May 28, 2026

I bought a brand new iPhone and immediately made it slow on purpose.

Last year I got a brand new iPhone 17 shortly after it came out. It was a bit ironic to spend that much on a phone just to build the thing that would slow it down.

Slowing down your own phone on purpose sounds… unconventional, but I had a good reason for it.

For a long time I struggled with doomscrolling. I tried the usual stuff (cold turkey, app blockers) but they didn’t address the craving, and they were easy enough to bypass on top of that, none of it worked.

A thought experiment about cookies.

How far would you go for a chocolate cookie?

If you had a little machine in your pocket that baked a fresh one any time you wanted, you’d eat way more cookies than you do now, probably one every time you got mildly bored.

But if the closest cookie were a four-hour drive away, you’d eat almost none, even if you love cookies.

Or if there were a cookie in your kitchen, but it was stale, you’d mostly leave it alone.

The phone,…