the norm and you could stay at one company for decades and call it a life.

And do not assume some industry has quietly cracked it. A few years ago, people were sure that San Francisco and tech startups were different, that the deal there was better. It is not. Now the boss tells you to use AI or be judged for not using it, then measures your worth by the tokens you spent rather than by what you actually built and shipped.

Or picture an ordinary office in Warsaw. The real transaction there reads something like this: ninety minutes of commute in the morning, ninety minutes back, five days a week, for the privilege of sitting in a cubicle in front of a screen that blasts blue light into your face. Nobody writes that on the offer letter, but that is the deal you are signing.

Build Something That Respects You

Now for the good news, because there is plenty. The tools to build something of your own have never been cheaper, simpler, or closer to hand than they are right now. A laptop, a notebook, a clear idea of who you actually want to help, and you are most of the way there.

You do not have to burn everything down tomorrow. Start with one client, one project, one page of notes. Keep the job while you build the thing on the side if that is what feels safe. The goal is not chaos, it is freedom. The goal is to end up in a setup where respect is the baseline you start from, not a lottery ticket you might lose. That is worth building toward, and it is far more within reach than the world wants you to believe. So start.

Do Your Own Research

• Respect and dignity at work. Reviews of workplace research connect being treated with respect to stronger wellbeing, and link incivility and disrespect to lower life satisfaction and worse mental health. The US Surgeon General’s framework treats dignity, the sense of being respected and valued, as a foundation of a healthy workplace. Sources: A review on health and well-being at work (Personnel Psychology, Wiley, 2023); Do work relationships matter? (NCBI / PMC); Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being (US Surgeon General, HHS).

• Toxic, narcissistic, and psychopathic leaders. Studies find that employees who rate their supervisors higher on corporate psychopathy report more psychological distress, more work and family conflict, lower job satisfaction, and stronger intentions to quit. Sources: A dark side of leadership: corporate psychopathy and employee well-being (ScienceDirect); Corporate psychopathy and abusive supervision (ScienceDirect); Negative Leadership, an overview (Springer).

• How much control you have over your work. The long-running Whitehall II research found that workers with low control over their jobs had a higher risk of coronary heart disease, and later meta-analysis supports the link between job strain and heart disease. Sources: Contribution of job control to coronary heart disease (The Lancet, via ScienceDirect); Job strain and coronary heart disease, a meta-analysis (Annals of Medicine, Taylor & Francis).

• Commuting. Across many countries, longer commutes are consistently associated with lower life satisfaction, more time pressure, higher stress, and poorer sleep. Sources: How commuting affects subjective wellbeing (Transportation, Springer); Systematic review of commuting, subjective wellbeing and mental health (ScienceDirect); Commuting and wellbeing, a critical overview (Transport Reviews, Taylor & Francis).

• Blue light and screens. Evening exposure to blue-rich light from screens and LED lighting suppresses melatonin and can delay sleep and shift your body clock, with blue wavelengths having the strongest effect. Sources: Blue light from LEDs and dose-dependent melatonin suppression (Journal of Applied Physiology); Home lighting, blue-light filtering and melatonin suppression (Scientific Reports, Nature); Blue light has a dark side (Harvard Health).

The argument usually sounds like this.

And my honest answer is, if all you want is someone to press a button on a camera, then you are right. Save your money and use your phone. It will be enough.

But if you want a portrait you will never forget, the photographer brings something your phone cannot. He will pick a better spot than you would. He will pick a better time of day. He will choose the camera and the lens for exactly what you want from that photo. Put the two pictures side by side and you will see it at once. A phone photo looks like a phone photo. A portrait taken with the right lens looks like something else entirely.

You Can Hear It Too

The same thing happens with music and with good listening gear. I am not talking about expensive audiophile toys here. I am talking about equipment that is simply made well. Headphones that reproduce sound honestly, a proper music player, and recordings that have not been squeezed and thrown away.

Imagine I handed you my headphones, which are planar magnetic and play very evenly, along with my music player, which uses an R2R DAC, and I played you a lossless FLAC file. You would hear the difference straight away. There would be no need to argue about it.

And here is the part that matters. After that, you would not happily spend an hour listening through cheap headphones, with a weak DAC, playing compressed files. Once your ears know what good sounds like, going back feels like a small loss every time.

My Daughter and Interstellar

Film works in exactly the same way. My older daughter, Helena, is into filmmaking, and she loves watching movies. Recently she watched Interstellar several times in a row.

Right after that she put on Harry Potter, which she had been enjoying earlier and genuinely liked. But this time she turned to me and said she could not watch it the same way anymore. The acting did not feel as strong. The picture did not look as good. The story did not feel as real to her. She simply preferred Interstellar.

So you see it, you hear it, and you feel it. That is the pattern across all of these things. Once you have experienced real quality, a part of you can no longer pretend not to notice.

Now, About AI

Here is the thought I asked you to hold. Today you can generate a whole article from nothing. The machine will happily write it for you. But do you really want to read something produced by an artificial tool, something that describes no human experience and carries no human feeling? Be honest with yourself.

If you knew for certain it was written by AI, you probably would not want to read it at all. And yes, if someone uses a capable AI, edits the result carefully, and chooses not to tell you, you might be fooled for a while. You might even believe it came from a real person.

But the moment you find out it was generated, something shifts. The sympathy you had for that creator quietly disappears, and you go looking instead for another human, one who is willing to share their own thoughts. That search is not a flaw in us. It is the whole point.

The One Thing That Survives

This is what people have always wanted from creative work. Not perfection, but a story that was imagined by another human being who wanted to pass a feeling along to someone else. We read and listen and watch in order to meet that person on the other side.

So do not be afraid of AI. It can generate portraits and images and articles, and it can do it quickly. But it cannot hand you a feeling. It cannot tell you what it felt while standing on the mountaintop, in the cold, the moment before the photograph was taken. It was never there.

That is the good news, and it is worth holding onto. The space for honest, human work is not shrinking. It is becoming more precious. So keep making things that carry your own experience. Choose the better lens, the better recording, the better story. Put your real self into what you create, and trust that people will feel the difference. They always do.

Do Your Own Research

On hearing the difference in sound quality

• Reiss, J. D. (2016). A Meta-Analysis of High Resolution Audio Perceptual Evaluation. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 64(6), 364 to 379. A review of 18 studies and over 12,500 trials found a small but statistically significant ability to tell high resolution audio apart from standard quality, and that ability rose sharply with training. Read it here

On why music and art move us

• Salimpoor, V. N., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. J. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience, 14, 257 to 262. Using brain imaging, the researchers showed that intense pleasure from music triggers real dopamine release, the same reward chemistry behind other things we crave. Read it here

On how we value AI made creative work

• Raj, M., Berg, J. M., & Seamans, R. (2026). The Artificial Intelligence Disclosure Penalty: Humans Persistently Devalue AI-Generated Creative Writing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Across 16 preregistered experiments with more than 27,000 people, the same text was rated lower once readers believed AI was involved, and the effect was driven by a loss of perceived authenticity. Read it here

• Agudo, U., Arrese, M., Liberal, K. G., & Matute, H. (2022). Assessing Emotion and Sensitivity of AI Artwork. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 879088. People judged the very same artwork as lower in emotion, sensitivity, and quality when they were told the artist was an AI rather than a human. Read it here

Part 2

Part 3

So an LLM only pretends to have a memory. It only pretends to reason. What it is genuinely, almost startlingly good at is showing you the result of a very binary analysis. The next letter is either a good fit or it is not, and everything else branches out from that single decision, made over and over.

Once that clicks, you can predict which jobs get handed to these models first. The easiest ones to automate, and the soonest, are the jobs that produce fairly binary answers.

The Jobs With a Clear Right Answer

Take junior coders. A line of code either runs or it does not. You can check it in a second. That clarity is exactly why those roles were among the first to be handed over.

The same logic reaches further than most people expect. Think about diagnosticians, the doctors whose work is reaching a diagnosis. They sit in a similar spot, and I would say sooner rather than later, because the outcome of what they do is also binary. The diagnosis is either right or it is wrong.

Financial analysts are in the same boat. The analysis is either correct, mathematically, or it is not. And lawyers belong there too. There is a code of law, and almost all legal advice is built on top of it, so you can check whether the reasoning holds and whether what the lawyer proposes is legally sound.

Try It With a Contract

If you think this will not actually happen, picture writing a contract. You really have two options. You can hire a lawyer who will probably spend ten days drafting it, going back and forth with you, making the small decisions along the way. Or you can start right now with a good LLM and get something of very similar quality almost instantly.

There is one real difference, and it is worth sitting with. You cannot sue the model. If it hands you bad advice, there is no one to hold responsible. You cannot go back and audit how it reasoned, because there is no real trail to follow.

That missing audit trail is exactly the kind of thing that should make a company pause before it leans on these tools, and right now almost nobody is talking about it. The encouraging part is that this is a known and solvable problem, and a whole field of researchers is busy prying the black box open, so that one day we will be able to trace what a model did and why.

The Economics Are Hard to Argue With

These jobs get automated first not because someone made a careless or unkind decision, but because it simply adds up. From a pure budget point of view, it is very hard to defend paying for a process that is ten times slower, that needs to rest, and that can fall sick, when you can get comparable quality in seconds.

I want to be clear that this is not the end of these professions. Lawyers will not disappear, in the same way translators did not disappear once DeepL started to perform adequately. What changes is the shape of the work.

Lawyers will be pushed toward the parts a machine cannot touch: visibility, judgment, and real relationships with clients. It is the same move translators made when they became proofreaders and editors, polishing and checking the output rather than starting every time from a blank page. Some, of course, still translate literature, and that is genuinely valuable, because a few of them carry rare and beautiful skills.

I Was a Translator Once

I can say all of this plainly because I was a translator myself when I was younger. So I am not describing this from the outside.

And honestly, the bulk of that work was not inspiring at all. It was technical documentation and other dry material, page after page of it. It paid my way through my studies, and I am grateful for that. But would I have wanted to do it for the rest of my life? No.

So I am glad a tool like DeepL or Claude can carry that load now, rather than me. These jobs are being handed over to AI as I write this sentence, and that is not something to fear so much as something to read clearly. Learn what an LLM really is. Get comfortable using one. Then put your energy into the things it cannot fake: taste, judgment, trust, and the human relationships that sit on top of all the right answers. That is where the interesting work is moving, and it is wide open.

Do Your Own Research

If you want to check any of this for yourself, here are solid, peer-reviewed places to start, grouped by topic.

What a language model actually is

• Vaswani et al., “Attention Is All You Need” (2017), the paper that introduced the transformer, the architecture behind today’s models: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

• Li et al., “Mechanics of Next Token Prediction with Self-Attention” (2024), a close look at what a model is really doing when it guesses the next token: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.08081

Which jobs are most exposed

• Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin and Rock, “GPTs are GPTs,” published in Science (2024). It finds that higher-paid jobs may be more exposed to these models, not less: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj0998 (open version: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130)

Coding

• Peng et al., “The Impact of AI on Developer Productivity: Evidence from GitHub Copilot” (2023), a controlled experiment measuring how much faster developers work with an AI assistant: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06590

Medical diagnosis

• Goh et al., “Large Language Model Influence on Diagnostic Reasoning: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” JAMA Network Open (2024): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11519755/

Translation

• Zouhar et al., “Neural Machine Translation Quality and Post-Editing Performance” (2021), on how the job has shifted toward editing machine output rather than translating from scratch: https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.801/

The black box and the missing audit trail

• “Bridging the Black Box: A Survey on Mechanistic Interpretability in AI,” ACM Computing Surveys (2025): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3787104

• “On Reading and Interpreting Black Box Deep Neural Networks,” International Journal of Digital Humanities (2023): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42803-023-00075-w

I have a new dumbphone. Honestly, it is the stupidest phone I have ever had, even more stupid than the Punkt MP02, and somehow that is exactly what is giving me lots of joy. So I have to share it with you, because joy has to be shared. It is a small red Panasonic KX-TU550EXR flip phone from Amazon, the same red as my car. It opens and closes with that satisfying little snap, and you can set it up so that opening the phone takes the call and closing it hangs up.

