Hi, I'm Jason.

The first one

I don't know how many times I rewatched Steve Jobs unveil the iPhone in January 2007. I couldn't wait. I was on my parents' family plan at the time, and I went off on my own to Cingular, which was the only carrier that had it, just to get one. There was no App Store yet. There were no apps in the sense anyone means now. What there was, was Mobile Safari, the whole internet in your pocket and a screen you could pinch, and that was my way in. I never looked back, and for about fifteen years I never wanted to.

I say this so you know I'm not writing from the "outside." I loved that phone. I loved most of the ones after it. Nothing here comes from someone who never "got it."

The in-between generation

I'm in my late thirties, as of writing this. As a millennial, we landed at an odd spot in the timeline. I went through high school with a basic flip phone, dial-up at home, and the social internet was mostly a buddy list, then later MySpace. Then the connected world arrived while we were coming of age, and we grew up with it in real time. Our parents were already adults with formed habits when the smartphone showed up. The kids after us have never known a world without smartphones, DLC, and social media streaks. We remember both sides clearly, which makes us a kind of control group, and it means the question "what was it like before" has an answer we can give.

The answer, for what it's worth, is that before was slower and I was bored: I read more and I was more often exactly where I was. That's roughly what this site is about.

Why I switched

My son was born in 2020 and my daughter later in 2022, and somewhere in there I noticed that I was checking messages, Slack and email constantly, and that a lot of the moments I thought I was capturing I wasn't in. I was taking photos of my kids more than I was looking at them. Blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments were going by on the other side of a screen.

So I bought a Light Phone II. It was one of the better decisions I've made. The first weeks were strange, of course: long runs with no music, waiting rooms with nothing to look at. Thank god for National Geographic. Then it got good. I picked up 35mm film photography. I read more and wrote more. The runs without headphones turned into something like meditation.

What a phone is

This took me longest to see. A smartphone is essentially fifteen "things" glued together and sold as one. That's the trick. You pull it out to check the time, the weather and the other fourteen things come with it: the inbox, the news, the feed, a game, the store. You can't use one without being offered all of them. Every check is a lobby with fifteen doors.

Downgrading is un-gluing. You give each job back to a thing that does only that job. Specialization, single use devices. Some of those things cost twenty dollars and some you already own. A few you'll find you don't need at all.

The parts that are hard

Anyone who tells you this is painless is probably selling a phone, or maybe has a YouTube channel. Some things are harder on a small phone, and a few are close to impossible because the world has decided everyone has to have a smartphone. I'd rather you know them going in. This is my list, and what I do about each.

Which brings me to the confession most of us make eventually: I still use a smartphone. Right now my daily setup is the dumb.co Dumbphone 2 paired with an iPhone Air that sometimes stays home or in a bag for the things above that still need an app. I went years with a dumbphone only, but over time it became less practical, personally. If you can live without one, you'll find the whole thing easier. If you can't, put it somewhere inconvenient and make it an old, slow one.

Why willpower loses

I tried the moderate route first. Screen time limits, gray screens, deleting apps. I lost every round, and I've come to think that's the expected result while trying to live "slower." The thing in your pocket was built by very good engineers to be picked up, and you are not going to out-discipline a budget in the billions. The alternatives page exists because those steps help, and I'd try them first. But a smaller phone is a different kind of move: one decision instead of a thousand small ones a day, and it stops the argument you keep having with yourself.

If you've set rules and broken them, that's the product working as designed. The research page has what the studies say, caveats and all.

What I do with the time

People ask what I do with the time, as if the point were to fill it. A lot of it I try my best to fill with nothing. I sit outside. I go for a walk, phoneless, and think about what to cook for dinner and how I'm going to cook it. I do read more and I do take better photos, and the things to do page is a list of what I tried. Treat it as options. The hours you get back don't owe anyone anything. The change I notice is that I'm present for more of my own life, including the boring parts, and the boring parts turn out to be where the good ideas were hiding.

Since then

A few years and a lot of phones later, I've used much of what's in the database at one time or another. These are the ones I've lived with for more than a month.

• Light Phone II the first one
• Punkt. MP02 (4G) a year of it
• Minimal Phone (MP01) physical keyboard
• Sunbeam F1 Horizon a flip that blocks things
• Mudita Kompakt 4.3 inch e-ink
• CAT S22 Flip a rugged Android flip
• Bigme Hibreak (original) e-ink Android
• Dumbphone 2 current daily driver

The ideas underneath

Two movements shaped how I think about this. The Slow movement, which grew out of Carlo Petrini's 1986 protest against a McDonald's opening at the Spanish Steps in Rome, argues for doing fewer things at a pace where you can taste them. It's where this club takes its name. Essentialism, Greg McKeown's name for the disciplined pursuit of less, argues for cutting the trivial many to make room for the vital few. A dumbphone is a small, physical way to practice both. It forces you to decide what you need from the thing in your pocket.

Privacy is part of it too. A phone that can't run apps collects a great deal less about you, and that's a quieter kind of freedom that I've come to value more each year. It's also why this site runs no trackers and why signing in, if you ever want to rate a phone, is a code sent to your email and nothing else.

How I keep the data honest

Every phone in the database has a list of sources and a last-checked date. Where I couldn't confirm a spec from the manufacturer, the field says unknown. Prices drift, and I fix them when I notice or someone reports them. Nothing here is sponsored: no maker has paid to be in the database, to be left out of it, or to have an endorsement made. I am in three affiliate programs: Light's, Amazon Associates, and Bookshop.org's, on the reading list. Each of those links is labeled where it appears, buying through one costs you nothing extra, and none of them has any bearing on what an entry says or on the fact that phones and books I think are better sit next to the ones that pay. If you spot an error, or you make a phone that should be listed, email me at hello@slowerliving.club, or use the suggestion form at the bottom of the database.