Though I have had the thought that a dumbphone wouldn't be the glamorous digital messiah I'm looking for that would immediately change my life and fix my mental health for good. No, what I'm probably longing for are the memories and the experience of being in middle school and getting my first phone. I didn't care that it wasn't a smartphone because it was a phone, and having a phone was cool. Now it's not just normal but expected, and that's taken a lot of the fun out of it.

Either way, after thinking about it for a bit that Alcatel probably wouldn't work on modern networks even if I was able to get it unlocked. I thought it was 4G but thinking about it more, it was already a bit of an older model by the time I got it and it was probably 3G at best. I would need to buy a new dumbphone, which itself isn't as easy of a prospect as you'd think. Smartphones are getting cheaper and cheaper, meaning there's less of a reason for manufacturers to even make dumbphones at all since one of the main reasons people even buy them is because they're not as much of an investment. Now the investments that really matter, your data privacy, screen time and exposure to algorithms, are all but forsaken, and the desire to get away from it all actually comes with a premium. Small companies overcharge for dumbphones that market themselves as such, and big companies' offerings are becoming harder to find and are often locked to expensive phone plans, many of whose features don't even work on the dumb devices.

dumb.co's Dumbphone 2 is probably the best I've seen at only $20 but even their practices seem a little shady, especially that they don't recommend using your own phone plan since most of the features it comes with are locked to their plan. Right now I'm just going to hold off and keep using my Pixel 8a with GrapheneOS and continue trying to make decisions that help me be more conscious about my phone use and overall screen time.