The last time a piece of hardware made me feel this way was the very first day I used a Punkt. Before that, I have to go back many years. Holding this little flip phone reminds me of what it feels like to use a good mechanical camera with a manual focusing lens. There is intention, there is a small ritual every time you pick it up. You just open it, do the one thing you wanted to do, close it, and walk away.

I called it the stupidest phone for a reason. It has no Wi-Fi at all, so it cannot make a hotspot for my laptop. If I am on the move, I simply have no internet on my laptop. Yes, that is a bit crazy in 2026. But it is also kind of liberating. The phone runs only on 4G, so my mind does not get bathed in all those narrow band 5G emissions. Other than that, it is a very capable little device. I even managed to put podcasts on it as MP3 files.

Two small changes, one big shift in joy

Two things have changed in my life recently, and both of them bring me joy on a daily basis. The first is this superb red flipping phone. The second is that I switched back to Sony for my photography, because I needed full frame, and I paired it with a Voigtländer manual lens. These two objects, sitting next to each other on my desk, are quietly rearranging how my days feel.

The camera with a manual focusing lens is, for me, what a small Leica is for richer photographers. My poor man’s Leica, if you like. The lens is smaller, so it is easier to carry around all day. But the real reason I love it is that it forces me to focus, in every sense of the word. You cannot just lift the camera to your face and spray and pray. You have to be totally in the moment. You have to decide what matters in the frame. You have to choose.

And that choosing, that small physical act of turning a ring with your fingers until the world becomes sharp, makes the photo feel like yours. The same thing happens with the flip phone. Opening it, closing it, pressing real buttons with my thumb. My body is involved. My attention is involved. I am not just swiping through a glass rectangle while my mind drifts somewhere else.

A flip phone that remembers the 90s

There is also something deeply nostalgic about a clamshell phone. It brings me right back to the days of the Motorola RAZR, when phones felt like little objects you were proud to own, not slabs of glass that all look the same. I even have custom ringtones for SMS messages and for calls, composed by my younger daughter Ida on her drum set and on the piano. Those ringtones do not exist anywhere else on Earth. They are ours.

That, to me, is the heart of the whole thing. A phone should be a tool, not a slot machine. A camera should be a tool, not an algorithm. The objects we carry around all day should reflect the people we want to be, and the people we love. When I hear Ida’s little drum pattern coming out of a red plastic flip phone, I smile every single time. You cannot buy that kind of joy in an app store.

So if you have been quietly wondering whether your shiny rectangle is really serving you, try the opposite. Try the smallest, simplest, stupidest phone you can find. Put real buttons under your thumb. Put a manual lens on a camera. Put a notebook and a pen in your pocket. You might be surprised how alive your days start to feel.

Do Your Own Research

On dumbphones, screen time, and mental health

• Pieh, C. et al. (2025). Smartphone screen time reduction improves mental health: a randomized controlled trial.BMC Medicine, 23:107. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11846175/

• Dale, R. et al. (2025). The influence of smartphone reduction on heart rate variability: a secondary analysis from a randomised controlled trial. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12360053/

• Sharma, K. K., Somasundaram, J., Sachdeva, A. (2024). Self-Selected Versus Assigned Target to Reduce Smartphone Use and Improve Mental Health: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial. JMIR. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11106705/

On focus, flow, and attention in a distracted world

• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row. Overview at the American Psychological Association:

https://www.apa.org/

• Firth, J. et al. (2017). The efficacy of smartphone-based mental health interventions for depressive symptoms: a meta-analysis. World Psychiatry. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5608852/

• Linardon, J. et al. (2019). The efficacy of app-supported smartphone interventions for mental health problems: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. World Psychiatry. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6732686/

On nostalgia and meaningful objects

• Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T. (2018). Finding meaning in nostalgia. Review of General Psychology. Available via the American Psychological Association:

https://psycnet.apa.org/

• Routledge, C. et al. (2011). The past makes the present meaningful: Nostalgia as an existential resource. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(3), 638-652. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21787094/

Mind you, this is happening eight months after I stopped what caused my depression in the first place. So if you are thinking that six or eight weeks of burnout leave will be enough, please give yourself more grace than that. The body and the mind take their time, and the part of you that wants to explore and feel joy again is often the last to come back online. There is no shortcut here, and I think it is important to say it out loud.

What surprised me even more than the return of curiosity was the way I found new music. I do not use Spotify. I do not use anything algorithmic. And yet, somehow, news of a new record by one of my favorite British bands, Mansun, found its way to me. Not through a feed. Not through a notification. Through a thread I followed myself.

Following a thread, not a feed

Here is what happened. I went to Bandcamp to look for FLAC versions of albums I love. I was searching for Lunatic Soul records, which led me to the Kscope label page, and right there I noticed a brand new Mansun release. I should have guessed it would be there, since Paul Draper, the band’s vocalist, has been recording for Kscope for a while now. But I had no idea they had been making new music, let alone that an album was already out.

This is a different kind of discovery. Instead of a machine watching what I do and pushing me toward the next thing, I followed something I cared about. One label. One artist I trust. One small detour. That is all it took, and the reward felt much bigger than any autoplay queue, because I had to be present for it.

I have not listened to the album enough times yet to tell you whether it stands next to Six or Attack of the Grey Lantern. Honestly, that is part of the pleasure. I get to spend weeks with it slowly, the way you used to spend time with a record when you brought it home from a shop. No rush, no playlist nudging me onto the next track, no algorithm wondering why I have not skipped.

Why this matters more than it sounds

I want to be honest about something. Joy has been thin on the ground this past year. The small, bright frequency I felt when I saw that new Mansun record on the Kscope page is something I had not felt in a long time. It is the feeling of being curious again. Of caring. Of wanting to follow a thread because the thread itself is interesting.

If you are deep in burnout or depression right now, I want you to know two things. First, the real timeline is longer than the internet will tell you. Recovery is measured in months and sometimes years, not weeks. Second, the small signals matter. The day you reach for music again, or for a book, or for a walk that does not feel like a chore, write that down. It counts.

And while you wait, you can choose where your attention lives. You do not have to hand it to a feed. You can pick a label you love and follow it. You can keep a notebook and write down the records and writers you want to find. You can use a service like Bandcamp, where artists actually get paid and where discovery feels like browsing a real shop instead of being shouted at by a machine.

A small invitation

Pick one thing this week. One artist, one label, one writer, one bookshop. Visit it on purpose. Skip the feed. See what happens when you let curiosity, and not an algorithm, decide what you find next. I think you will be surprised how good it feels, and how much it sounds like coming back to yourself.

I am still healing. I still have heavy days. But there is new Mansun music in the world, I found it on my own, and for today, that is plenty of good news to carry.

Do your own research

On burnout and depression recovery timelines:

• Evolution of burnout and psychological distress in healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, a 1-year observational study (PMC, NCBI): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9763813/

On music, anhedonia, and the return of pleasure:

• A Pilot Study Investigating the Effect of Music-Based Intervention on Depression and Anhedonia (Frontiers in Psychology): https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01038/full

• Anhedonia severity mediates the relationship between attentional networks recruitment and emotional blunting during music listening (Nature Scientific Reports): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-70293-x

• Neuroimaging and neuroelectrophysiological features of music’s effects on anhedonia in major depressive disorder (PMC, NCBI): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12305197/

On algorithmic recommender systems, autonomy, and wellbeing:

• Normalizing toxicity: the role of recommender algorithms for young people’s mental health and social wellbeing (Frontiers in Psychology, PMC): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12630993/

• Recommender systems for mental health apps: advantages and ethical challenges (PMC, NCBI): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8761504/

Jose started his YouTube channel about five or six years ago, talking about digital minimalism and dumb phones. His motivation was personal. After graduating from university in 2018 and starting his first job in 2019 working with nonprofits, community centers, churches, and schools, he found himself spending somewhere around nine to ten hours a day on his phone alone. When you added in work on the computer, the total was closer to twelve or thirteen hours of screen time every day. Those were, as he put it, his darkest times.

He decided that was not how he wanted to live. He started looking for alternatives, came across the Light Phone, tried it, liked it, and stuck with it. Since then he has been making videos, writing, and building resources to help other people find their own path with technology.

From magic to extraction

Jose has an interesting way of framing the history of technology in our homes. When tech first arrived in households sometime in the 1980s, it felt magical. Think about the VCR - suddenly you did not have to stay up late to watch something. You could record it and watch it when it was convenient. Think about the first personal computers - people could compose documents at home and bring them to work. It gave them freedom. The early video games, the first consoles - everything felt like it was adding something to life.

Because those first technologies made our lives genuinely better, we were trained over time to assume that more technology always means a better life. And for a while that assumption held. But somewhere around 2014 or 2015, things shifted. Technologies stopped being primarily useful to us and started being extractive. Instead of giving us more time and agency, they started demanding more of our attention. The value proposition flipped. It was no longer about making your life easier - it was about keeping you watching longer so that advertisers could make more money from you.

I asked Jose whether this was done on purpose or whether it was just a natural evolution of design. His answer was unambiguous. Yes, it was on purpose. They saw that they could make more money by keeping people hooked to their screens than by providing great service. So they hooked people to the screen because it was easier to convince them.

Software, hardware, and the screen in between

Some people argue that the problem is purely about software - the algorithmic feeds, the attention-grabbing apps - and not about the hardware itself. Jose sees it differently. Software is the larger problem, yes. But hardware amplifies the software. It amplifies the good and it amplifies the bad. Looking at a soccer match on a tiny flip phone screen is not the same experience as watching it on a six-inch device. The bigger the screen, the more immersive the experience - for entertainment and for distraction alike.

Jose makes a sharp observation here. If hardware manufacturers were truly focused on giving us the best utility without distraction, every company would be using e-ink displays. That technology exists. It is excellent at delivering utility without pulling you into a rabbit hole. But companies do not use it because they want the software to do its thing - to keep you engaged, to keep you scrolling.

And this is where the interesting part of Jose’s personal journey begins. Like many people, he initially thought the problem was his physical phone. Switch to a flip phone, life gets better. Simple, right? Not exactly.

It is not the device, it is the lifestyle

Jose quickly realized that while switching devices helped, it did not fix everything. The real issue was internal. He enjoyed being connected, getting information, watching podcasts, reading articles, chatting with friends. In university, he never had this problem because his life was so full - cafeterias, classmates, professors, sports leagues, intellectual lectures. He had a rich offline life and never felt that the internet was giving him a better experience.

But once he left that university environment, he lost those built-in structures. He started creating new habits, and instead of going to cafes to talk to people or attending lectures, he started scrolling more. And more. And more. Until his lifestyle became internet-dependent.

This is Jose’s core insight, and I think it is an important one. Your environment usually dictates your lifestyle. The better your environment, the better your lifestyle. A dumb phone helps, but it is not going to fix the internal struggle. You need to develop other lifestyle choices that make the offline world more compelling than the online one.

