Three Years of the Light Phone

I was at a press event for a show I was working on last year, and one of the people I was working with saw me ordering a non-alcoholic beer. She turned to me and asked:

So, you drink 0% beers. You're vegan. You run marathons. You use a Light Phone. What's your obsession with limitation?

I didn't have an answer then, but I've been thinking about it ever since. I'm still not sure I have an answer now.

The following blog post contains lots of anecdotal evidence. A lot of my experiences - both good and bad - are not replicable or applicable to anyone else necessarily. It’s easy to make a positive change in your own life and want to prescribe it to others, but in this case, it’s not that simple. Everyone has to find their own way with a lot of this. What I define as a ‘problem’ for me, might be a ‘benefit’ for you, and vice versa. With that said: I want to talk about what might be the healthiest change I’ve made in my adult life.

I picked up the Light Phone II in the summer of 2022 - a small minimalist e-ink phone. At the time of writing, in the summer of 2025, I've been using Light’s updated model - the Light Phone III - for the last 3 months.

I'm not going to delve too deeply here on the hardware (or cost) of either device. That's not because they don't deserve appraisal, but conversations about build quality and asking price tend to lead the conversation down a path I don't really want to go down with this piece. But it might be worth touching on this at the beginning so we can carry on.

The Light Phone II is currently the longest-running phone I've ever had. What started as a quirky experimental change has cemented itself as the way I want to operate for the foreseeable future. That doesn't mean it's been free of friction, but the friction itself has been worth considering and examining, as I will throughout this post.

When I started using the LPII, I had my concerns about whether the hardware, the battery, or even the software would withstand regular daily usage, and I was pleasantly surprised. The only piece I've needed to replace is the hard shell case I keep it in. Aside from that, this is a rugged piece of kit.

I loved that it lives up to its name as a light device, and when I used to chuck it in my pocket to go for a run, it barely felt like it was there. Which is perfect, and a huge improvement from the bulky Huawei P20 Pro I graduated from. As a friend I met in the community pointed out, it's physical lightness becomes a lightness in mental load, and that's a beautiful thing. 

It is, of course, not without its flaws. The battery life means you have to keep a watchful eye on it when it goes below 50% when you're out of the house, as the battery life is limited. On the upside, it charges fully in ~15 minutes, but you always have an eye on the percentage out and about. Texting is a slow and deliberate act, but whether that's a feature or a bug depends on how much of a rush you're in at any given time.

The software also leaves a bit to be desired. Not in the "I need Spotify" way, but in the “everyday quality of life” way. However, LightOS is a perpetual work in progress, and I don't want to judge something too harshly that might be ironed out in subsequent patches (as they often are). The Directions tool, however, is going to have a lot said about it, which I'll save for later.

To compare the II with the III - from the couple of months of daily usage - there are a lot of pleasant upgrades with the III. The OLED screen really pops at night in a clean and minimal way, the battery life is outstanding, and the hardware feels rugged. The whole design has a unique and industrial feel, and it pairs well with the rOtring 600 I keep on my desk. I will say that the II still feels like a more consistent partnership of form factor and functionality, but the III certainly has its' charms, and feels more like a ‘Light Phone Pro’ in many ways. 

Another disclosure it's probably worth making up front is that I still do have my old Huawei lying around. It stays in my desk, and comes out for limited functions that I have no way around: renting cars, using a railcard, and the occasional bit of unavoidable 2FA that requires a camera or QR code. I'm not really interested in purism points here; this is the most frictionless way I currently operate, and I'm at peace with it. 

A lot has changed in my life since I wrote my first post talking about this device. I've run a couple of marathons. I got engaged. I made my West End debut. I came off social media. I also got more actively involved in the community surrounding this device and this lifestyle, and a lot of the people I met in the space have had a considerable impact on how I've thought about this topic. I've also had plenty of conversations with curious colleagues and family members, which has always been a fun and explorative experience. It's not a one-way experience either, I'm not there to convert people to a new religion. Oftentimes, I get asked difficult questions (like the one I opened with) that I don't have the answers to outside of a vague gut intuition. That's part of the reason I'm writing this. 

