Do we really need a dumb phone to feel better?

Meditation, journaling, silent retreats, and books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation have become a widespread cultural phenomenon in response to the brain rot epidemic. Although the name may sound alarming, it’s not a clinical illness, but rather a condition of mental deterioration caused by overexposure to social media and other online content. The term, ironically coined on social media, appeared in the Oxford Dictionary as the word of the year in 2024, confirming its spread in contemporary vocabulary. While adults talk a lot about Gen Z's obsession with phones and how they affect their personalities, their social lives, and their language, young people are looking for a solution to the problem. They've revived past practices like meditation and analog living, until arriving at what are now called dumb phones, which are simply old-school phones. Lacking colorful graphics, Instagram, and TikTok, dumb phones have only a few functions like calling, texting, and a camera. The phone market is now facing a new chapter: on one side, Apple continues to churn out new iPhone editions, adding artificial intelligence and cutting-edge technology; on the other, some brands are leveraging young people's interest in dumb phones by launching new products.

In the United States, flip phone sales started to rise in 2022 — right after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown — and since then, Nokia has continued to sell millions of early-2000s devices. Alongside the flagship manufacturer of Y2K phones, other companies like Punkt and Light have responded to the trend by launching options with a minimalist aesthetic. These are devices «created to simplify your life and help you focus on what really matters,» according to Punkt's website. The company, founded in 2008, claims to have created the world's first smarter phone. For €599, the MC02 is a phone with a display that promotes «conscious» interaction with technology and the internet, while offering enhanced data protection. The phone has recently integrated Threema, a messaging app developed using Swiss software Apostrophy for user privacy.

While in Switzerland Punkt is trying to revolutionize the European phone market, in America a start-up is offering an alternative to hyper-connected iPhone users. Light is a company founded in Brooklyn in 2015 that has just unveiled the third edition of its dumb phone, the Light Phone III. For $600 (about €520), it will launch on the market in July. In recent months, the start-up has launched a targeted campaign to promote the product, which can only make calls, send texts, take photos, navigate maps, or play music and podcasts. Unlike Punkt, this phone has no email apps — not even an App Store. In a New York Times article where he recounts his week testing the new device, journalist Brian Chen says that at first «It reminded me of simpler times, when we used phones mainly to talk, before putting them away to focus on other activities.» However, he soon realized he couldn’t do certain things that are now only accessible via smartphones. The problem, Chen explains, is that «society as a whole has become dependent on advanced smartphone features.»

Although tools like dumb phones can certainly offer real help to those who feel they’re victims of brain rot, the best choice for those wanting to interact with technology more mindfully is still to turn off the device — whatever it is. If the culprit of our addiction is society itself, which has made life without a smartphone impossible, then buying a second phone can’t be a sustainable solution to the problem — in fact, it might make things worse. Precisely because we’re tied to a life with a smart device, owning another one will never really eliminate our anxieties. Luckily, there’s airplane mode, vacation time, and places with no signal — devices for which, for now, there’s no price.