The detox trap

I asked Jose about a common strategy - simply deleting problematic apps from your smartphone. His answer was nuanced. It can help, he says, but for most people it does not work long-term. The pattern he has seen over and over goes something like this: you delete the apps, you feel great for a few months, you start thinking you have the problem under control, and then you slowly reintroduce the apps. Before you know it, you are right back where you started.

He compares it to a detox. People quit coffee or sugar for a while, feel good about it, and then go back to old behaviors once the detox period is over. The same thing happens with smartphones. Without permanent changes to your environment, willpower alone is usually not enough.

Jose does point to more permanent solutions, even on smartphones. Tools like Apple Configurator 2 can lock down a device so that you can only use the apps you choose from the start - no installing new ones, no workarounds. This is what is called a mobile device management solution, and it removes the willpower battle entirely. But if you just dump down your smartphone without these environmental constraints, the odds are you will go back to installing everything again.

The dumb phone as a gateway

I shared my own experience here. I tried managing my smartphone, I tried the MDM apps, and I still found ways to work around the restrictions - installing a browser, finding loopholes. For me, the dumb phone was actually a gateway drug to a better lifestyle. Once I started using one, I simply could not do those workarounds anymore. The option was gone, and that was liberating.

Jose uses the Light Phone 3 as his personal device. No browser, no social media. He literally cannot do those things on it. And that, he says, is a better solution than artificially limiting a smartphone. When you cannot do something, you do not need a workaround.

But here is where the conversation got interesting. I said that life in 2026 is very difficult without a smartphone. Jose disagreed - respectfully, but firmly. He acknowledged that life without a smartphone is more inconvenient. Some things take longer, some things are harder, your employer might be more frustrated. He understands if someone does not want to switch because of the inconvenience. But what he disagrees with is the idea that you have no agency to change your situation.

You have more power than you think

Jose gave some great examples. Even in China, where super apps like WeChat handle payments, home access, and digital ID, you could argue that you need a smartphone. But does it have to be your primary device? His argument is that it does not. You can carry a smartphone for the things that absolutely require it and use a flip phone as your daily driver. You can buy a small tablet for QR codes and digital ID. You find halfway solutions.

In Scandinavia, people say you need a smartphone for bank ID. But Jose had a friend who went to Norway without one and just used cash. Is it less convenient? Sure. Is it impossible? Not at all.

He brought up France, where workers collectively fought for and won the right to not receive work emails after 5 PM. That did not happen by accident - people advocated for it. And Jose’s broader point is that we all have more power than we think. You can tell your employer that you are a good employee, show your performance, and ask not to be bothered after hours. Define what a real emergency is. Give them your phone number for true emergencies. If you are valuable and you deliver, people will accommodate you.

He even applied this to everyday situations. Go to a restaurant that only has QR code menus? Ask the owner for a recommendation. If they refuse, that tells you something about that business. You vote every day with the purchases you make and the services you use. The more you reward companies that demand technology dependence, the worse the situation will get.

Going analog

Once Jose recognized that he did not need the internet for everything, he started venturing into more offline activities. He joined a local cycling club, bought his first road bike, and now rides around town every two weeks with a group of people having real conversations. He joined a local safer streets organization and meets with them every Friday for coffee to talk about community needs and plan events.

He started reading physical newspapers and magazines instead of scrolling through Twitter. He goes to the library and reads the paper there. Sometimes he buys a copy of the weekend newspaper so he can read it slowly over a long period of time. He started cooking more from home, learning new recipes, trying to make bread - things he would never have had time for before. Or rather, things he never prioritized before.

His personal setup is the Light Phone 3 and an e-ink tablet for reading books. He buys physical books from time to time but usually borrows from the library and reads on his e-reader. He has also been tinkering with manual projects over the past five years, building things and learning new skills outside of the technology world. It has been, as he described it, a good journey.

Paper, planning, and the morning ritual

I asked Jose whether switching to a dumb phone and planning on paper could help someone who feels overwhelmed at work. His answer was practical and simple. A good reset in the beginning is important. Have a calendar, have a task list that you can reference at a quick glance.

What he started doing was looking at his screen in the morning, writing down on a small note card what he needed to do for the day - his tasks, his calendar appointments. Then he put the phone in his pocket and went about his day. When he needed to know what was next, he took out the piece of paper and looked at it. At the end of the day, that was it. Next morning, same thing. Log into the computer, look at the task list, write it down, and keep going.

Over time he developed a more refined system. But he emphasizes that in the beginning, creating that organization and that separation is especially important. It helps you learn - or relearn - how to function without constantly reaching for a smartphone.

Writing a book, one thousand words at a time

After about three years of creating content about digital minimalism, Jose had accumulated a lot of information in his head. He decided to write a book - a short, cohesive guide that people could read without having to watch every video or read everything he had written. His approach was beautifully simple. He wrote a thousand words a day.

The first ten days were difficult, he says, because you are getting used to putting things on paper. But after day seven or eight, a thousand words started feeling manageable. Some days he wrote much more - one day he hit seven thousand words in a state of flow. Other days it was a grind, and a thousand words was all he could manage. But once the habit was built, he just got on with it.

The book collected stories from people who made the dumb phone lifestyle work, stories from people who had to go back to technology but did so consciously, and personal experiences - including how he got into credit card debt by buying every new iPhone and Samsung that came out. Looking back, he admits he could have done better. But that kind of honest self-critique is healthy, and now he is thinking about a second book.

Financial freedom as the foundation

This was the most surprising part of our conversation. Jose believes that the first thing you need to do to become more independent from the online world is to fix your finances. I did not expect that. I would have guessed he would say environment or mindset. But his reasoning is compelling.

When you have financial freedom, you can choose the environment you want. When you are dependent on a specific job, you feel trapped. You cannot say no. But if you have a cushion - if you make a hundred thousand dollars but only spend fifty thousand - you have the ability to take risks. You can give yourself two years to try a different career. You can walk away from an employer who demands access to your phone around the clock.

Without financial independence, you are more likely to accept digital intrusions into your life simply because you need the paycheck. You will put up with things you would otherwise refuse. Financial freedom gives you the power to say no - not just to your employer, but to the broader societal push toward digital dependence.

Technology is amazing, but give it time

I asked Jose whether there are parts of life that are genuinely better with digital technology. Absolutely, he said. We were having our conversation across continents because of digital tools. People who advocate for digital minimalism are not saying they want zero technology. What they are saying is that they do not want technology to be extractive. They want technology to give them more of their life back, not take it away.

Jose draws the line at the shift in intent. In the 1980s, the microwave made reheating food faster and easier. The VCR let you watch your show without losing sleep. Technology was making life better. But now, technology is often making life harder because it is not focused on improving quality of life - it is focused on capturing attention.

His advice is simple and wise. When a new technology comes along, give it a year or two before you adopt it. We have been seduced by tech companies into thinking that if you do not adopt something today, you will be left behind. That is simply not true. Technology is amazing. Technology is great. Just give yourself some time before jumping in.

The best dumb phone is the one you stick with

I asked Jose the question every dumb phone curious person asks: what is the best dumb phone? His answer was perfect. The best dumb phone is the one that you stick with. It can be a dumbed-down smartphone, a Light Phone 3, a Sunbeam F1, a Xiaomi F21 - whatever matches your lifestyle.

But if he had to pick one right now, he would choose a simple flip phone. It is economical, basic, has no distractions, and is made for simplicity. If it breaks, it is easy to replace. Just go to the store, pick one up, and start. It does not have to be fancy or expensive. It just needs to do less.

Jose also mentioned traditional watches during our conversation. He has an old Bulova watch passed down from his grandfather - a device that tells the time and carries a story. No notifications, no charging every night. Compare that to a smartwatch that distracts you with every buzz. The best smartwatches, in his view, are the ones that last a long time without charging, like the new Pebble with its 30-day battery life. Simple interface, basic information, and then it gets out of your way.

Digital minimalism is not anti-technology

One thing Jose made very clear is that digital minimalism is not about being against technology. It is about being conscious about which technology you adopt and when. It is a rejection of mindless consumption, a rejection of always having to have the latest and greatest thing just because a tech company told you to buy it.

Is it a full rejection of consumerism? Probably not, since digital minimalists still buy devices and create solutions. But it is a beginning. It is the decision to say: just because something is available does not mean I have to say yes. I am going to wait, I am going to think, and if it actually makes my life better and the world better, then I will adopt it.

And Jose makes a great point about modeling this behavior for children. He remembers always asking his mom for the newest phone in the early 2000s, and his parents did not say no often enough. That mindset - new is always better - eventually got him into financial trouble. A healthier attitude is to use what you have until it does not work anymore. Be content with the things you already own instead of seeking happiness from the next shiny gadget.

Slow down and enjoy the ride

Jose closed our conversation with something that captured his entire philosophy. Instead of flying to see his parents - a four-hour trip - he decided to take the train. In America, that means a two-day journey. And he is doing it on purpose, because he wants to have more experiences in life and enjoy the slowness of things. He wants his life to be a little bit slower than just having the latest and fastest option available.

That is what digital minimalism is really about. It is not about going back to the stone age. It is about choosing, consciously and deliberately, what kind of life you want to live. It is about saying no to what takes from you and yes to what gives back. And it starts with small steps - a flip phone, a paper notebook, a newspaper instead of a feed, a train instead of a plane.

The tools are simple. The decision is yours.

Do Your Own Research

The topics covered in this conversation - screen time effects on mental health, the attention economy, the cognitive benefits of handwriting and analog tools, and the relationship between financial autonomy and wellbeing - are backed by a growing body of peer-reviewed research. Here are some key studies and papers grouped by topic.

Screen time, smartphone use, and mental health

• Ratan, Z.A. et al. (2021). “Smartphone Addiction and Associated Health Outcomes in Adult Populations: A Systematic Review.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(22), 12257. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182212257

• Twenge, J.M. & Campbell, W.K. (2018). “Associations between screen time and lower psychological well-being among children and adolescents: Evidence from a population-based study.” Preventive Medicine Reports, 12, 271-283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pmedr.2018.10.003

• Abi-Jaoude, E., Naylor, K.T. & Pignatiello, A. (2020). “Smartphones, social media use and youth mental health.” CMAJ, 192(6), E136-E141. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.190434

• Allcott, H., Gentzkow, M. & Song, L. (2022). “Digital Addiction.” American Economic Review, 112(7), 2424-2463. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20210867

The attention economy and addictive design

• Bhargava, V.R. & Velasquez, M. (2021). “Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction.” Business Ethics Quarterly, 31(3), 321-359. https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2020.32

• Lupianez-Villanueva, F. et al. (2020). “The Struggle for Human Attention: Between the Abuse of Social Media and Digital Wellbeing.” Healthcare, 8(4), 497. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare8040497

• Mujica, A.L. et al. (2022). “Addiction by Design.” Medical Research Archives, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.18103/mra.v10i2.2677

Benefits of handwriting and analog tools

• Umejima, K. et al. (2021). “Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 15, 634158. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2021.634158

• Van der Weel, F.R. & Van der Meer, A.L.H. (2024). “Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity.” Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1219945. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945

• Marano, G. et al. (2025). “The Neuroscience Behind Writing: Handwriting vs. Typing - Who Wins the Battle?” Brain Sciences, 15(3), 285. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci15030285

Financial autonomy and wellbeing

• Fischer, R. & Boer, D. (2011). “What is more important for national well-being: Money or autonomy? A meta-analysis of well-being, burnout, and anxiety across 63 societies.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(1), 164-184. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023663

• Ngamaba, K.H. et al. (2020). “How closely related are financial satisfaction and subjective well-being? Systematic review and meta-analysis.” Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 85, 101522. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2020.101522

What came out of the conversation surprised me. Not because the ideas were new, but because they made so much sense - and because science keeps confirming what a simple notebook already knew.

