Lately I’ve read several articles about the smartphone mental health crisis, AI taking over, and the various ways technology is destroying us all. Overall, there’s a large amount of technological doom and gloom in the media right now for various reasons, some of it completely justified. While I agree with many of the points of these articles, it sometimes feels like we’re conflating topics and lumping everything into “smartphones”, “technology”, “Silicon Valley”, and “AI”. I think the picture can be more nuanced, as it’s too easy to fall into negative paradigms and false dichotomies when talking about these topics.

The articles tend to equate smartphones to social media, rather than describing a phone as an entranceway to social media. They are focused on the issues with social media and mental health, but the solution tends to be to “quit your phone, pick up a dumbphone”. Clearly social media is a problem, especially for children, where FOMO (fear of missing out) is especially prevalent. But I'd argue that social media is the major problem, and the rest of “tech” gets unfairly placed in similar buckets by association. The solution to escaping social media tend to ignore other ways we use technology: to text friends, call family, find our way with maps, etc.

Realizing that social media was an issue for me personally, I felt that I needed to make a serious change. Quitting most social media made a huge improvement in my life.  I just didn’t care about it anymore and wanted to do something else. It required a deeper dive into what I actually wanted to do with my time, and I didn’t see social media scrolling as a part of that. That inner work is probably the real key, but doing the work is a lot harder than believing a pseudoscience Medium article claiming “dopamine detoxing” is the real secret to happiness.

It makes sense that these articles tend to be fairly negative. I think one of the problems with journalists writing about tech is that they’re stuck with it for work. Journalists  use social media to boost their brand, mine ideas for their articles/content, or are forced to use it at work. They need social media to not suck so much, since it’s one of the main ways for people to find and interact with their content. I’m not anti-journalism, nor do I think a lens is a problem, as all content has a lens through which it’s created.

 

Perhaps curating your own experience and finding ways to use technology as you need it would be the best approach to managing a healthy balance. Blaming smartphones feels a bit like shooting the messenger, and 4 hours of screen-on time isn’t a bad thing if you spent it all using Khan Academy. But when most people say screen-on time, they actually mean social media time.

I think you can use technology and your phone for lots of cool stuff, and so I’m here to make some suggestions for things you can do instead of spend 4 hours on TikTok.

My links are for Android, but most of these are on both Android and iOS.

Diarium - A journal app. I’ve found it very helpful since it’s cross-platform (iOS, Android, Windows) and I don’t typically have bag space for a paper journal. You do need to purchase it multiple times if you want to use a different platform. Your database is stored to your own personal cloud storage (like Google Drive), which for me is a convenient feature and something I’d like to see more of.

Google Arts and Culture - Great website, and also a somewhat decent app. This is one of the Google products that feels very “old Google”. The app provides a space to view art, read articles about culture, tour museums, etc. You can even use AR to view them in your home to better examine the painting’s details. It’s not a perfect app (no dark mode or landscape), but I’m willing to let it slide since the content is so good.

Google Lens - Indispensable when traveling abroad. The main way I use it is to OCR Japanese text from print to my phone’s clipboard. I wouldn’t have been able to read print Japanese books as easily as I do now without it. You can also use it to translate, which is great for languages you don’t know at all.

Loop Habit Tracker  - An Android exclusive habit tracker. It has streak tracking, simple metrics, and most importantly notifications that can’t be swiped away. 

Breathe: relax & focus - Better than therapy. Kidding, of course, but breathing is one of the best ways to get yourself out of fight or flight. I have it set to remind me daily to breathe 3x a day, and I’ve found it really made a difference in my day to day wellness.

Google Docs - Any writing app will do, but using it on my phone is something that I never really made much use of until recently. It just feels like a desktop/iPad kinda app, right? But being able to work on blog posts on the go has been a great way to spend time.

E-reader - The obvious pick for an e-reader is the Kindle app, but there are plenty of alternatives. I’ve heard good things about Kobo and Calibre, but haven’t tried either.

Too Good to Go - This app lets you purchase surprise bags of food from restaurants before they close. The restaurant picks out food they were planning on throwing out that day, so you get a discount and they avoid food waste. How useful this is depends on your area, but where I live, we have access to restaurants within walking distance.

NewPipe - An Android exclusive YouTube client. It lets you watch YouTube without ads and download videos locally.

Procreate - Procreate is famously the best drawing app on the market, and for good reason. It’s feature-complete, easy to use, and I’ve never experienced a performance problem, even working in high resolution with a lot of layers. It’s iOS exclusive and is compatible with the Apple Pencil. And the craziest part? It’s a one-time purchase of $12.99.

Autodesk Sketchbook - When I had a Note 8, this was my app of choice for drawing on the go with my Phone. It’s free to start, with a well-priced paid version. The performance is solid, but it used to make my Note 8 heat up quite a bit if I started painting with a lot of layers. It’s probably less of an issue with an S24 Ultra. I use it on my S23 sometimes if I want to draw a thumbnail sketch, but without the S-Pen it’s not super useful.

Suika Game - The hit Switch game is now on iOS and Android. It’s so fun and very satisfying once you get the watermelon, but also frustrating at times since it’s a little difficult.

Crossy Road - Frogger with skins. It’s fun and doesn’t pester you with ads, you watch ads if you want extra coins, but you don’t need to do that unless you’re really looking to accelerate your skin generation. It’s also possible to pay to remove ads entirely. But really, it’s just a simple game that you can play quickly.

Stardew Valley - PLAY IT. Seriously, it is an amazing farming simulator with catchy music and gorgeous sprites.