I also don't want to retrace my steps from my 6-month post too much either, firstly because a lot of my thinking on the subject remains the same, but also because that is a piece of writing I'm tremendously happy with. Give it a read! It's full of big-picture thinking that I'm not going to rehash here. 

What has changed in that time is that I have given this phone an extremely thorough usage. It's been up and down the country, often used as the sole device I have on my person. I've used it for all kinds of things, in both my personal and professional life. It's proved to be a dependable - and more importantly - enjoyable experience. However, in the interest of balance, I think it would be better to start with the persistent difficulties of using this particular device every day. And the main one is navigation. 

Directions, and Lack Thereof

The Light Phone has a collaborative directions tool with Here maps. The way it works on the LPII is: you either tell it your start destination, or let the GPS find you. After that, you tell it where you want to go, and it will present you with either a written list of instructions or a set of images that you cycle through to get your directions. The LPIII has a more interactive map, which does constitute a minor quality of life change across models.

This is, frankly, a terrible experience.

In my home city - or anywhere I'm staying for a period of time - I'll simply read directions before I leave the house/hotel on my laptop, and then just rely on the phone for an occasional reminder if I need it. At home, I can just use my sense of direction (an unintended benefit of having a barely working navigation system). And when I'm visiting big cities, destinations are either well-signposted or self-explanatory. I'm lucky to be reasonably good at intuitively navigating (and live in a pretty safe area) so I don't mind figuring this out on my own. But this is not the value proposition Light want to make to people who need to navigate regularly.

The issue, however, does not stem from a ‘quality of life’ perspective. I don't mind the little list of instructions, and the quirky little images - I think it's charming and quite novel. The issue is that Here Maps is harmfully inaccurate. The lack of real-time updates means I have had to just arrive at train stations to find out that a whole train-line is down. The inability to set departure/arrival time means I may not have realised that I've already missed the last bus/train. Pair that with the phone not having Uber, and you can find yourself in a precarious situation quite quickly. As someone who still gets a great deal of value from the phone, I'm committed to having workarounds. I make a habit of saving numbers for cab companies in places I visit regularly, and often copy instructions from Google Maps before I leave the house. The problem is, navigation is a solved problem in the year 2025. This is not the place I want to pare down in the name of minimalism. ‘Going Light’ shouldn't mean getting lost. 

There's also the particular problem of the kind of language you need to use with Here. It's not good enough to want to go to Euston - it won’t assume you mean the Station, so you have to state explicitly that you’re looking for ‘Euston Train Station’. And even then, it might not help you. Last week for instance, at the time of writing, me and my partner were attempting to walk between two nearby train stations in a city we hadn't visited before. In the name of experimentation, we put the same set of directions into our respective maps apps. And the directions listed gave us the same walking distance, but in opposite directions. Here Maps is constantly getting destinations wrong. I was also recently walking to a studio I hadn't been to before, and the Light phone guided me to a dark, abandoned car park in the middle of December, and told me I'd reached my destination. Luckily, it was only a few hundred metres off the mark and I was able to make it on time, but any further distance would have been catastrophic. My trust in this tool is so severely undermined that I need to fact-check everything before I head out. This is not the experience you should be having with a premium device, no matter how well-intentioned. This is simply not good enough. There’s also no easy solution. Given Light’s (understandable) refusal to compromise on the principle of user privacy, it eliminates the possibility of using a more reliable service like Google Maps. It’s a trade-off you need to be ready to compromise with heavily if you want to rely on LightOS in your daily life.

This experience unfortunately hasn't improved since transferring to the newer model, the Light Phone III. The ability to interface with the map has improved greatly, and it's nice to have a much more comprehensive view of my route as a whole, but the above issues are still persistent. I'd like to say they're being addressed, but this is likely a root issue with how Here operates. So I'm going to continue as I do currently - checking Google Maps before I leave the house, and using Directions to prompt myself if I need a nudge whilst I'm on my way there. 