Here is what I learned.

Stop Switching Apps - You Are Not Doing Any Work

The first thing Carl told me was blunt. When you switch productivity apps, you are not doing any work. You are just moving stuff from one side of your desk to the other. It is the digital version of shuffling papers around and calling it progress.

Most people will never admit this, but the real reason they switch is because the new app looks prettier. Then they find a better excuse. “My current system feels overwhelming.” But here is the thing - it looks overwhelming because of what you put in there. It is not the tool. It is always what you are putting in it.

Unless something is actually broken, switching apps is one of the biggest time-wasting activities you can do. Carl has been with Todoist for twelve years. He knows every keyboard shortcut, every workaround, every little trick. That knowledge compounds over time. You do not get that by jumping ship every six months.

The Dopamine Trap of a Fresh Start

Switching apps feels good. That is the dopamine talking. You get a momentary sense of relief because you eliminate a lot of the mess from your old system when you transfer to the new one. But give it two or three weeks and it is just as overwhelming as before. Then you see a YouTube video about yet another new app, and the whole cycle starts again.

Carl put it beautifully. You are focusing on the tools instead of focusing on the craft. A carpenter who makes chairs and works of art is not constantly shopping for new hammers. Those guys have tools that are a hundred years old, handed down from their grandparents. It is not the tools that make you productive. It is you. It is the clarity of knowing what is important to you and to the work you are doing. The tools are often a distraction, especially if you are changing them all the time.

To prove this point, Carl regularly runs experiments where he switches to tools he does not normally use - Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, even a paper planner for a whole year. And every time, his system stays the same. The work gets done. The tools change, the output does not.

A Carpenter’s Hammer and the Franklin Planner

Carl’s preferred stack is simple. Todoist for tasks. Evernote for notes. Apple Calendar for scheduling. That is it. No fancy project management software. No complex integrations. When I asked him about project management, he said he uses Evernote as his project manager. He even wrote his book over three years using Scrivener for the writing and Evernote for all the surrounding notes, meetings, and checklists.

But the most interesting part of Carl’s system is not digital at all. It is the Franklin Planner he brought back into his life after first using one in 1992. What he loves about it is the layout - tasks on the left, calendar in the middle, notes on the right. When he writes out his appointments by hand, he can visually see how much time he realistically has to do actual work. If the page is full of meetings, he knows not to pile on tasks.

This is something digital tools are terrible at. You can schedule your day three times over and the app will still accept it. Paper has a built-in constraint. When the page is full, the day is full. That limitation is not a bug. It is a feature.

The Power of a Pocket Notebook

Carl carries a small pocket notebook everywhere. When he watches his favorite podcasts in the evening - Cal Newport, The Rest Is History - he keeps his little notebook next to him instead of a phone. Random thoughts, content ideas, project sparks - they all go in there. It is, by his own admission, a complete mess. But every Saturday during his weekly planning, he goes through the previous week’s notes and pulls out anything worth moving into his digital system.

The pocket notebook serves another purpose too. Carl’s wife is Korean and operates on Korean time, which means ten minutes late. Carl is from the UK, which means ten minutes early. So he often has a fifteen-to-twenty-minute window sitting in the car waiting. And instead of scrolling, he writes. He told me there is something about pen and paper that engages the brain better than any digital tool.

I started doing something similar years ago - copying the day’s events and tasks onto a paper pocket notepad. If I ran out of space on the page, it meant I would not have the time to do the task. The page was the day. Simple, visual, and honest.

Why Handwriting Makes You Smarter

There is real science behind all of this. Carl mentioned the University of Tokyo study, and he was right - there is now a mountain of research showing that handwriting engages the brain differently than typing. When you form letters by hand, you are essentially drawing. You are engaging the creative part of your brain.

When you type, it is repetitive tapping. Plus, your word processor starts flagging grammar and spelling mistakes, so you shift from creating to editing. That is the opposite of what you want when you are planning a new project or brainstorming ideas.

Carl’s approach to project planning is to grab a clean A4 sheet of paper, a couple of colored pens, and a highlighter. Day one is the big brain dump. Day two, he comes back with a different pen and starts connecting ideas. Day three, more refinement. Then he scans it into Evernote and starts building the digital version. But the initial creative thinking happens exclusively on paper. As he put it - if you want to be creative, pick up a pencil. Or a pen.

Leonardo’s Notebooks and Samuel Pepys’s Diary

Carl told me a wonderful story from Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci biography. When Isaacson was working with Steve Jobs on his biography, Jobs promised to send over all his journals and notes from the NeXT years. Weeks went by, nothing came. When Isaacson followed up, Jobs admitted the problem - he had typed them into a computer, and even Apple’s best engineers could not open the files. The time gap was just ten years.

Meanwhile, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks - thousands of pages of sketches, ideas, and observations - are still perfectly readable five hundred years after his death. Paper does not need a software update.

Then there is Samuel Pepys, a low-level civil servant in seventeenth-century London who kept a journal for ten years. He wrote about ordinary life - what it was like to be a middle-class married man in London during the plague. We are incredibly lucky to have that journal, because normally history only records the kings and queens. Pepys gave us the real texture of life. If everything had been digital, there is a good chance we would have none of that.

Digital Impermanence Is Real

I shared a similar story with Carl about Steve Albini, the music producer who recorded Nirvana’s In Utero. When they prepared a commemorative edition of the album, they could not open some sessions that had been recorded on a digital medium. But the master tapes Albini had recorded on analog reel-to-reel machines were still perfectly fine. They did the mix from those tapes.

Analog will always be readable. You can always open a notebook and read the letters on the page. You can always play back a magnetic recording. Digital formats carry compatibility risks that can make your work unreadable within a single decade. This is not a theoretical concern. It has happened to Steve Jobs and to one of the most important rock albums ever made.

Carl hopes that in three or four hundred years, someone might find his journals and think - so that is what life was really like in Korea in 2025. It sounds humble, but it is actually a profound thought. Your life might feel ordinary to you. It will not feel ordinary to someone reading about it centuries from now.

Paper in a High-Tech Country

I asked Carl whether the popularity of paper journals is mostly a thing for people over forty. He surprised me with a story from South Korea, one of the most high-tech countries on the planet. His wife went back to university a few years ago to study physical therapy, alongside students straight out of high school. Carl asked her what percentage of students use digital tools versus paper notebooks. The answer was roughly sixty-forty - sixty percent digital, forty percent paper. Among the paper users, about seventy percent were women.

Near their home, there is a discount store with an entire floor dedicated to pencil cases, pens, notebooks, and folders. Carl told me he is always amazed at how many middle school and high school kids are in there buying stationery. Paper is not going away. If anything, there is a growing appreciation for the feel of pen on paper. As Carl said - plastic on glass does not work. Even with paper-like screen protectors, it is still tap-tap-tap. You do not get that wonderful sound of a pencil on paper. Or even a scratchy fountain pen with a very fine nib.

The numbers back this up. The global paper notebook market was valued at over 76 billion dollars in 2025 and continues to grow steadily year after year.

The Anti-Convenience Movement

Toward the end of our conversation, Carl said something that stuck with me. He wants to start an anti-convenience movement. All this technology is about convenience. And there are a lot of problems in the world today that are probably connected to our obsession with finding more and more convenient ways of doing things.

Take the rise in obesity and type 2 diabetes. A lot of it comes down to diet, and a lot of those diets are driven by convenience. It is hard to boil potatoes, roast a joint of meat, and prepare vegetables. It is much easier to order something online and have it at your door in thirty minutes. The attraction is obvious. But long term, it is not good for you.

Carl thinks we are at the same stage with convenience technology that we were with smoking in the 1950s. We know it is not great for us, but we tell ourselves it is not that bad. Gradually, over time, we will realize how much it costs us.

Peaceful Productivity

Carl’s favorite moment of the week is when he goes to the dining room with an A4 notebook, a couple of pens, a highlighter, and a cup of tea. For an hour or ninety minutes, there is no screen. Just planning, thinking, and creating. He described it in two words: peaceful productivity.

That phrase captures everything we talked about. The point is not to reject technology entirely. Carl uses digital tools every day. The point is to recognize that some things are better done slowly, by hand, with intention. Not because it is more efficient - but because it engages your brain in a way that screens cannot.

If you want to try it, start small. Get a little notebook, write the date at the top, and list the two or three things you absolutely must do today. Keep it on your desk where you can see it. And when you cross those tasks off with a pen at the end of the day - well, Carl says the dopamine hit is ten times better than any app notification.

Pick up a pen. You might be surprised at what it does for you.

Do Your Own Research

Here are peer-reviewed studies and resources on handwriting, cognition, and the topics discussed in this article, grouped by theme.

Handwriting, Memory, and Brain Activation

• Umejima, K. et al. (2021). “Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 15, 634158. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2021.634158

• Mueller, P. A. & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking.” Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159-1168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581

• Van der Weel, F. R. & Van der Meer, A. L. H. (2023). “Handwriting but Not Typewriting Leads to Widespread Brain Connectivity: A High-Density EEG Study with Implications for the Classroom.” Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1219945. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945

• Ihara, A. S. et al. (2021). “Advantage of Handwriting Over Typing on Learning Words: Evidence From an N400 Event-Related Potential Index.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 15, 679191. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.679191

Handwriting and Learning in Children

• Longcamp, M. et al. (2008). “Learning Through Hand- or Typewriting Influences Visual Recognition of New Graphic Shapes.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(5), 802-815. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2008.20504

• Marano, G. et al. (2025). “The Neuroscience Behind Writing: Handwriting vs. Typing.” Life, 15(3), 345. https://doi.org/10.3390/life15030345

Handwriting and Spelling in Schools

• Scientific Reports (2025). “Comparing the Effects of Typing and Handwriting on Spelling Performance in School.” Nature Scientific Reports. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-03369-x

Digital Impermanence and Preservation

• Library of Congress Digital Preservation resources:

https://www.digitalpreservation.gov

I was one of the first users of the Punkt MP02. When this phone came to the market, I was genuinely happy to find something like it in these modern times. I didn’t really have a problem with the price tag, even though that was the most objectionable thing people liked to point out. The design, the materials, the feel of it in your hand - it looked and felt like a premium phone, and I thought the price was justified.

And yet, I have stopped using it. I stopped using it, started searching for other alternatives, came back several times to a dumbed-down iPhone, went back to the Punkt because I was not happy with the iPhone, and then eventually had to accept that the Punkt just wasn’t working for me anymore. Let me explain the three reasons why.

The first reason is related to something I care deeply about - my health.

The Audio Problem Nobody Talks About

There is a big problem with the USB-C audio output on the Punkt MP02. The phone uses an analog USB-C output, which is something extremely rare these days. Most USB-C outputs on phones and other electronic devices are digital outputs. When you plug in a pair of USB-C headphones or speakers, those accessories have a DAC inside - a digital-to-analog converter - that translates the digital audio signal into an analog one so you can actually hear it.

