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.…