This is semi-related, but the Directory tool is great. The ability to search any business and get a simple summary, their opening times, and then pull up directions to the place instantly is great. The only seriously missing feature is the ability to call the place straight out of the app. But this leads me to another small issue - there's no global copy and paste at the time of writing. It makes what should be as simple as copying and pasting a phone number out of the Directory and into the Phone tool extremely cumbersome, often involving either pen and paper or, somewhat paradoxically: a second phone. 

There are some areas of friction the Light Phone provides that are thought-provoking, and part of the intended experience. Some of these frictions aren't intentional in the same way, and we - the userbase - are consigned to live with them until the bugs are fixed. I'd like to see a less buggy, more cooperative version of LightOS - one that truly lets you use your phone as little as possible - but there’s still work to do.

This was something I knew I was signing up for when I decided to support a small business undertaking a herculean task. But that experience isn't for everyone. I'm lucky insofar as these decisions only really affect me (both positively and negatively). But for parents, and those with non-negotiable professional requirements might feel very differently about some of this, and that's fine. I'm not here to sell you a product; I'm here to move the needle on a conversation that I'm glad is being had more widely. 

Most of the other features of the device will go unmentioned, as this is the only one I have major issues with. Everything else works just as you'd expect, aside from the occasional bugs that are inevitable in early developments of new software. 

Hearing the Blood in your Veins

There's one other problem I've been having that is going to be harder to discuss with much clarity (as my therapist was well aware of), but I'm going to try my best. It's going to sound hyperbolic, but this is my experience.

In the summer of 2023, I started dissociating pretty badly. I don't know what spurred it, but every day started to feel like a kind of bizarre waking dream. I felt like my conscious experience ended at the roof of my mouth, and everything below that a body that existed entirely independently of the brain that inhabited it. It was deeply unpleasant, and my fear was that because it had started so suddenly and arbitrarily, there wasn't going to be a way to solve it. I went to therapy, had blood tests, started taking all kinds of supplements, but for the best part of a year, nothing helped. My blood tests came back clean and therapy was an extremely slow burn. It was equal parts scary, depressing and bewildering.

Why am I bringing this up here? Am I suggesting that this phone was to blame for a mental health crisis? I'm not, but I think it played an interesting role in both the cause and the eventual recovery from it. Let me explain. 

There's a kind of room in some laboratories and studios called an anechoic chamber. The room is acoustically treated so as to remove any echoes, atmospheric noise, and any extraneous sound from the room. When you're left in a room like this alone, the result is that your hearing starts to gradually shift inward, in an increasingly uncomfortable way. People who spend a longer amount of time in these spaces report being able to hear the blood pumping through their veins at a high volume. It’s a loud, uncomfortable noise that arises from pure silence. I feel like this is an analogous experience to what I felt like when I started dissociating. 

My experience of Going Light prompted a lot of introspection on my relationship to other technology in my life. Lots of people might be familiar with the idea of an "information diet", and in many ways, what I felt like I was doing was an information crash diet. I cut a lot out of my life, and suddenly ended up with a surplus of attention and nowhere to direct it, nothing to distract myself. I still saw an uptick in many good behaviours; I wrote a lot more (and better), I read a lot more, enjoyed the media I was experiencing and fixed my relationship with the outdoors. But even after all of those things, there was a lot of dead time. Unstimulated time. And much like how our hearing ends up turning inwards when there's a lack of background noise to settle on, my attention often started turning inwards, and started overanalysing my own conscious experience. The most regular times I'd dissociate were when I had nothing to keep me occupied. I'd have a thought about what "level" of consciousness I was experiencing, and something was triggered. There'd be a sort of shift that would occur, and I'd feel myself slowly become unmoored from my waking, breathing experience. 