The Punkt does the opposite. It expects you to plug in a USB-C accessory that has an analog input and is waiting for an analog signal coming through the plug. This means that the dongle provided by Punkt works, and maybe one or two other dongles in the entire world work with this phone. The rest does not. You can buy the best, most well-reviewed USB-C audio adapter on Amazon, and you can be sure it will not work with the Punkt MP02.

Now, you could say “just use Bluetooth headphones,” but no. I don’t want to irradiate my head with Bluetooth while I’m talking on the phone. I want to use my wired headphones because they sound better and because they are safer for me. And even if I was not worried about my health, using Bluetooth would drastically impair the already poor battery life of this phone. The Punkt MP02 has an awful battery life for such a small and simple device. In my opinion, it should last at least a week on standby, but in reality it lasts about two, maybe three days. So Bluetooth is not a good solution either way.

Screens That Self-Destruct

The second reason is the screens. I have pointed this out several times already - the screens tend to break after about one year, maybe two years. And they break beyond repair. Lines of the screen stop working, then a part of the screen stops working, and finally you cannot use the menu because you don’t see what you are choosing.

This brings me to something that makes the situation even worse. There are reports on Reddit suggesting that Punkt might be facing financial problems, maybe even bankruptcy. And looking at what has been happening with the company in recent years, I think there could be some truth to that. Now, I could say “well, it’s a good phone, exchanging it every two years is fine for me.” But the Punkt has become very, very hard to get.

There was a time you could buy the MP02 on Amazon. You cannot anymore. The only place I have found right now, besides maybe Dumbwireless in the United States, is the Punkt.ch website itself - the manufacturer’s site. And there it’s backordered. You have to pre-order, you don’t know exactly when the phone will be shipped, and you’re not even sure it will be shipped at all. If you have a phone that is so vulnerable to the screen failing and you don’t have a reliable source of getting another one, why should you keep using it?

What I Would Love to See in a Punkt MP03

If they ever decide to make a Punkt MP03, I would love to see a headphone jack. A proper audio output to connect wired headphones to this phone without any adapter nonsense. I would also love to see the possibility to install an audiobook player or a podcast player. Maybe even giving people the opportunity to install some Android apps, though of course that comes with downsides related to how Google is surveilling those devices. So I honestly don’t know if that’s a good idea.

What I do know is that I really enjoyed my time with the Punkt MP02. I enjoyed the fact that my kids saw me using a phone that looked like a calculator. That matters. The things we model for our children matter. I would also love to see a flip phone - the kind you can close when you stop talking. That is something from the early 2000s I’m really nostalgic about.

The dumb phone movement is important. Resisting the urge to fill every moment with apps and notifications and all those modern technical distractions is a form of freedom. If Punkt can address these issues - the audio, the screen durability, the availability - they could still make something truly special. I hope they do. Because the world needs more tools that help us be present, not more screens that demand our attention.

Do Your Own Research

The topics covered in this article - particularly around RF radiation from Bluetooth devices and the benefits of wired audio - are supported by peer-reviewed scientific research. Here are some key studies and resources:

RF radiation and oxidative stress:

• Yakymenko, I. et al. (2016). “Oxidative mechanisms of biological activity of low-intensity radiofrequency radiation.” Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, 35(2), 186-202. This review found that 93 out of 100 peer-reviewed studies confirmed RF radiation induces oxidative stress in biological systems. PubMed

• Schuermann, D. & Mevissen, M. (2021). “Manmade Electromagnetic Fields and Oxidative Stress - Biological Effects and Consequences for Health.” International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 22(7), 3772. Found consistent evidence for EMF-induced reactive oxygen species formation. PubMed

WHO classification of RF radiation:

• The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organization, classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as Group 2B - “possibly carcinogenic to humans” - in 2011. WHO/IARC

Bluetooth devices and proximity exposure:

• Lai, H. & Levitt, B.B. (2022). “The roles of intensity, exposure duration, and modulation on the biological effects of radiofrequency radiation and exposure guidelines.” Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, 41(2), 230-255. This review found biological effects at very low specific absorption rates, below current safety limits. PubMed

Scientists’ petition on wireless device safety:

• The International EMF Scientist Appeal, signed by over 250 scientists from more than 40 countries, calls for stronger regulations on electromagnetic field exposure from wireless devices. EMF Scientist Appeal

Wired vs. wireless headphones and exposure reduction:

• The FDA has stated that non-ionizing radiation from Bluetooth headphones has not been linked to health problems. However, researchers such as Dr. Joel Moskowitz at UC Berkeley recommend minimizing exposure from wireless devices placed directly against the head, following the precautionary principle. UC Berkeley

Hello there, wonderful people. How is your morning run? Mine is excellent, thank you for asking.

So I’m running through my neighborhood today and I pass by this property. There’s a sign. You know what it says? “Please don’t make U-turns here.” On a part of the street. A public road. The owner of that property is so frustrated by life that they felt the need to put up a sign telling strangers how to drive on a road they don’t own. And look, I’m not making fun of anyone’s struggles. But this kind of energy - this need to control things that are none of your business - is exactly the sort of thing that makes me want to raise my kids somewhere else. Somewhere with a bit more breathing room in people’s heads.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Let’s talk about something far more exciting.

We Built Real Websites

It’s 2026. And I have made a real website. A website that actually exists on the internet. It has the possibility of being ranked by Google. It has a robots.txt file - that’s the file that instructs crawlers from LLM companies what they can and cannot do on your site. Whether they can learn from your content. Whether they can describe it and show it in search results. I set all of that up, and I feel great about it.

But here is the bigger news. My kid, Helena, has also launched her own site. A blog with videos and lots of text, all in English. She’s a young person and she already understands something that most adults haven’t figured out yet - you don’t need a social media platform to reach people.

As I’ve said many times before, pretty much every platform today is a social media platform. Substack is a social media platform. Medium is a social media platform. Instagram, X, Threads - I don’t even have to list them all. And that is exactly why I went back to publishing a podcast and a website. I simply don’t want a company sitting between me and the people who might enjoy reading what I write, watching what I record, or listening to my podcast.

Helena Gets It

Helena believes in the same thing. She prefers to give people a web address rather than directing them to some platform and saying “search for Helena.” That takes courage when you’re young and everyone around you lives on groupchats and social media.

Now, if we are both sufficiently long-term thinkers, and sufficiently committed to doing this reliably week by week, we will ride the revolution that is happening right now around us. The revolution of LLMs. And in the future, this change will touch social media platforms too, because social media platforms are heavily AI-driven already. If you didn’t know - the algorithms that decide what you see on social media are built by AI, by large neural networks. They have been for a while.

This change that is happening right now will completely shift the dynamics. And I believe there will be a comeback to normal websites run by real people. No mediation. No algorithm deciding who gets to see your work. Just you, your content, and the public.

Slow Growth, Long-Term Value

I know that our websites - mine and Helena’s - will not grow as fast as maybe a Substack or an X profile would. But we believe in something that will be long-term valuable rather than something that will grow fast. There’s a big difference between those two things.

And if you’re curious about the tech - we run our websites on Ghost. It’s a very good framework for running websites. It was initially designed to run newsletters, but today you can build a very nice looking site with all the functions you need. What is very important is that the links Ghost creates are flat. That means if you connect a domain to a Ghost site, you get yourdomain.com and then the title of your post. Clean and simple. That kind of structure is far more easily manageable by LLMs and Google crawlers, which means our content might appear in results faster.

So this is it. This is why we decided to launch websites in 2026. Old school websites with old school links and a modern infrastructure. Ghost is very modern, very up to date. We’re just using the best of both worlds - the independence of the early web and the tools of today. If you have questions, leave them below. And please, if this makes sense to you, go build your own little corner of the internet. You won’t regret it.

Research and Further Reading

1. Platform dependence and creator vulnerability - Caplan, R. & Gillespie, T. (2020). “Tiered Governance and Demonetization: The Shifting Terms of Labor and Compensation in the Platform Economy.” Social Media + Society, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120936636

2. Algorithmic curation and content visibility on social platforms - Bakshy, E., Messing, S., & Adamic, L.A. (2015). “Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook.” Science, 348(6239), 1130-1132. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa1160

3. Impact of AI-driven recommendation systems on information access - Milano, S., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2020). “Recommender Systems and Their Ethical Challenges.” AI & Society, 35, 957-967. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00950-y

4. The open web and decentralized publishing - Zuckerman, E. (2020). “The Case for Digital Public Infrastructure.” Knight First Amendment Institute, Columbia University. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-case-for-digital-public-infrastructure

5. AI crawlers, robots.txt, and the future of web indexing - “Is Misinformation More Open? A Study of robots.txt Gatekeeping on the Web” (2025). arXiv preprint. https://arxiv.org/html/2510.10315v1

By popular demand, here is my Minimal Phone review. And it’s not just a quick first-impression kind of thing. I’ve been using this phone as my daily driver for four months now. It replaced my Punkt MP02, and I have quite a few thoughts to share.

I don’t usually do phone reviews because there are better channels for that. But I do think I have something worthwhile to say about this particular kind of device. I have real experience with dumb phones. I was using the Punkt MP02 for a very long time. Half of my family uses a Punkt MP02. My daughter uses one right now. And the Punkt is a really dumb phone - classy, very well designed, but really dumb. It just does calling, texting, and a very basic calendar. That’s it.

So the Punkt is dumb and a smartphone is really too smart. The Minimal Phone sits right in between. And that’s where it gets interesting.

The E-Ink Screen is a Feature, Not a Bug

This phone has two things that make it excellent for this kind of device. First, it has an e-ink screen. Now, the e-ink panel is not the sharpest or crispest display you’ll ever see. It’s rather old school. And I don’t know the exact model, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that because it’s old school, consuming media on this phone is really painful.

If you have something to compare it to - the Bigme Hibeak Pro I was using has such a crisp screen that you can actually watch YouTube videos on it or browse photos. It’s not completely impossible, just very uncomfortable. On the Minimal Phone, it’s an even poorer experience. And that’s actually the point.

If, like me, you want the possibility to download your preferred podcast app and listen to your favorite podcast, or maybe use the phone to listen to a YouTube lecture without looking at the screen - the Minimal Phone is excellent for that. And because it’s a normal Android smartphone under the hood, you can install whatever you want. I’m using Obsidian on my Minimal Phone and it’s really comfortable. I can search information inside my notes whenever I need to. So it’s a very good middle ground between a totally dumb phone and a full-fledged flagship smartphone.

The QWERTY Keyboard Changes Everything

There is a second element I love about this phone. It has a QWERTY hardware keyboard. Maybe it’s because I was a Blackberry user. But either way, I love hardware keys. I prefer hardware keys to an on-screen keyboard by far. And this phone has a really well-designed QWERTY keyboard.

What I did on my Minimal Phone is that I completely ditched the proprietary launcher that comes with the device and installed the old-school BlackBerry launcher instead. What this allows me to do is configure each key to perform a specific action. You can launch an app if you want, but that’s not my preferred use. My preferred use is speed dial. I put all my family members and most of my frequent contacts on speed dial. When the phone is unlocked and I press one of the hardware buttons, it makes the call. This is something I last used on the BlackBerry Key One, and it is very comfortable. Very cool.

So those are the two main excellent functions of this phone. I could add a third one - a 3.5 millimeter audio jack. Old school. And since I’m using excellent wired planar magnetic headphones, I love the fact that the jack is built right in. I don’t have to use USB-C to jack dongles, which I hate.

