A new trend has surfaced on my feed. I felt like it was a good subject for a blog post because it relates to a past post. Analog bags. An analog bag is basically an expensive bag filled with devices and knick-knacks meant to keep people off their phone. Even though I have employed somewhat of the same idea myself, I believe it is blatant over-consumption, packaged up in a pretty bow of feigned superiority.
The decentralization of phones is something I wholeheartedly subscribe to, it’s the lack of actual behavioral change that irks me. Most of the time, when we reach for our phones, it’s to satisfy our brains. The quick hits of dopamine that come from endlessly scrolling on Instagram or TikTok have become a way to destress or to avoid something. It’s difficult to break out of this cycle, but it makes it even harder to get out cold turkey when we simply replace it with things that don’t produce a similar reaction in our brains. This lack of dopamine often brings us back to the cycle within days or weeks, and that expensive bag of other devices or items that you bought specifically for getting away from your phone is now forgotten and relegated to a dark corner of disinterest. And most of the time, people are only doing it to tote their “chronically offline” lifestyle as a medal of honor to hold over people’s heads. It feels like a taunt when the ones who are actually doing the work to move away from social media and the slot-machine-from-hell that is the algorithm get lumped into this group. When self-improvement stems from disingenuous intent like this, it makes other movements seem just as fabricated. It also adds to the over-consumption that plagues the globe when influencers create a trend that is so heavily supported by the buying of new things. Most videos I’ve seen have recommended buying from the Amazon storefront linked in their bio, when it would be so much easier to take an old bag and buy from thrift stores and rent books from libraries. These endless pits that we throw our money into won’t improve us no matter how much we spend if we don’t do the work to improve our behavior. You have to do the work to change the habit or it will just lead you to seek that dopamine from other, maybe worse sources.