However, I also felt this space to be extremely vital to my well-being. I didn't want to go back to being distracted all the time; I didn't want to simply swap one fugue state for another, so I decided I needed to tough it out. A conclusion I came to in therapy was that this is something that probably would have happened whenever I stopped using devices that distracted me as much. This was likely a dormant problem that I was just suppressing with a drip feed of information at all times. Something I said in those sessions was that I believe that if most people in my age bracket also withdrew from a lot of the things that occupy this part of their brain, there would be a huge uptick in people experiencing the same symptoms. 

However, things did get better. A revelation I came to about a year later, was that there was one place that I never felt dissociated - the shower. Never once had I felt that vacancy or emptiness while I was carrying out a task that required a focus that also allowed my mind to wander. Now, when I felt myself starting to dissociate, I had a kind of counter-trigger phrase: Soft Focus. Whenever I felt myself starting to ‘phase out’, I simply repeated soft focus to myself, and I'd find myself actively connecting with things and people, invested in what I was doing, and fully present again. If, when I started experiencing these symptoms, I'd tried to simply dull the sensation with media, it would likely have been a recurring problem. I stop scrolling, I start dissociating, so I start scrolling again to numb the unpleasant sensation. The space was in some ways a cause of the issue, but it ended up being the solution as well. 

This is anecdotal and presumptuous, but with clean blood tests and lack of inciting trauma, I have to assume this to be a possibility; my total immersion in the internet, at all hours, for the best part of a decade, was a major contributing factor this. The reason it occurred when it did is because the symptoms were previously dulled by not being able to give them attention. Finally removing social media, the cause and inhibitor of this problem, was like finally opening a can of Fanta that had been shaken up and left on the side. It would have been very tempting to dull this strange new sensation with the very thing that I have a suspicion caused it. But that would have simply kicked this can down the road. 

These are the two main negative experiences I've had that are associated with this device - if you can even say the latter experience is a direct consequence. That said, the positives have drastically outweighed the negatives, and that's what I want to spend the rest of my time here discussing. 

Albums are great, and they need to be protected and enjoyed

Light has always defined itself and its devices by what they can't do. It's all over the advertising copy, and some of it has a pretty clear motivation. LightOS can't, won't, and never will, send an email or post an Instagram story. However, the exclusion of certain services - some likely due to the technical constraints of creating a new OS - raises the question of why Light might be deliberately leaving this one out, and what kind of thinking they hope to encourage in their users.

The most interesting example of this is: music streaming services. For many people, the lack of Spotify is a deal-breaker, and a reason many haven't gotten the phone (or so they say, we'll see if that's true if it ever gets added). Notionally, implementing this shouldn't be an impossibility, either. There are third-party devices that have been permitted to use Spotify's API, such as the Mighty, for example. So, I believe this an intentional - albeit quiet - move on Light's part, to softly suggest their politics surrounding this. Given their deliberate exclusion of music streaming and their reluctance to commit to developing it in the near future, here's my interpretation of Light's thinking regarding this. 

Spotify - and its competitors - have a real problem both with algorithmic recommendation being their primary discovery mechanism, and the absolute deluge of AI slop onto the platforms. It is harder and harder to use these tools to find music you truly care about, and easier than ever just to slip into an AI-playlist-fuelled malaise, listening to the same few songs you like, without expanding your horizons. 

In his book Life Inc., Douglas Rushkoff discusses the architectural phenomenon known as the Gruen Transfer. Coined by Austrian architect Victor Gruen, the Gruen Transfer is the measurement of time it takes between someone entering a shopping centre looking for something specific, and them getting disoriented enough that they no longer care as much about that particular goal, and start window shopping. Gruen used this idea as a way of raising the alarm about this, but architects in charge of building shopping centres ran the other way. They wanted shoppers to get as disoriented as possible as quickly as possible. I may be speaking from my own experience alone, but this is the feeling I have when I visit Spotify's desktop app. I go in looking for a specific album, and the moment I'm hit with a wall of deliberately disorienting and conflicting information, I quickly lose interest, and often forget what album I was looking for. I click on one of the albums I regularly listen to, pre-suggested for me at the top of the page, satisfied on one level but deeply dissatisfied on another. I often feel the same going to YouTube looking for a specific video, and the top 5 recommendations on my home page pull just enough of my attention that I often forget what I came to YouTube for. I believe this is by design, and I believe it's working.