A Screen That Protects Your Eyes and Your Sleep

Lots of people criticize this screen as poor quality. I think that’s actually a big advantage. And there’s another thing that’s good about it - the screen has a non-flickering amber front light. On e-ink screens, it’s a front light, not a backlight. So it’s amber and non-flickering. Very good for the eyes. If you have to use it at night, you can set it to a very, very low intensity amber color so it does not disrupt your circadian rhythm.

I don’t really think the screen is so bad. It’s clearly not as sharp as the Bigme Hibreak Pro, of course. But hey, the whole purpose of this phone is to make you do everything you would normally do on a smartphone, but less comfortably and more slowly.

• I can use all my banking apps,

• I can use all my two-factor authentication apps,

• I can use Obsidian which I have installed.

But none of those experiences is so fluid, so magical that I want to spend time on the phone just for fun. I use it when I need to do something with it and I obviously can’t use a PC or a laptop for that.

But if I had my laptop right next to me, I would for sure prefer using my laptop instead, because the phone slows me down. And that is exactly the point.

What Your Kids See When They See You With Your Phone

One additional thing that is important for me - this phone does not look like a smartphone. If my kid sees me with this, my kid knows it’s a phone, not a smartphone. And that was precisely the reason I was also using the Punkt MP02 - because it looks like a phone and not a smartphone. In our family, it’s normalized that we use phones and not smartphones. This matters more than most people think.

Now, a few practical notes. There is a fair amount of ghosting on the screen. And I think that’s actually a positive. If you hate ghosting, there’s a dedicated refresh key on the side. Press it once and the ghosting is gone. Press and hold it and you get to some settings - there are three modes. The fastest mode with three triangles drops the resolution by half. There’s a mode with two triangles that uses the highest resolution for static images and automatically switches to the faster mode when something moves on the interface. But I don’t like that one because it makes the screen flicker a lot.

On the power button there’s a fingerprint reader, so you can unlock it with your finger. The battery life is very good for how I use it. I’m mostly just calling and texting, and I can go five days without recharging. The Punkt MP02 was closer to three days with some Bluetooth use - sometimes just two. So five days is a pretty solid improvement. I’m not really listening to music on this phone if I can avoid it - I take my dedicated audio player with me. I mostly use the headphone jack for longer phone calls, using my headphones as a headset.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

The Minimal Phone is not for everyone. But if you’re looking for a way to stay connected without being consumed by your device, if you want your kids to grow up seeing a phone in your hand and not a glowing rectangle that steals your attention, this is a genuinely smart choice. It lets you do what you need and nothing more.

Research and Further Reading

Here are peer-reviewed studies and reputable sources related to the topics covered in this article:

E-ink displays and eye health:

• Rogers, R. et al. (2023). Study on the effect of displays on human retinal cells. Journal of the Society for Information Display. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. DOI: 10.1002/jsid.1191

• Siegenthaler, E. et al. (2012). Reading on LCD vs e-Ink displays: Effects on fatigue and visual strain. PLoS ONE. PubMed

• Maducdoc, M. et al. (2017). Visual consequences of electronic reader use: a pilot study. International Journal of Ophthalmology. PMC

• Benedetto, S. et al. (2013). E-Readers and Visual Fatigue. PLoS ONE. PMC

Blue light and circadian rhythm disruption:

• Hatori, M. et al. (2017). Global rise of potential health hazards caused by blue light-induced circadian disruption in modern aging societies. NPJ Aging and Mechanisms of Disease. PubMed

• Tähkämö, L. et al. (2019). Systematic review of light exposure impact on human circadian rhythm. Chronobiology International. PubMed

• Haghani, M. et al. (2024). Blue Light and Digital Screens Revisited. Journal of Biomedical Physics and Engineering. PubMed

• Wahl, S. et al. (2019). The inner clock - Blue light sets the human rhythm. Journal of Biophotonics. PMC

• Ouyang, X. et al. (2020). Blue light disrupts the circadian rhythm and creates damage in skin cells. International Journal of Cosmetic Science. PubMed

• Harvard Health Publishing (2024). Blue light has a dark side. Harvard Health

Screen time, children, and parental modeling:

• Canadian Paediatric Society (2017). Screen time and young children: Promoting health and development in a digital world. Paediatrics & Child Health. PMC

• Merkaš, M. et al. (2025). Effects of Parents’ Smartphone Use on Children’s Emotions, Behavior, and Subjective Well-Being. Frontiers in Psychology. PMC

• Alrasheed, M. et al. (2025). Impact of Screen Time on Development of Children. Children. PMC

• Harvard Medical School (2024). Screen Time and the Brain. HMS

I have an important message for you. It is especially important if you are working in an office. It is related to your health. And if you don’t know it yet, here it is: your office job is killing you. I am not talking about how it might be stupid to work in an office today, or that you could do better things with your life. No. I mean it literally.

It was not always the case. Forty or fifty years ago, it probably wasn’t. But today it is, and I am going to explain to you very simply why. If you need some confirmation or want to double-check my sources, you can do that by using Perplexity, Claude or any search tool and asking whether what I am talking about is true or not. You will be able to verify my statements for yourself.

If you are working in an office, you probably already feel to some degree that there could be something to what I am saying. That the office could be toxic. That it could be slowly killing you. But even if you are not working in an office, let me paint you the picture.

The commute is just the beginning

You go in at a certain hour. You are enclosed in a building. But this enclosure is preceded by a commute. A commute that is stressful because everyone is rushing to work at the same hour. If you are using public transport, the people around you are stressed too. There is distrust. There is tension. Public transport is underscaled for the needs of rush hour, so you can have trouble finding a place in your tram, your bus, or your train. You are commuting stressed, surrounded by stressed people.

And if you don’t know it, cortisol - the stress hormone - is very bad for every organ in your body, including your heart and your mind. So before you even arrive at work, your body is already under pressure.

Then you arrive in the enclosed office that your company gives you as your place to work. The air inside is artificial, pumped in through ventilation systems. On the windows - which are not openable, you simply cannot open them - there is a filter. That filter strips the sunlight of roughly eighty percent of UVA, UVB, and infrared. The goal is to avoid heating the space inside, because in the summer it gets too hot in office buildings. So the solution is to block the very light your body needs.

The light that is slowly breaking you

The office is lit with LEDs. LED bulbs are very narrow-band light sources, dominated by toxic blue light and almost nothing else. Very little of the other light spectrum gets through. And there is no infrared, because the heat from a traditional halogen or incandescent bulb was considered wasteful - it just went into the air, and that was labeled as bad. So it was stripped from those LED lights.

Here is something interesting. Landlords are often forced by investment banks and investment funds - which usually participate in or own these buildings - to exchange the old incandescent bulbs for new LEDs. Why? Because they can show that the building is “green”. They can receive an ecological certification. They can check a box. And this is all done at the expense of the people working inside.

This is pretty universal across the board. Every employee in the office is being irradiated with toxic blue light, including the owners and the managers. Nobody is exempt. On top of that, everyone is looking at screens that also emit toxic blue light and very little of everything else your eyes and body actually need.

What you are really sitting in

So let me put this together for you. You go to an enclosed space. Artificial air is pumped inside. You sit in a cubicle or maybe in an office. The windows have filters that strip eighty percent of what you need for your health. You are being forced to look at blue-light-emitting screens. You are working under blue-light-emitting LEDs. The air is recycled. The sunlight is blocked. The light around you is synthetic and incomplete.

The result is that you are aging five times faster inside such an office than you would normally - just by walking outside or at least working with incandescent or halogen bulbs.

That is not a small thing. That is not something to brush off. It is something to take seriously. The good news is that once you know what is happening, you can start making changes. You can get outside more during the day. You can look into better lighting for your workspace. You can take your breaks in natural light. You can push back against the sealed, filtered, LED-drenched box they put you in. Your health is worth more than any green certification on a building. Start by simply stepping outside.

Or quit the office job, if you can.

Do your own research

If you want to verify what I am saying, here are the studies and sources. I encourage you to read them, check them, and come to your own conclusions. The science is there, and it is not hiding.

On sunlight, infrared and mitochondrial health:

• Barrett & Jeffery (2026) - “LED lighting (350-650nm) undermines human visual performance unless supplemented by wider spectra (400-1500nm+) like daylight” - a study showing that LED lighting lacks the longer wavelengths needed for healthy mitochondrial respiration, and that supplementing with broader spectrum light improved visual function by 25% in office workers: Scientific Reports, Nature

• Shinhmar et al. (2025) - “Longer wavelengths in sunlight pass through the human body and have a systemic impact which improves vision” - showing that infrared wavelengths from sunlight penetrate through the body and improve mitochondrial function even without reaching the eyes directly: Scientific Reports, Nature

• Powner et al. (2024) - “Light stimulation of mitochondria reduces blood glucose levels” - demonstrating that red light exposure at 670nm reduced blood sugar elevation by 27.7% by boosting mitochondrial activity: Journal of Biophotonics, Wiley

• Kooijman et al. (2023) - “Effects of Near-Infrared Light on Well-Being and Health in Human Subjects with Mild Sleep-Related Complaints” - a double-blind, placebo-controlled study showing that near-infrared light exposure improved mood, reduced drowsiness, and lowered resting heart rate, especially during winter when sunlight is scarce: PMC

• Dr. Glen Jeffery on the Huberman Lab podcast - explaining how long-wavelength light enhances mitochondrial function, improves metabolism, blood glucose regulation, and eyesight, and how LED bulbs impair mitochondrial health: Huberman Lab

On blue light damage to mitochondria:

• Tao et al. (2019) - “Mitochondria as Potential Targets and Initiators of the Blue Light Hazard to the Retina” - a comprehensive review showing that excessive blue light from LEDs causes oxidative stress in retinal mitochondria and triggers cell death pathways: PMC

• Giebultowicz et al. (2022) - “Age-dependent effects of blue light exposure on lifespan, neurodegeneration, and mitochondria physiology in Drosophila melanogaster” - showing that blue light from LEDs impairs mitochondrial respiratory function and accelerates neurodegeneration, with effects worsening with age: npj Aging, Nature

• Sheridan et al. (2025) - “The Effect of Blue Light on Mitochondria in Human Dermal Fibroblasts and the Potential Aging Implications” - demonstrating that blue light causes significant mitochondrial DNA damage, dysfunction, and increased free radical production in human skin cells, creating a cycle associated with premature aging: PMC

• Bian et al. (2023) - “Long-term blue light exposure impairs mitochondrial dynamics in the retina” - showing that long-term blue light exposure destroys and disrupts mitochondria in retinal cells both in living mice and in laboratory cell cultures: Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B, ScienceDirect

On indoor air quality in office buildings:

• Saini et al. (2020) - “Indoor Air Quality in Buildings: A Comprehensive Review on the Factors Influencing Air Pollution in Residential and Commercial Structure” - confirming that people spend over 90% of their time indoors, that indoor air is more contaminated than outdoor air, and that this has significant impacts on health: PMC

• Wyon (2004) - “The effects of indoor air quality on performance and productivity” - showing that poor indoor air quality reduces office work performance by 6-9%: PubMed

• OSHA - “Indoor Air Quality” - tying poor indoor air quality to headaches, fatigue, trouble concentrating, and irritation of the eyes, nose, throat and lungs, as well as long-term risks including respiratory diseases, heart disease, and cancer: OSHA

• European Commission SCHEER - “Are LED lights safe for human health?” - noting that LEDs lack the infrared emission present in traditional lighting and that this might influence normal bioprocesses in humans: European Commission

Read these. Check them. And then decide for yourself whether the sealed, filtered, blue-light-drenched box you sit in every day is worth the paycheck. Your mitochondria already know the answer.