The Battle of Polytopia - Fun diet-Civ game. It is lacking the connection to history that makes Civ so great, but it has a similar gameplay loop of building a civilization from nothing.

Bejeweled Classic - Great for when you’re standing in line for something. Idle and not too difficult.

Hanafuda Koi-koi Dojo - If you like Hanafuda, I recommend it.

Emulators - I use DraStic, PPSSPP, and My Boy!. Admittedly, I don’t use them that much lately since they require longer engagement and a lot of games don’t work well with touch controls. But some game styles like RPGs work well with touch controls.

Minecraft - The mobile controls are kinda hard to use, but Minecraft is one of the most popular games in the world for a reason.

I’m nitpicking a bit here, but some apps are just a site. The distinction is probably confusing to non-software people. At its core, a social media “app” is a front end for an API, but it has access to more functionality since it’s not limited by the browser and can instead interact with the OS to provide a better experience (or mine more data about the user). For example: imagine Apple adds a new theme option along with Dark/Light mode, like grayscale or something. Instead of waiting on the browser’s developers to support it, they can instead support it themselves. Or they can configure the app’s style to match the native iOS/Android design languages. Android released their Material You design a while ago and this allows developers to build dynamically themed apps. But that’s just design, the core functionality is mostly interacting with the REST API for CRUD actions.

One useful feature a lot of mobile browsers support is the ability to “install” a shortcut of a site to your app screen. This gives you something closer to an app-like experience without needing to install an app. I’ve been trying to use this rather than using a mobile app if it’s available to avoid downloading apps unnecessarily. Or I  just use a simple bookmark to the site.

My site - I don’t send notifications of any kind, so you have to check and see if I wrote something. I’ve set up RSS, but it doesn’t work perfectly yet. More to come on that!

birdbyrocket.com - Excellent work by the greatest writer of our time.

Excalidraw - No login necessary to use this. Excalidraw lets you make charts, diagrams, and any kind of “board” with easy to use pre-built components. I like using this for planning out databases for my web development projects.

New Yorker - I generally find the New Yorker to be a better way to keep track of current events than regular news. It’s long-form and usually written with time after events occurred, so the analysis is more thoughtful than a typical news article.

Notion - I use Notion for almost everything. The free-format makes it very appealing to use. I use the app versions a bit, but I prefer the website. I find it useful for making quick mini-spreadsheets or creating task boards for projects. I don’t like how hard they’re pushing their AI crap, so I do think there may be a point where I leave.

Khan Academy - Very famous and for good reason. You can learn almost anything here. I think the site has come a long way in the past few years and is an excellent place to learn something new.

Gurney Journey - Blog of the great James Gurney. He’s an excellent artist and a very prolific blogger. He recently created a Substack, but the blog is still being updated regularly.

New York Times Cooking - Say what you will about NYT as a news outlet, their Cooking site is excellent. The price is worth it and the recipes are usually a hit.

I know I went on a rant about social media, but hear me out. YouTube has a lot of good content. There are plenty of issues with YouTube’s algorithm, but there are a lot of channels putting out high quality content and if you don’t make use of the algorithm it’s still a great site. Here are my recommended channels:

J. Kenji López-Alt - I owe a lot of my cooking knowledge to Kenji. He knows the science behind cooking (he wrote the Food Lab) and will teach you the how and why of cooking. He often makes modifications to his recipes for home-cooked versions and has great explanations of which techniques/ingredients you can cut in a recipe to make your life easier.

Rick Steves’ Europe - Excellent travel videos of Europe.

DancingBacons - Food travel videos, mostly focused around Asian foods. They post plenty of videos of conveniences stores, vending machines, and restaurants in Thailand, Japan, Singapore, etc.

Folding Ideas - Excellent channel, you might’ve been introduced to Folding Ideas back in 2022 with “Line Goes Up”. His newer videos are usually a deep-dive into internet scams, and they are incredibly well-thought-out eviscerations of these grifters. His older content is great too, a lot of it is focused on TV/film, either reviews or filmmaking. I recommend his lukewarm defense of 50 Shades of Grey for some of his film content.

It’s Time to Travel - This channel focuses on Japanese Travel, mostly hotels. I really enjoy the videos about 旅館 (ryokan, Japanese style hotel), since these ryokans usually have beautiful architecture, cozy vibes,  and delicious looking food.

PBS Eons - Short videos about the history of life on earth. Very insightful and up to date on some of the latest archaeological studies.

James Hoffmann - This channel stars the 2007 Barista World Champion James Hoffmann. He has great guides and product reviews relating to coffee. He also has some good content into the science of coffee and actually cites his sources. I use his recipes daily and upgraded my coffee gear based on his recommendations.

Chef Jean-Pierre - YouTube is full of wanna-be chefs with big “I went to film-school” energy and low cooking ability. They’re always sponsored by Squarespace and other “premium” advertisers. But if you want real cooking ability from a trained chef, Chef Jean-Pierre is the place to go. I mentioned J. Kenji Lopez-Alt before, and he’s at trained chef as well, but Kenji usually teaches the “home cook” version while explaining why he’s using less technique/ingredients. Jean-Pierre will show you how it’s done in a professional kitchen, with no substitutions. Both are great for different reasons, and I recommend them both.

Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games - Masahiro Sakurai, famous creator of the Super Smash Brothers series, is a legend in terms of team management, creativity, and game design. His lessons are short and very insightful. I’m too impressed with his ability to work, how does this man have the time to do so much? He’s an inspiration and his advice can apply to any team.

That’s it for now! I’ll consider updating this list with a few more sites, apps, and YouTube videos in the future.