This is also getting an increase in attention, and lots of good writing has been done on the subject. Filterworld (a book I have mixed feelings about), Mood Machine (a book I've yet to read), and plenty of online commentary is dedicated to this same fatigue. Platforms that promised variety, challenge, and novelty are slowly succumbing to sameness and predictability at the expense of our real ability to find something new, challenging and exciting. I'm glad that the conversation is shifting towards the reclamation of our artistic curiosity as listeners, but the solution will not come from these platforms. They're staying this way now and they're only going to get worse.

I find it very likely that Light has seen the writing on the wall here - before many of us did - and decided, instead of offering us a bad, watered-down Spotify experience, to simply offer us a simpler alternative. An alternative that doesn't have the feature set of streaming services, but something that is defined by its limitation. You load the music onto your device, and you listen to it. You're not going to be able to absently scroll through another service while you're listening to this music, lest it simply become background radiation that you barely take in. This is music that you're really going to get used to. Up until very recently, both phones only had 1GB of music storage, and the LPII still does due to its hardware constraints, so it also meant you only had a handful of albums. If you’re not rotating your music regularly, you’re getting very acquainted with a small library of music, and this was a positive change for me personally. 

While the actual experience of the music tool can be cumbersome and inconvenient in ways it probably shouldn't be (please let me upload albums in song order!), the actual upshot of a much simpler music player was a breath of fresh air. The album became the primary format of my listening again. I even ended up buying an old iPod Classic, to build further on the good experience I was having listening to albums in their entirety again, with my full attention on them. 

I previously complained that Light had made map reading more complex and obtuse through their simplification, and this is a case of the opposite. Map reading might be a solved problem in 2025, but I don't think music streaming is. A constant firehose of media isn't a good or healthy thing to be exposed to, be it on a Spotify playlist or an infinite Tik Tok scroll. Endless algorithmic recommendation's place as the default way of consuming media is long overdue a re-examination, and I'm excited to see the conversation shifting that way in recent times. 

On principle, I also believe the time we're living in is the best it's ever been for discovering great new art. Despite what some people might say, music is more varied, individual, daring and creative than it's ever been. The real issue stems from the fact that we have no good mechanisms of discovery. Once we reclaim our autonomy and start striking out into the art landscape on our own, we're bound to discover new (and old) amazing things, but that needs to be an effort we make as individuals, not outsource to tech companies that only care about listener retention, and never listener curiosity.

Albums aren't just great because they're the place for artists to tell a coherent and long-form story, they're great because they end. The moments after an album finish should be your moment to think about that experience, not simply space for more music or - worse yet - an advert.

Another kind of album I've learned once again to appreciate is the photo album! With the addition of a surprisingly nice and simple to use 50mp camera, my camera roll on this device looks exactly like that, a camera roll. It's not gummed up with tons of images I've been sent over WhatsApp, or screenshots of things I pulled from websites that are inevitably going to get forgotten about (but paradoxically never deleted), they're just pictures I've taken the time to capture. It's a collection of people I care about, cool places I went to, and plenty of pictures of my dog, and that's how it's supposed to be.

Hard Changes, Soft Changes

When I first started my experiment with this device, the main pitfall I had was that I simply transferred all of my problematic behaviour associated with my phone usage to my laptop instead. This felt like I was doing good, because I didn't have constant access to it all. But being around the house, my laptop simply followed me around. All of my impulsive social media usage and all of the surrendering of my data happened with the same regularity. The difference was that I had sanctioned it off in my subconscious as a healthier set of habits, simply because I was doing it on another device. The real changes in my life didn't occur until I also had to address this. The main change I made was the “Offline 'til 9” rule. I tend to get up pretty early on account of my dog, and in previous times, I'd get out of bed and turn my laptop on straight away. I’d tell myself that this was somehow better than checking my email in bed, and in reality the degree of separation from those two actions is minimal. For all the smugness I felt of using the Light Phone, I was in the sauce straight away like everyone else.