If you want to change something in your life, don’t wait for January 1st. Just change it right away. You can do it today. Start running every day, for example. It will make your life better. I’m actually running right now as I’m telling you this.

A quick public service announcement: some of you were subscribed to my Digital Pragmatism Substack. I have sent one email to all of you with some secret info about a new project that I will not announce here.

It’s a secret project.

If you were subscribed, you will know which project it is. Please check your spam folders, because today most email goes to spam. Reply to my email or act accordingly - there is a button you have to click.

Forget Goals, Set a Direction Instead

Since it’s the beginning of the year and people love to make plans and set goals, I wanted to ask you to not make plans. Don’t set goals. Actually, if you want to really set some goals, there’s a better thing to do: you can set a direction for your life.

Direction is enough. If you are fairly motivated and you know you have a connection with yourself - so you pretty much know what you hate and what you like - then direction is sufficient. You will make extreme progress. Whereas if you set goals, you can be disappointed in not reaching those goals, even if the direction would be right.

So I wanted to ask you not to make plans, but rather to choose one thing you will change. One thing you will do differently in 2026. This way you will have far more chances to actually reach this one thing you want to change. You are minimizing the chances of being disappointed.

Welcome to the Year of Analog Productivity

2026 will be the year of analog productivity, and this is what you will find here. I will tell you how I ditched my electronic devices and replaced them with paper notebooks and notepads. I will show you some of my favorite pens.

This will be the leitmotif for this channel throughout the year.

I will also post more interviews with people. I’ve got two of them which are being produced already. But I will also make more interviews and talk “analog” with interesting people.

So, welcome. Happy 2026.

Why “Use More Paper” Is the New Name

New year, new brand. But don’t worry, I will explain everything.

Two months ago I was explaining to you why Amenotes is the better brand. And then, closer to one week ago, I started examining all the domains I have purchased over time. And I saw that I have an excellent domain that I completely forgot about. This domain is usemorepaper.com.

Just how cool would it be to have a t-shirt with that!

And then I started analyzing whether Amenotes is not a better, more fancy word. And actually came to the conclusion that no - everything I’ve been doing on this channel was leading me to saying,

I get it, of course, that there are a lot of stationery content out there. And this one will not be a stationery website (or newsletter). You can treat it as a philosophy website, maybe a lifestyle blog?

I will not post reviews of notebooks. Well, I will post some of them, of course - those that I judge are excellent. But most of the time I will just share my ideas like I did until now.

What’s Coming Next

What is also very important is that with my wife we will actually in the future want to open a physical store that will sell notebooks - excellent quality Japanese notebooks and pens. And so it makes sense to rebrand as Use More Paper.

New year, new brand.

Do you remember the video I made about the fact that I still buy CDs, vinyls, and music files like MP3s from the Apple iTunes store? What Amazon did recently is proof that I’m doing a good thing for my music library. And you should also consider doing the same - owning your stuff and not renting it from somebody, let’s say Amazon.

Amazon changed its policies related to Kindle books, and from February 26, 2025, you’re not able to download the books you’ve bought on the Kindle store. You’re only able to transfer them to a Kindle device, so if you use a Boox tablet or a Kobo tablet to sideload those books, well — you’re out of luck.

Of course, Amazon is doing this because the company wants to sell more Kindle devices, but you know what I mean. In the music realm:

• Spotify can do the same.

• Apple Music can do the same.

• Tidal can do the same.

You’re not the owner of your playlist.

The Illusion of Ownership

If I buy an MP3 album on the iTunes store, I own the MP3s. They are DRM-free, and I can use them anywhere I want - on my preferred digital audio player, for example. This is real ownership, not the illusion of it that streaming services provide.

The fact that Amazon is making this policy change so that after a certain date, no book - even if you spent the last 10 years collecting your Kindle books - can be downloaded ever again is plain and simple stupid.

It would be very bad, but it would be slightly better if they said, “Ok, for all the books purchased after February 26, 2025, you will not be able to download them,” whereas all the books you have bought in the last 10 years, you will still be able to download until the end of time. It would be a policy change with respect for the consumer - but of course, it would not push people to buy Kindle devices. So, screw the respect!

Amazon is not Customer-Centric

This kind of aggressive policy change will probably push some people that are more comfort-inclined to buy a Kindle for 100 dollars and forget the change. That’s exactly what Amazon wants - to lock you into their ecosystem.

I’ve seen this pattern repeat itself across digital media platforms. Companies start with consumer-friendly policies to build their user base, then gradually restrict options once they have enough market share. It’s a bait-and-switch tactic that punishes loyal customers.

Remember when you could easily transfer your purchased iTunes songs to any device? Or when Kindle books could be read on practically any e-reader? These freedoms are being systematically eliminated to force consumers into walled gardens where companies have complete control.

Curation and True Ownership

I’m a big believer in owning things, and I think that you don’t really need access to every book on earth and every music album on earth. It would be much better if you curate what you want to listen to, if you curate what you want to read, and then you own it.

There’s something deeply satisfying about building a personal library of books or music that you’ve thoughtfully selected. It reflects your tastes, your journey, your intellectual development. When you stream everything, you own nothing, and that collection can disappear at any moment.

Preferably, you own your media in such a way that you pay the artist or author the most. Because if not, those people will not make more music, they will not write additional books, they will just go to a corporation and get a job in order to pay bills.

Taking Control of Your Digital Life

The Amazon Kindle policy change should be a wake-up call for all of us. Remember: when you “buy” digital content through most platforms, you’re really just purchasing a conditional license that can be modified or revoked.

For books, consider purchasing DRM-free ebooks directly from publishers. For music, look into Bandcamp or buying MP3s that don’t have usage restrictions. Yes, it might be slightly less convenient than one-click streaming, but the peace of mind is worth it.

Physical media still has tremendous value too. A book on your shelf can’t be remotely deleted. A CD or vinyl record will play regardless of whether a company changes its terms of service. There’s resilience in tangibility that digital licenses simply don’t provide.

Supporting Creators Through Direct Ownership

When you purchase directly from creators or through platforms that give them a larger cut, you’re not just securing your own access - you’re helping sustain the creative ecosystem. Streaming services typically pay fractions of pennies per play, while direct purchases provide meaningful income.

Think about the future of creativity if we continue down this path of centralized control. When artists can’t make a living from their work, we all lose out on the books, music, and art that enrich our lives. Your purchasing decisions are votes for the kind of creative economy you want to see.

The bottom line is simple: if you value something, own it outright if possible. Don’t trust corporations to maintain your access to the content you’ve paid for. They’ve shown time and again that their priorities can shift, leaving consumers stranded without the media they thought they owned.

Many parents struggle with this decision, and today, we want to discuss an organization called “Wait Until 8th” that has a powerful suggestion for parents: wait until your child is at least 14 years old before giving them a smartphone.

Why 14? According to the organization and psychologist Jonathan Haidt, waiting until the end of puberty is crucial for a child’s mental health. During puberty, children have a strong need to fit in and are constantly checking in with their peers. Introducing a smartphone during this time can lead to negative effects on their mental health, as they are exposed to powerful algorithms that can provide enraging or harmful content.

Even adults can struggle with the impact of smartphones and social media on their mental health. So, if it’s difficult for grown-ups, imagine how much harder it is for children going through puberty. This is why some experts, like Haidt, believe that waiting until the end of puberty is essential.

However, some people argue that even 14 might be too young. They suggest waiting until a child is 21 or even avoiding smartphones altogether. So, what are the benefits of giving your child a smartphone at 14 or 15? Honestly, it’s hard to say. Some may argue that it could help them become an Instagram influencer or provide useful apps for traveling, but these benefits can be achieved through other devices that are not as addictive as smartphones.

The idea behind “Wait Until 8th” is not only about delaying smartphone usage but also about creating a community of parents who support each other in this decision. By signing the online pledge and connecting with other parents from your child’s school, you can form a supportive network that ensures your child won’t be the only one without a smartphone.

Recent studies have shown that the earlier a child receives a smartphone, the worse their mental health may be later in life. This means that waiting as long as possible before giving your child a smartphone is indeed a wise decision.

As a parent, one of the best gifts you can give your child is good mental health. If their mental health is strong, they will be better equipped to handle conflicts, develop self-esteem, and navigate the ever-changing world.

In conclusion, the “Wait Until 8th” organization suggests waiting until your child is at least 14 before giving them a smartphone. However, some believe that waiting even longer or avoiding smartphones altogether is the best approach. Ultimately, the decision is up to you as a parent, but it’s essential to consider the potential impact on your child’s mental health and well-being.

Media-mix choice

Our family has made a conscious decision to avoid certain forms of media, such as TV, radio, and streaming services. We believe that these platforms are often vehicles for advertisements and news, which can be overwhelming and distracting. Instead, we prefer to make our own decisions about what to buy and what to pay attention to, based on our needs and analysis.

The rule of effort

We also employ a strategy called the “rule of effort,” which involves consuming media that requires a significant amount of effort from its creators. For example, we prefer to listen to audiobooks over podcasts, as the former requires more effort to write and record. Similarly, we choose movies over series, as they generally require more effort to produce and offer a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end.

A mindful experience

Our media consumption choices extend to the formats we use. For music, we prefer vinyl records and CDs, while for movies, we opt for DVDs. We find that these formats require more effort to enjoy, making the experience more intentional and meaningful. For example, listening to a vinyl record involves taking it out of its sleeve, placing it on the turntable, and carefully positioning the needle, all of which contribute to a more immersive and mindful experience.

What media do we consume?

When it comes to watching movies, we avoid streaming services and instead choose DVDs. This allows us to have control over our movie selection, without being influenced by algorithms or suggestions. We find that this approach leads to less time spent scrolling through options and more time enjoying the movies we truly want to watch.

Shaping the environment

Our environment plays a significant role in shaping our media consumption habits. By creating a space that encourages intentional media consumption, we can better focus on the quality of our experiences. For example, we use a projector to watch movies, providing a more immersive and theater-like experience.

Friction and coping mechanisms

We also avoid using media as a coping mechanism for life’s challenges. By creating friction in our media consumption process, such as the ritual of choosing and playing a DVD, we prevent ourselves from mindlessly turning to media for distraction or comfort.

A beginning and a clearly defined ending

Furthermore, our media consumption habits are designed to respect our time and avoid stealing it away. By choosing media with a clear beginning, middle, and end, we can better manage our time and avoid the trap of binge-watching or endless scrolling.

In conclusion, our family’s approach to media consumption is centered around intentionality, effort, and control. By making mindful choices about the platforms, formats, and content we consume, we can enhance the quality of our experiences and maintain a healthy relationship with media. We encourage you to consider your own media consumption habits and explore ways to make them more intentional and meaningful.

The Challenge of Digital Parenting

In today’s world, parenting has become a digital battlefield. We face the dilemma of whether to raise our children as digital minimalists or risk them becoming technologically backward. The truth is, it’s not about being afraid of technology; it’s about managing its influence on our kids’ lives.

We often see parents giving smartphones to their children, not out of necessity, but because it’s the default. It’s an easy way to keep them occupied while we handle our own tasks. But this unintentional decision can lead to long-term consequences, including technology addiction and social isolation.

A Shift in Norms

Imagine a future where giving a smartphone to a child is as frowned upon as giving them alcohol. As awareness grows about the negative impacts of unrestricted technology access, we believe there will be a significant shift in societal norms. Just as laws regulate alcohol and tobacco for minors, we foresee similar regulations for smartphone usage among children.

