Part of my plan to take over the world this year involves going full caveman with my phone situation.
I’m talking dumb phones, baby.
The shitty little Nokia bricks that can barely send a text message without setting on fire.
The ones where typing out “meet you at 7” takes forty five button presses and the patience of a monk.
I used to do this back in the day whenever I wanted to drop off the face of the earth and become uncontactable by humans.
I’d swap my smartphone for a phone dumber than a bag of hammers. Just calls and texts. That’s it. No apps. No notifications.
I’m bringing that energy back to 2026.
There’s one small problem though…
The UK is completely nuking its 2G/3G infrastructure this year, which means my beloved vintage Nokia is about to become a very expensive paperweight. (Which is cool cause I still write things in notebooks and on paper like a caveman)
So I need to throw a whopping fifty bucks at a “modern” dumb phone that can actually connect to the 4G/5G networks.
And in the grand scheme of things. Fifty bucks to reclaim my sanity seems like a bargain.
But going dumb has it’s benefits. I mean if you look at the insanity that’s been at play last year and even now as 2026 starts. Dumb has its benefits.
Firstly. You’ll murder your dopamine addiction. No Instagram. No Twitter. No endless scroll of garbage designed by Stanford PhDs whose sole job is making you as addicted as a lab rat pressing a cocaine button. Your brain gets to remember what it’s like to be bored without immediately reaching for what I believe is the digital equivalent of crack.
You’ll fix your TikTok brain. You know that feeling where you can’t focus on anything for longer than eight seconds? Where reading an actual paragraph feels like climbing Everest? Yeah, that’s TikTok brain. It’s rotting your ability to think deeper than a puddle. A dumb phone forces you to sit with your thoughts like a normal human.
You’ll actually think again. Real thinking. The kind where ideas marinate and develop instead of getting interrupted every four minutes by some notification about shit you don’t care about. The kind of thinking that built businesses and wrote novels and created things worth creating. Which believe it or not, is fairly easy to do with what we have at hand. But clowns on social media gotta peddle you different ideas.
You won’t become an AI personality cult member.
You know these people…
They lurk around us…
…the ones who’ve made ChatGPT their entire identity. Who’ve replaced actual skills with prompt engineering. Who’ve become the hollow husk of whoever they used to be before they outsourced their brain to a chatbot.
They’re everywhere now, and they’re insufferable. Don’t be them.
You’ll be unreachable, which is a fucking superpower.
The world doesn’t end when you’re not available 24/7.
Actually, the opposite happens. You become more valuable because your time and attention aren’t free for all commodities that anyone can grab whenever they want.
I’m not saying throw your smartphone in a river and go live in a yurt. (The Yurt is a pretty damn cool idea though)
But having a dumb phone as your escape hatch for when you need to actually focus, actually create, actually think without your brain being hijacked by engagement bait and people pretending to be stupid for clicks, seems to be the best thing as we ease into 2026.
Fifty bucks.
That’s what it costs to opt out of the dopamine hamster wheel whenever you want.
Which imho is the best investment you’ll make all year.
Now if you’ll excuse me. I’ve got a Nokia to order and a world to take over.
Stephen Walker.