Last August, CoverStory ran a piece I wrote on three simple ways to lessen screen time. That was six months ago and, like a dutiful patient out of rehab, I am reporting on how it has been, some losses and some gains, since I weaned myself off my phone. Suffice it to say that it went smoothly, until it didn’t. Screen time went down to three hours a day from an average of five, and climbed back to five after three months. Thankfully—miraculously—I’ve made it out again and now clock in less than two hours daily.
Reviewing what I wrote back then, I remember why I proffered just three ways to reduce screen time. I wanted to keep it simple because lifestyle features (listicles!) were meant to be simple. I also wanted to leave the impression that weaning yourself off your phone could easily be done —just two purchases (an alarm clock and some reading material for your toilet time) and you’re free! Of course, experience has proven to me otherwise, and curing an addiction is never simple.
But to be fair to myself, the third suggestion I made was for people to read up further on the methods that Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads), X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Huawei, and other tech companies have employed to keep us glued to our phones. It was wise advice because in just three months, the Silicon Valley bigwigs had reeled me back in with their codes and witty marketing, rendering me helpless on my phone for more hours in a day than I would be cooking, reading, and actually living.
Christmas
The Christmas season has long been described as a difficult time mentally and emotionally. I would add that it’s difficult, too, for those trying to wean themselves off their phones. It was doubly hard for me because classes for the first semester at the University of the Philippines Diliman ended in the second week of December and the second semester wasn’t due to start until mid-January. After more than six straight months of teaching with no real break, there was suddenly a vacuum of things to do and think about.
This was when my phone use skyrocketed once more. The sentimental posts, the showing off, the messages to the Lord that people are wont to publicize during the season—I felt I had to read them all. And besides, the hangovers from the Christmas parties left me with little agency to function like a normal human being.
At the same time, I was on the lookout for other things: an unexpected Christmas bonus, an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, a significant development in the flood-control corruption scandal involving lawmakers and other ranking government officials… I expected my phone to give me the news I wanted to see. But except for delivering news of our union fighting for and later winning additional bonuses for us, the phone offered me no real joy.
Brick
It was an article from The New Yorker, titled “A Holiday Gift Guide: The Newest, Strangest Gadgets and Apps,” that saved me. Its blurb: “Our columnist on digital culture suggests technology—or anti-technology technology—to give this holiday season.” There, I found Brick, a gadget/app that I wish I could say was taken from my own rib. Its concept is simple: a physical barrier between you and your phone. Brick serves as a gate between you and your addiction by requiring you to tap the phone to the gadget before you are given notifications and access to the apps that draw and glue you to the screen. The gadget is a plain, grey magnet that you can stick anywhere in the house. Anywhere, I would suggest, far from the couch or the bed. It has done me wonders.
I don’t know exactly why it’s called “Brick.” On one end, the plain, grey, 5-gram magnet could easily be the brick. On the other, I feel it turns my phone into a brick: good for answering calls and messaging apps, rectangular, and just as heavy as an actual brick. But why should it matter when it has been an answer to a wish I’ve long been wishing: that phones return to the way they used to be.
Of course, you have full liberties as to which apps Brick locks you out of. I’ve blocked off all my social media apps, including Reddit, and my Photos app (I’ve found that the distraction caused by looking at old photos and videos can also be significant). I leave the house and go to work with my phone Bricked; I un-Brick it only for a few minutes a day, mostly to watch the Reels and memes sent by friends and to view the stories posted by friends and family. I still reply to messages, make calls, take pictures, and play music via the phone, but for the most part, my iPhone 11 feels like the best phone you could get in 2008.
I’ve had my Brick for a little over a month now, and my phone use was a gradual but steady decrease from five hours a day to just two. The week I wrote this piece, my screen time was mostly for replying to messages on Messenger, Telegram and Viber and a little Googling for information I needed on the spot. The reading I had to do for my classes, the managing of my Google Classroom, and other more serious work, I did on my laptop. The same principle I wrote about in my August 2025 article applies: If the task can be done without a phone, I’ll do it without a phone.
Reading
The amount of freed-up time since I made a deliberate effort to reduce my screen time has allowed me to read way more books than I did before my phone addiction went into full swing. To put a ring around this “reformed” life, I’ve started reading The Urge: Our History of Addiction by Carl Erik Fisher (Penguin Publishing, 2023).
Fisher writes about the many perspectives and approaches that societies and disciplines have taken in addressing addictions over the past centuries, for humanity’s approaches toward addiction—drugs, smoking, alcohol, or behavioral addictions—weren’t only rehab, containment, eradication, or regulation. It was always more complicated than what was at play, and to have a one-track approach to addictions could do more harm than good, much like Rodrigo Duterte’s reckless and damning remarks to “shoot [addicts] dead.”
From the get-go, the book offers a lush field of knowledge that welcomes the possibility of getting addicted (i.e., lost, obsessed, unhappily wanting, desiring, etc.) as being in our nature as human beings.
Social class
In the past weeks, I have also talked to my friends about Brick and phone addiction, and realized in my conversations how so much of the ways we use our phones is tied to our social class. For starters, a Brick would cost you a small fortune of ₱3,600 (plus shipping costs from the United States).
Weaning oneself off one’s phone would not be a possibility, or even a concern, for swathes of Filipinos whose jobs and modes of income require them to be chronically online. Schools, post-Covid, have also largely migrated online, and students have been given little choice but to engage in the internet’s fictions.
Clearly, the manner with which we consume our news and entertainment on our phones—ultimately, what we do with our time and what we find meaningful and worthwhile—is also a problem of how much we earn and on what we spend our money. Phone addiction is so intricately tied to our problems, with our country’s networks of disinformation, with our low literacy rates, and even with the services that government offers.
I write this with the heightened self-awareness of someone who had just gotten out of his phone addiction, like a crazed evangelist who hopes that one day you’d also see the light. I know fully well that I might just, in the next few months, relapse again. Strangely, I find comfort nonetheless that I’ve made steps forward: long and strange leaps forward because I recall that the first article I have ever had published in a broadsheet was a sloppy piece, titled “How I broke up with my Facebook account,” in the Philippine Star back on June 30, 2012. That’s almost 14 years ago and here I am, still writing about it. CS
