I think he made a good video but I couldn’t stop thinking about this new “anti-consumerism consumerism”. So many “I needed my phone to do x, so I bought this to do that.” Even without the immediate ability to buy anything anywhere he is fundamentally locked into this mindset of “I need so I buy”.

Could have used parental controls(like so many “adults” need to have their friends set on their phone) and locked your phone as only a phone. Delete every app that isn’t essential. You can make your phone useless when you’re bored, you can pick it up but nothing will be there to give you “relief”. No distractions, no ability to install distractions. Your phone is yours, you can have it do whatever you want. I guess some people are just so addicted they can’t even be near it. They’re like people that stop smoking just to get addicted to vaping. Still addicted, just not to the old dirty style of getting your fix.

I like Eddy. And at first I’ve liked this essay subject from other creators, but now I just find it shortsighted. The phone isn’t the problem, just like the television and radio weren’t the problem. It’s the content you put on it.

You can watch great TV shows—documentaries, masterpiece dramas, etc. Or you can watch slop.

You can do incredible stuff with your phone—get directions, listen to almost any song ever recorded, learn about the night sky, watch documentaries anywhere you are, write, create your own content, sky’s the limit. Or you can install slop and brain rot apps like Twitter.

You don’t have to pull a stunt like locking your phone away. Just delete the slop. Be more mindful of what an app and the company behind it are, and either limit your use of it or simply don’t install it at all.

I loved his video, but there were some pretty key actions that he could have done to reduce his phone usage, e.g., limiting/deleting his social media apps, reviewing/turning off his notifications, or setting Focus times to limit distractions during productive times of the day.

Fun experiment overall, but I wasn’t expecting any new revelations on attention spans from a comedian.