It’s ridiculous to me that I’m writing a list article in the year of our Lord 2025. But my excitement over finding the cure to my cellphone addiction demands that I employ the listicle’s simplicity. Friends, I have found a way out! It’s totally doable, and it doesn’t require anyone to download an app that costs an arm and a leg.

First, get an alarm clock. The subtlest but most cunning function of a cellphone is to replace the alarm clock. With that crucial replacement, it has become the first thing we interact with in the morning. Once we touch the phone’s screen, the day is lost, having begun with us in cyberspace, opening our apps, scrolling through, checking our messages…

I didn’t think that getting an alarm clock would make that much of an impact, but I played a game with myself. I made it a rule not to touch my phone in the first 30 minutes after waking up. The period soon increased to one full hour. I am able to grind and brew coffee, cook breakfast for me and my wife, and read a chapter of a book I’m trying to finish. 

When this first hour of my day is done, it feels so much easier to avoid the phone in other parts of the day. I feel it has something to do with the story and the sense that I would like my day to make: If the story starts with me looking at my phone, then it should continue with the phone being some sort of character, an unwanted sidekick—an addiction, precisely.

Thinking about it, I realized that the spikes of emotion that led me to be so attached to my phone usually occurred in the morning, when I woke up, browsed through my phone, and found out that a certain celebrity died while we were asleep in this side of the world. I remember learning of Michael Jackson’s death on my phone, of Amy Winehouse’s, of Dolores O’Riordan’s, of Chris Cornell’s, of some friends’ and acquaintances’. And maybe, morbid as it may sound, it’s the type of news my fingers look for first thing in the morning, when I tap my phone’s screen. When Ozzy Osbourne died last month, I was in the thick of this project to wean myself off my phone, so I found out about it after that first hour awake. I realized that it wasn’t so bad to find out “later” than most people have.

I am happy to report that alarm clocks these days are niftier. There are clocks that you can set multiple alarms on, so you wouldn’t have to keep fiddling with them before going to bed. There are also clocks that don’t jolt you awake. The one I bought beeps just once every second for the first 10 seconds of the alarm, twice every second on the 11th to 20th second, thrice per second on the 21st second until the second minute. I also have a clock that you need to flip upside down to shut its alarm. 

The alarm clock made me think about how I was awakened in the morning when I was a schoolboy. Back then, it was my mother who’d tap my calves to wake me up for school. I’d get up and go downstairs to the smell of breakfast cooking and my father’s coffee. Waking up was so much kinder in those days, without phones and the other things that trouble us. 

Next, have something to read in the toilet. Of course, there are morning rituals to perform after getting out of bed. Many doctors have pointed out how unsanitary and unhealthy it is to bring your phone with you to the toilet. The strain on our thighs when we sit for prolonged periods—regularly, too—can cause all sorts of harm to our bodies. But it’s just so difficult to resist having something to entertain ourselves with while doing our business.

This realization came to me through Tarantadong Kalbo’s (Kevin Eric Raymundo) nostalgia series. In one comic strip, he drew the childish joy of spending time in the toilet and reading the back of shampoo bottles for entertainment. It was all we had and it didn’t make much sense, but that’s what we did, anyway. I realized that the need to entertain ourselves while pooping is somewhat primordial, and it has only changed its form. Once more, the phone has succeeded in usurping a function that is not for it to take.

Bringing a book or a newspaper instead of a phone to the toilet is an easy remedy. I’ve hung a tote bag with issues of the Philippine Collegian on our bathroom door, but it can also hold other texts—brochures, flyers, manuals, warranty cards, receipts, etc.—that come for free. The bigger objective here is to strip the phone down to being just a phone. Like many of us, I long for the days when the phone was just for texting and calling. But just like you, I couldn’t do without Viber, WhatsApp, Messenger, my phone’s camera, and the fact that I need a working phone to keep my job. I guess the next best thing is to be away from all that work while in the toilet, and to labor on more urgent, pressing concerns.

This business of reading in the toilet has made me think more about the needs that phones try to address. Most of the stuff I used to do on my phone I now do on my laptop, and it’s much easier to fold this big bulky thing and tuck it away. I’ve also realized that one need which the phone has effectively met is music streaming; if there’s anything I would have difficulty doing away with, it’s that (although FM radio has made a comeback in my life). But I believe that the phone has also overdone its task of providing entertainment. So much so that it has made us forget the very human need to be occasionally bored.

Finally, continue to read up on our impending doom caused by these gadgets. Once it becomes easier for you to ignore your phone, it would help to read up on how exactly you developed your addiction. The first thing you must know and take to heart is that many of its apps, and practically all social media platforms, are designed to get you hooked on them. 

Over the past few decades, certain people have developed more and more tools to make us dependent on our phones. They’ve employed all sorts of disciplines outside mere computer programming—psychology, visual arts, writing, sociology, etc., etc.—to bring to life a robust “attention economy” through algorithms that seem to know us better than we know ourselves. As kooky as this may sound, they are actively working on keeping us glued to our gadgets, so that it takes our entire being just to resist. Consider it a pat on the back, an assurance that you’re doing good, every time you read an article about the dangerous and wasteful paths social media, tech giants, and artificial intelligence have decided to take.

Me, I’m doing this partly for myself, partly for the people around me, and partly for the next generation. I find it worrisome to see in restaurants all these kids, ranging from toddlers to teenagers, too engrossed in their gadgets to enjoy the food in front of them, too busy to talk to each other. It helps to see a few persons looking around, looking somewhat entertained, or lost in thought, and not looking at their phone.