Parents will soon realize that the constant flow of notifications and the addictive nature of apps are designed to exploit our attention. This realization will drive a movement towards more mindful and intentional use of technology in parenting.

Intentional Technology Use

Being a digital minimalist doesn’t mean rejecting technology altogether. It means using it intentionally, as a tool to enhance learning and creativity, rather than as a default babysitter. For example, showing children how to use a desktop computer for research or creative projects can be beneficial, unlike giving them a smartphone loaded with addictive apps.

We can draw parallels with how technology has evolved in other fields. When Prince recorded his first album, he didn’t have the luxury of an iPad with multi-track recording capabilities. He had to navigate through gatekeepers and studios. Today, technology has democratized music production, but it requires intentional use to harness its full potential.

The Dangers of Unrestricted Access

Smartphones, unlike dedicated tools, come with a plethora of distractions. They are designed to keep users engaged, often at the cost of productivity and mental health. This is why it’s crucial to set boundaries and teach children the importance of using technology as a tool, not as a crutch.

Gaming, for instance, is often touted as a gateway to tech careers. However, it can also be an entry point to addiction. While it may foster some technical skills, it often limits real-world social interactions and practical knowledge. Encouraging children to balance online activities with offline experiences is key.

Building Real-World Skills

We must emphasize the importance of real-world interactions and skills. Children learn best through hands-on experiences and face-to-face communication. By limiting screen time and encouraging outdoor play, we help them develop essential life skills that technology alone cannot provide.

It’s about creating an environment where children can thrive without being tethered to screens. This means providing them with opportunities to explore, create, and interact with the world around them. It also means being role models in our own use of technology.

Setting Boundaries

As parents, it’s our responsibility to set rules and boundaries around technology use. This might mean no screens before school or limiting gaming to certain hours. By establishing these guidelines, we help our children develop a healthy relationship with technology.

We also need to be aware of the subtle ways technology can infiltrate our lives. Notifications, for example, are designed to grab our attention and keep us coming back. By turning off unnecessary notifications and being mindful of our own screen time, we can set a positive example for our children.

The Role of Single-Use Devices

One effective strategy is to use single-use devices. For instance, giving a child a dedicated camera instead of a smartphone can foster creativity without the distractions of social media and games. This approach helps children focus on the task at hand and develop specific skills.

Our daughter’s experience with a manual camera is a perfect example. Without the option to take selfies, she focuses on capturing meaningful moments and developing her photography skills. This contrasts sharply with peers who use smartphones primarily for social validation.

The Community Factor

The type of community our children are part of also plays a crucial role. By not giving them smartphones, we steer them towards peers who engage in more offline activities. This can lead to richer, more meaningful social interactions and a stronger sense of community.

It’s about shaping the environment to support our parenting goals. If we want our children to value real-world experiences, we need to surround them with like-minded individuals and provide opportunities for offline engagement.

The Future of Digital Minimalism

Looking ahead, we believe that digital minimalism will become a mainstream parenting approach. As awareness of the negative impacts of technology grows, more parents will adopt intentional tech use. This shift will not only benefit our children but also society as a whole.

We must remember that technology is a tool, not a master. By using it wisely and teaching our children to do the same, we can harness its benefits without falling prey to its pitfalls. It’s about finding a balance that promotes healthy development and real-world skills.

Conclusion

In conclusion, raising children as digital minimalists doesn’t mean depriving them of technology. It means using technology intentionally and mindfully, ensuring it serves a purpose rather than becoming a default distraction. By setting boundaries, encouraging real-world interactions, and being role models in our own tech use, we can help our children develop a healthy relationship with technology.

Thank you for joining us on this journey towards more mindful parenting. Let’s work together to create a future where technology enhances our lives without controlling them.

Recent studies have linked depression and poor mental health among teenagers to smartphone use, particularly iPhones and social media platforms like Instagram. This app, which encourages users to showcase their lives and compare themselves to others, can be especially damaging to girls' self-esteem and body image. By not giving our daughters smartphones, we hope to avoid these issues and direct them towards healthier peer groups and interests.

Peer group?

We recognize that our decision may lead to challenges, such as explaining to our children why they do not have smartphones when many of their peers do. However, we believe that there are multiple peer groups available, and by not providing our children with smartphones, we are guiding them towards a group that shares their values and interests. Just as we had the choice to avoid drugs, alcohol, or certain types of passtimes in our youth, our children can also choose their peer groups based on their preferences and values.

For those who may already be dealing with smartphone addiction in their children, it’s essential to remember that it’s never too late to address the issue. We suggest talking to your child about how smartphones are designed to grab their attention and asking them how they feel after using social media or other apps. Watch documentaries like “The Social Dilemma” together and discuss the content, helping them understand the potential consequences of their actions.

In cases of severe addiction, seeking professional help may be necessary. However, we believe that by setting a positive example in our own technology use and engaging our children in physical activities and real-world experiences, we can help them develop a healthier relationship with technology.

More offline activities

As our daughters grow older, we plan to involve them in activities such as Scouts and volunteer work to encourage them to spend more time outside of the virtual world. This approach is supported by experts like Cal Newport, who recommend engaging in more physical, real-world activities to help detox from technology and determine which aspects of technology are genuinely beneficial to our lives.

We also believe it’s essential to engage with other parents and our local community to discuss these issues and share our experiences. While it may be challenging to convince others to make significant changes in their lives, we can at least try to raise awareness and encourage more face-to-face interaction among families.

It’s up to you - consider yourself warned

Ultimately, the decision to give a child a smartphone or not lies with each family. However, we hope that by sharing our thoughts and experiences, we can spark interest and encourage others to consider the potential consequences of smartphone use among teenagers.

In conclusion, we believe that addressing phone addiction among teenagers is a vital issue that requires attention on both individual and collective levels. By making informed decisions as parents and engaging with our communities, we can work together to create a healthier, more connected society for our children and future generations.

Links:

• Stephanie Gruner Buckley, “My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone” — https://medium.com/modern-parent/my-daughter-was-a-creative-genius-then-we-bought-her-an-iphone-bf617c0b6ca0

• Center for Human Technology, “The Social Dillemma” — https://www.humanetech.com/the-social-dilemma

• Cal Newport “Digital Minimalism” — https://www.calnewport.com/books/digital-minimalism/

Like an old Nokia

Our experiment began when we decided to switch from smartphones to dumb phones, inspired by the Punkt MP01 design, reminiscent of the old Nokia phones we used as students. At first, the transition was uncomfortable and painful, as we had grown accustomed to the convenience and features of our smartphones. However, we soon learned that living without a smartphone was, in fact, much easier than we anticipated.

One of us, a busy mother of two, recognized the symptoms of smartphone addiction in her life, such as sleep deprivation and constant distraction from notifications. The switch to a dumb phone forced her out of her comfort zone and made her more aware of her dependence on technology. Despite the initial anger and frustration, she eventually found a middle ground with the Unihertz Titan Pocket, which provided some useful features without the addictive properties of a smartphone.

More talking, less texting

We discovered that using a dumb phone made us appreciate talking to people more, as the phone didn’t allow for easy texting. We found that we would hide behind technology if given the chance, and the dumb phone helped us expand our social capabilities.

We both tried going back to smartphones at different points, only to find ourselves slipping back into old habits and addiction patterns. This realization led us to believe that short technological detoxes are not enough to break the cycle of addiction. Instead, using a dumb phone for an extended period can help identify the root causes of our discomfort and dependence on technology.

Balance and privacy

Through this experience, we learned that we could find a balance between the need for certain smartphone features and the desire to live a simpler, less addictive lifestyle. For example, one of us found that a minimalistic Android-based phone, like the Unihertz Titan Pocket, was the perfect middle ground.

While we understand that the privacy concerns regarding data collection by Android and other smartphone operating systems are important, our focus in this experiment was primarily on breaking free from the addictive nature of smartphones.

In conclusion, our journey with dumb phones has been an eye-opening experience that has taught us valuable lessons about our relationship with technology. We’ve learned that it is possible to find a balance between convenience and simplicity, and that breaking free from smartphone addiction requires more than just a temporary detox. As we continue to explore unconventional choices and anti-cultural lifestyles, we hope to inspire others to question their dependence on technology and seek a more fulfilling way of life.

Let’s talk about music today.

After trying Tidal, Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, I went back recently to purchasing MP3 files from Apple - from iTunes, because I want to own the music I listen to.

It’s because I really don’t like the concept of streaming. I don’t like the fact that you pay a certain amount of money monthly to have access to everything. It’s not beneficial for me as a listener because I’m overwhelmed with the number of tracks I have access to. It means also that I don’t value those track because this mass of music is so cheap.

I like the fact of possessing the music, of having it on my hard drive, inside my computer, on my storage. Ideally I prefer owning the music on vinyl, but vinyl is not portable at all. So the albums I buy on vinyl, I buy them twice: once on vinyl and the second time as MP3s from iTunes.

You have the money

I think it’s okay because first of all, it’s not a cost that is prohibitive in 2022. I don’t have to buy lots of albums a month, so my home budget is not suffering. It gives me the opportunity to listening mobile of course, but it’s all also giving me the opportunity to listening in a better sound quality than I would normally do on Spotify, because I can choose from which player I will play the songs. I don’t have to have it on Android on iOS, I can have it on an obscure audiophile MP3 player. I can just copy the files from my hard drive and it’s done. It works offline. And I also know that by buying the album twice, I’m actually helping the musician because musicians are really screwed by streaming platforms like Spotify, Deezer, Amazon Music, etc. You have to generate 3 million streams per month to have a few hundreds of dollars of revenue. It’s crazy.

Business model

I’ve been a musician, so I know how it works. It basically costs you nothing to put an album on Spotify. And then because everybody’s paying for the whole catalog, you basically get nothing in return, since the discoverability becomes a huge problem, not the barriers in putting the music on the platform. So you work two years to compose and record the music and then you get a few streams and everybody says: “Yeah, don’t expect money for releasing music, play live and sell some merchandise.” But I think that musicians should be paid for the music and not for selling merch. They are musicians, not apparel companies, after all.

I think Pink Floyd would not record “The Wall“ if they were forced to tour 200 days per year and sell t-shirts in order to sustain themselves financially. They would not have the time nor the mental bandwidth to compose the masterpiece. This is what’s happening today in music. Basically, the music that is available online it’s usually not arranged in albums, but it’s single tracks and it’s released every two to three months because if not, people lose interest and forget about the artist.

Making music today is like making videos on Tiktok or YouTube - you have to keep publishing. If not, the channel won’t grow.

So I’m very proud of myself that I am buying each album twice: once on vinyl and a second time as MP3 files from iTunes, because I know that at least the musicians that have worked very hard to create the music I enjoy are given a much larger “cut” from those transactions.

Discoverability

And one last word about discoverability: people often get trapped into thinking that Spotify gets them new listeners.

No, it does not.

The sheer amount of new music added every minute to Spotify makes it actually VERY HARD to get organically discovered on Spotify. YouTube is very good at that. Use YouTube for discoverability, and then put your MP3s on Bandcamp, maybe on iTunes - but specifically on a platform that allows the music to be bought by your fans directly and own the files. Not to be streamed. It will give you much more opportunities to gain new listeners than Spotify by word of mouth and by people supporting people, looking for what other listeners listen to and checking the bands other people support.

Like in the old, cassette days.