"Dumb Phones": Pretentious consumerism, nostalgia, and a good idea about to turn into a contradictory micro-trend
We're living in a time where information can be found in an instant and entertainment can be provided in a few seconds with the only effort required being the scrolling of your thumb. With the convenience and quick dopamine, it's easy to feel content without the process of researching, learning on your own accord, seeking out your own interests, and finding hobbies. Now, most attempts at those things are influenced by whatever the algorithm feeds you. It decides your hobbies, interests, music taste, etc., and I think that once certain people realize this and want a return to "tradition," they tend to think of themselves as above the simple-minded, addicted to their little electronic bricks, dopamine fiends. Like all great communities, they start to conglomerate and fester on REDDIT. And the solution? "Dumb phones." And like all great Reddit communities, it completely devolves into a grotesque display of consumerism. (more on that later)

Ideally, the "dumbphone" is the antithesis of a smartphone (DUH), which has very little function outside of phone calls and text messages. It makes sense that someone who really is THAT addicted to their phone would need to strip away all the appealing features in order to actually break that addiction, but who's actually throwing away their thousand-dollar smartphone? ALMOST NOBODY. And as long as it's in reach, that dumbphone is going to be collecting dust as you keep reaching for the smartphone.

It's very obvious that the rise of the dumbphone has a lot to do with the novelty of the current wave of 2000s nostalgia, and like all interesting, kind of cool concepts that start trending, it gets watered down and basically loses all meaning. How this was meant to work is that you buy a shitty phone with little to no function, you break your phone addiction, and your life is perfect and you are a real person again. How this is actually going is that someone will scour ebay for something that fits their performative "y2k aesthetic," buy one phone, but never get rid of their smartphone and the addiction persists, and decide that the phone they bought isn't as cutesy as the one someone else on the internet has, and then buy a new one. The cycle continues, and eventually they're posting their full collection of old, mostly useless plastic on r/dumbphones.

We need to be completely real. Using an old flip phone ONLY and not owning a smartphone is simply not realistic in the current time we live in. Very few people are successfully doing that, and the ones that actually are probably aren't obsessively showing off on every social media. No one's actually getting rid of their new iPhone 17 for the sake of this cool dumbphone trend their tiktok feed told them about. No one wants to admit that if you want to actually achieve the original goal that the dumbphone was for, you need to have at least a little self-control. The aesthetic 2000s dumbphone won't save you. Like I mentioned previously, these dumbphone connoisseurs will go on and on and on about it on whichever social media platform that they swear they're above using.

And then the trend comes. This little contained group online is starting to spread, and people are now showing their collections of mostly useless and unused flip phones to a wider audience. With this, the 2000s nostalgia that's really in right now (mostly as escapism for gen z) mixed with the uniquely dumb demographic that uses tiktok (really, this is something that needs to be studied) solidifies the term "performative" in this whole thing. They need to fit their "y2k older brother core emo mall goth myspace" aesthetic, but you'd have to pry their social media accounts from their cold, dead hands. If you find yourself saying anything along the lines of "I just need a flip phone that can run tiktok and pinterest!" in the context of anything other than aesthetics, you might just be a lost cause.

Now that my complaining is finished for now, here's my actual solution: There's no need to go through the effort of buying another phone and figuring out how to get it to text and make calls if you're going to end up not getting rid of your smartphone anyway. Don't spend the money on new devices that online trends are telling you that you need in order to fix yourself. They will end up collecting dust in your drawer in a few months at most. Delete all of the non-essential apps on your phone, or at the very least set time limits on them. Most social media platforms can still be accessed fine on a computer, and you'll find yourself being less dependent on them once they're not as accessible and you realize that they really weren't a necessity at all. If you need to go even further, keep your phone theme minimalistic and grayscale. Find more meaningful hobbies to fill your time. Confront the problems in your life instead of ignoring them and living vicariously through celebrity drama. It'll be very difficult at first, but once you do it, you'll be much, much happier and fulfilled.