Nowadays, I'm trying to stick to the rule that devices stay off until as close to when I start work at 9 as possible. This usually means I have a couple of hours in the morning that are uniquely quiet. The bass player Janek Gwizdala once likened being up early to being in on a secret, and it certainly has that feeling when done right. The early morning can feel like a hiding place from the world in a lot of ways, and actively withholding when I decide to reconnect with the everything has given the morning so much more potential. Whether I want to journal or lift weights or do some guitar practice (or just sit and watch anime), that activity being the sole purpose without any other responsibility or pull at my attention is by far the best change I've implemented.

The other big change came in October last year, when I deactivated all of my social media (with the exception of Reddit and Discord if you count them), with the intention of taking a three-month break. Almost a year on, and I've yet to reactivate any of them. At the beginning, it felt like an absence. The kind of uncomfortable absence that led to my previous minor mental health snafu. In reality, that additional space was absolutely necessary, and it feels like I've regained a portion of my processing power that was previously dedicated to, for want of a better term, background processing. Constantly concerned with the over-stylised lives of others. Constantly concerned with how I'm going to stylise and commodify the important moments in my life to signal to potential employers and distant acquaintances that I'm also worth some of their background processing power. 

This is now something I simply don't consider. I'm no longer actively thinking about how not-online certain aspects of my life are. I'm simply getting on with my life. Once that RAM in your brain is free for other use, there's a quiet sense of potential that comes with that. Services like Instagram and Twitter now hold the same significance in my life as things like 4chan and Tumblr; platforms I was aware of but never had an active life on, and never felt like I was missing something by not being there. The big difference with the large social media is that we can feel beholden to them in what feels like a cultural way. If I've learnt anything over the last few years, it's that maybe that hold it has on us might be more internally constructed than we might think. Especially with the fracturing of the text-based social media landscape since the demise of Twitter, the onus to have one well-manicured Twitter profile for professional reasons has all but evaporated, and the respective splinter communities have all become more localised. The lack of expectation has meant that these different communities can act less professionally, both for better and for worse. Participation in a place like X or Bluesky is now no longer a professional requirement, but a recreational activity, and not one I have any personal interest in. Applying the same thinking to Meta services has freed up a lot of thinking not just around how I make art and who it's for, but also how I connect with other professionals. All of my networking is now done much more directly and personally, and my work life has benefitted greatly from either talking with people one-to-one or simply being in the room. 

Is this the same for everyone? Absolutely not. I have friends in visual media and pop music whose careers could disappear overnight if they didn't have an Instagram profile. But I also thought the same before I came off the platform, and I'm still busy, I'm still in contact with people I care about, and I'm still progressing. And I'm doing so without being an unpaid employee for Meta, or being what Naomi Klein calls “attention-economy roadkill”. I'm not saying that you need to remove yourself entirely, but it's certainly possible to consider the place it has in your life without the fear that it's an essential foundation your life is dependent on. 

The landscape is also changing rapidly. In the UK, the Online Safety Act is having serious collateral damage, with many parts of the internet being deemed NSFW being censored until users verify their identity. I needn't explain why this is such a slippery slope, but it's a slope we're undeniably at the top of. The unintended by-product of this, however, is that it's yet another obstacle between users and the services that we have previously assumed to be essential for participation in wider society. The unexpected benefit is that there will be no expectation for you to have profiles in certain places if you're a young professional. This might be me thinking about the silver lining of an eerily dark cloud, but if the accidental fallout of this is internet users making a move towards cultural decentralisation, this is a good thing that can come of it.

