Core Purpose Thinking: Going Analog Part 1

This is hopefully the first in a series of essays that I want to write to explore “Core Purpose Thinking”.

Table of Contents (because this is a long article)

What is Core Purpose Thinking?

This phrase just came into my head one day – I am sure it has been coined elsewhere before, so I don’t claim any originality. However, I did find that it helped me integrate the many observations I have about the way our environment and technology is structured these days, especially the issues that I have with them¹.

I believe that the majority of issues I have with the way our lives are structured is due to a lack of Core Purpose Thinking on behalf of both us, as people who experience life, and those who design or structure the environment that we live in. To a large extent we can be both, and this series of essays will explore how we can take over agency of our own lives as users since we have barely any influence over the large companies that have so much apparent control over how we interact with our environment.

Going Analog: Don’t be Gaslighted

There has been a movement recently to return to analog ways of doing things. There are many reasons for this, including nostalgia, digital fatigue, non-conformism, etc. Buried beneath all this is a general disappointment with the promise of technology, which some have contextualized as ungratefulness: essentially, we take for granted the immense power we have at our fingertips thanks to modern mobile computing. It is the same argument as that we should not complain about how terrible flying coach on a budget airline is because objectively speaking, the ability to fly in an aircraft is amazing and we should not take it for granted.

This is a convincing argument, but it does not hold up because it fails to acknowledge that a technological advance, once achieved and universally implemented, loses its novelty factor and becomes routine. This brings us to Core Purpose Thinking. Given enough time, adoption, and evolution, the core purpose of a technological breakthrough changes because the world it now exists in – which it helped create – has changed.

Take flying for example. To continue seeing it solely from the perspective of its initial core purpose – to enable people to cover hitherto unimaginable distance in a few hours’ time – is to not acknowledge how the world has changed to accommodate this new reality. If this were true, why would there be first and business class, executive lounges, airport shopping malls, additional charges for seat selection, meals, baggage allowance, etc.? The simple act of flying has been normalized and recontextualized by exactly those companies that facilitate it, and users are justified in evaluating their experience apart from being always in awe of the fact that they can go from New York to London over night.

There is an awful lot of what is now called gaslighting that goes on when anyone tries to move away from a generally accepted idea. First of all, we tend to gaslight ourselves. I find being called without prior notice very stressful, and I am hyper-sensitive to the sound of phone notifications. For the longest time I tried to convince myself that this is how life is now, and I just need to stop being a special snowflake and get along with the program.

Guess what? This did not make my “condition” go away. I still felt stressed every time I or someone else I was with got a call or a text, but now I had the additional task of actively silencing my initial response and scolding myself for feeling this way. Over time, I accepted this was a legitimate problem that only I could solve, especially because I seemed to be the only person who at least admitted to having it. This lead me to dramatically reduce the number of such interactions – and now without even noticing, I have much less stress in my life, and I feel grateful for it every day.

If you don’t gaslight yourself, others are happy to. All popular media and news will confuse you by releasing content that does acknowledge the fact that your problems exist and are shared by other people, but then continue pushing the same things that cause those problems without any awareness of their hypocrisy. They got you both ways, and you just eternally oscillate between the catharsis of having your issues acknowledged by someone else and the helplessness of thinking there is no escape.

Your boss, your family, your friends – they will listen to you, even empathize, but will not help you with a solution. This is not because they are evil, but simply because they prioritize their needs and convenience over yours – as everyone does, including yourself. If you are waiting for someone else to take the step that you need to – like I did – you are just wasting your time, because the intensity of your needs will never be felt by someone else, no matter how much they empathize and sympathize with your condition.

Why Go Analog?

So why go analog? I had the same reasons as everyone else, to repeat: nostalgia, being non-conformist, digital fatigue, or even just the feeling of doing something different. But these are unsustainable because they can’t compensate for the sheer convenience that a modern smartphone provides. It is hard to build lasting habits on a negative feeling – that is, any new change in our lifestyle should enable us to achieve something tangible and positive instead of being a pole to hang a moral or emotional flag on. At the very minimum, any new habit, especially if it is more difficult than the status quo, should eliminate something tangibly negative in our lives, opening up time and energy to pursue more positive experiences.

It is only when I started tying this dissatisfaction with technology to actual tangible issues in my life that I was able to make sustainable steps towards going analog. I started thinking critically of every interaction I had with my smartphone and other devices, and isolating those parts that really pissed me off. And then it occurred to me: my problem was that my idea of the core purpose of these interactions did not align with the core purpose for which these devices and applications were designed for.

The modern smartphone is capable of doing so many things that it is impossible to arrive at one single core purpose for it. So like they did in classical philosophy, I tried to get to this definition by removing things that were not part of the core purpose for me and arrive at the essential point of this technology. Is it the phone and internet connectivity? the ability to take photos and videos? Or the ability to use it as a mobile computer? Because I know one thing for sure: it is an indispensable part of my life that I hate using, but can’t understand why. Core Purpose Thinking is a framework that allows me to work step-by-step to identify, isolate, and rectify those things that don’t work for me, and build on the things that do.

