Music subscriptions are definitely a hard thing to give up; I’d have to go buy countless albums that I don’t want to give up, and I even searched for an MP3 player that could connect to such services. The only options I found were an iPod, which kinda defeats a lot of the purpose of this task, and one that syncs to Spotify with varying results, but has no screen (effectively an iPod Shuffle).

I did run into the threading issue the other day. I rarely do group texting, but my supervisor set one up last week for a training class I’m in this week, and I missed all but the initial message because the Nokia couldn’t understand what it was receiving.

Emoji I could live without, but guessing what those little squares are can be frustrating. And could potentially change the context of the message, depending on how the sender uses them. My big this is gifs; I personally like to respond in gifs from movies and tv shows where appropriate (or inappropriate). The Nokia can receive them just fine, but there’s no way to search for them myself.

Ultimately, a smartphone with strict parental controls might be the solution. If I can’t learn to limit my time on distracting apps, I may need to prevent my iPhone from being able to download them at all. And then once I lock that door, lose the key.

Already, however, I’ve taken more walks on breaks at work, and I’ve cracked open a book when I didn’t have a way to access YouTube. So far, it isn’t perfect, but it is getting there.