ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Brick is a $59 device that blocks you from accessing your most-used apps
- It’s on sale for $47 right now
- It helped me develop a better relationship to my phone
- Its positive reinforcements work better than competitors or Screen Time limits.
nov / 2025
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As every aspect of our working and social life is digitized, screen addiction has become less an exception to our way of living and more a widely accepted characteristic of it. I see this most commonly when I ask my friends, family, and coworkers how many hours a day they spend on their phones. The answers vary from three to eight hours.Â
I average around four hours of my day on my phone, checking emails, responding to texts, scrolling social media, and checking the weather. That’s four hours I could be spending reading a book, writing an article, learning how to predict the weather, calling a loved one, and doing anything besides checking the time suck and brain rot that is social media sites and messaging apps.Â
Also: I turned my Apple Watch into a dumbphone with this quick fix
Every October, as average daylight dwindles and my energy levels deplete, this feeling of learned helplessness at the hands of technology comes to a head. I have no energy to get up from my bed. It takes me a while to build the courage to transit to the gym. What do I do instead? I sit on my bed and I scroll.Â
I scroll through financial advice posts telling me that I should be investing way more in the market than I already am, I scroll through engagements and weddings my former classmates are celebrating, I scroll through reactionary content strangers post on the internet for clicks, and I scroll through some of the most sinister news my eyes can see and my brain can fathom. All this content is jumbled together, and I let it wash over me like I’m lying on the sands of a pathetic ocean.Â
Once I reach this point, I delete my social media apps. I try to put my…