There might be something in your life that you consider some kind of necessary evil. That could be regularly posting things you don't care about, or trying to stay up to date on services that might also affect you negatively in the name of either professional or personal improvement. My suggestion is that maybe that evil isn't actually that necessary. That's not to say you should delete all of your accounts and migrate to a dumbphone, but everything can - and should be - regularly re-evaluated when it comes to its place in your life. If participation in a service is starting to become a net negative, you have much more power than you might think. Your Instagram presence isn't going to be your career-defining body of work.

You Should Start, But Maybe Not Here

A pre-prepared quip I often have in the discussion that arises around this phone - and the Nth degree to which it's taken a lot of my thinking and action - is that this is the best decision I've made that I wouldn't recommend. This has been a hugely beneficial, transformative change for me that has left me a much healthier and happier individual. However, for a lot of people, these extreme measures aren't the ones they need to be taking. If anything, seeing these kinds of actions being taken can be more off-putting than they are encouraging. I'm not too interested in suggesting what path to take as an individual, only that they pick whatever path they are on mindfully and deliberately. There's lots of great writing in your preferred medium, be it podcasts or books or video essays, that provide much more insight than I've offered here. I'd suggest taking a look at the various angles people approach this topic from and seeing what you might resonate with. 

The changes themselves also don't need to be big or drastic. It might be that you wait a little longer in the morning before checking your notifications. It might be that you leave your phone in your bag at social events. It might even be that you're simply well-adjusted with your phone use and this problem doesn't affect you in the way that it did me, and despite how many purists might feel about the situation at large, that's actually OK. You can have a balanced and healthy relationship with smartphones, and if the smartphone is something you need in your life, that's something I encourage. It’s a tool, and if you can use it as such, you shouldn’t be made to feel constantly resentful of it by the current negative cultural outlook on it. It doesn't take an expensive feature phone to bring about positive change. It brought plenty of positive change for me, but everyone's different. Don’t let the drastic actions of people who’ve made large changes scare you away from making the small changes in your life that could make a huge positive difference.

If I were to prescribe any thought process, it would simply be to think much more consciously about the value you're getting out of the physical hardware you surround yourself with, and the software you're loading onto it. Is it really helping you grow as a person? Is it helping you achieve the goals you set out to achieve long before this technology was ubiquitous? 

Is it really making you happier and more connected? 

These services are not going to get regulated any time soon. Nobody is coming to help us. We need to think about how we're going to protect ourselves and our autonomy as individuals. That might sound hyperbolic and alarmist at a glance, but the flip side of this is that we have much more autonomy than we're led to think. If our attention is now the prime commodity that we deal in, our withholding of that commodity from services we no longer actively benefit from is a small but valid form of driving change. When people vote with their wallets, things improve. Less people want to eat meat, more alternatives are offered. People boycott a service, and the controversial changes they made that spurred the boycott get rolled back. If we have to make consumer choices, we can make the choices that suit us first and the market will catch up.

Maybe I'm idealistic when it comes to how much I believe in the power of individuals getting together. Maybe I feel that way because my individualism has always been rewarded, and I can absolutely concede that others may feel differently. But what I don't believe is that a small group of tech oligarchs trying to brute-force a new norm that only benefits them - directly at the cost of our privacy and wellbeing - is something that we should passively condone. We can step back, and we can take our attention, money, and life energy elsewhere. I don't think Light are doing a perfect job, and I don't think expensive niche devices are the direct answer to this problem. But I'm happy that I'm supporting a small team with a new and interesting vision, and I hope more people follow suit and offer their own ideas, products and effort. I don't think hope is lost, and it's extremely encouraging to see this conversation move gradually further into the zeitgeist. To quote Nemik's manifesto from Season 1 of Andor: "Remember this: Try."

I want to take one direct quote from my previous blog I wrote about all of this, because I think it's the best job I've done at summing this whole process up.

I could talk about how I read more, or write more music, or I think I'm a better listener, but all of these are small changes in the face of being rid of this horrible gut feeling I've been used to having. The feeling that if I just kept digging through the void hard enough, I could find the one scrap of it that made it worth all the digging.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks to Jordan for taking an editorial pass over this blog, and for being a constant sounding board for some of these ideas.