In short: keep the good, leave the bad, and don’t get moralistic about anything.

Getting A Second Device

I plucked the lowest hanging fruit first: my major annoyance with smartphones is being interrupted during scheduled time by unscheduled and unexpected notifications. If I am listening to music on my smartphone, I don’t want it to get paused by a call from a telemarketer.² Having a second capable device that allowed me to do the things I liked without unwanted interruptions is the simplest solution I found. Since this may sound counterintuitive, I would like a second to explain.

Going analog is not the same as minimalism, although they may begin from the same premise. The more you go analog, the more you increase the number of single-purpose devices you have for doing things your smartphone did in one package. Depending on your use case, going analog may mean getting a dedicated alarm clock, a point-and-shoot camera, a separate GPS device, a pedometer etc. You will still need a phone for calls and texts, and for multimedia consumption.³

Besides separating scheduled and unscheduled interactions, you can also use a second device to segregate your personal and professional life. I use my Galaxy Z Fold 5 for work stuff like emails, calls, texts, etc. My second device – an iPhone 13 Pro Max that was my primary phone earlier – functions as my camera, video recorder, Instagram browser, and media player.

I can plug in my iPhone to my car and not worry about my ringtone blasting at full volume two minutes into my drive playlist. I can go on a run with my iPhone, ignorant of any work calls that I receive in the interim, which I can respond to in the right mental state when I return. I can respond to Whatsapp messages on my work phone without the temptation of swiping over to Instagram while I wait for my employee to respond. My iPhone has all notifications disabled, so I can catch up with messages and e-mail (shared between both phones) in the evening in my own time.

This one change has been the most meaningful because it has helped me define expectations for my interactions with technology: I know now exactly why I reach for my phone, what I intend to do with it, and how I will conclude my interaction and move to the next thing. If I pick up my iPhone, I know it is to listen to music, watch YouTube, scroll Instagram, or take a picture. If I pick up my Fold, I know it is to respond to an e-mail or just be ready to take a call. The unscheduled interruptions have been minimized.

Reviving Old Devices for Single Use

I had some old iPads lying around with dead batteries. I have an irrational attachment to old things, so I decided to try and revive them. I sent them to a local repair shop and voila – after replacing the battery, they turned on and were in perfect working condition. The thing we forget about old devices such as these is that, at the time, they were built as flagship items priced at the top of the market. A second-generation iPad is much superior in build quality to a cheap Samsung tablet, even though the latter might have the latest OS and features. This makes it ideal for use as a single-purpose device once software support for it has died out.

I also have an old iPhone 5S that I dearly love, so I revived that as well. I wanted to make it into a dedicated music player for my home office and car. Besides its super small form factor and dedicated headphone jack, it still had the ability to download Spotify and iTunes music – making it perfect for the task. I had the battery replaced, and it worked like a charm.

Repurposing old devices for single use is a very satisfying feeling. I can use my iPad to browse the internet for guitar chords that I can then set up in front of me while I practice. My iPhone 5S can live dedicatedly next to my speaker and play all the songs that I import into it from iTunes or Spotify. Outsourcing these interactions from my main smartphone again helps me narrow down the use cases I have for it, and also give me perspective over its apparent indispensability.

The Relationship between Going Analog and Core Purpose Thinking

This essay is titled “Core Purpose Thinking” and most of it has really been about my tentative steps towards Going Analog. Someone (yes, I know one of you exists) reading it might start to wonder: did I wander off into a stream of consciousness? How are they related?

I probably did wander off slightly, but I also don’t want to make this into a catchphrase that I insert into every paragraph. The truth is, recently every time I picked up my phone and opened an application, I felt a flash of anger and frustration. For example, when I opened Spotify and had to keep dismissing pop-ups for Hit Music in India to get to my library of Liked Songs. Or when my Fold kept making me tap “not now” on a UI upgrade, and when I finally gave in, that I can Circle and Search now, when I just wanted to open Whatsapp and respond to a work message. Or when I wanted to Google something, Google News threw up a bunch of news articles on my home page that were were not at all suspiciously related to conversations I had just had with friends and families offline.

All these interactions got me thinking: why do developers insert pop-ups that interfere with using an application for its intended purpose? Why do applications hound you to update them when you just want to use them normally, and then when they are updated, everything has been moved around without any apparent benefit? What is the point of it all?

And then it hit me: I have no control over these things that are essential to my day-to-day life. It used to be that when you bought something – if it was a good product – it could be used reliably and predictably till the end of its life span. You bought it for a purpose, and used it to that end till you could. With modern consumer technology, this is no longer the case.

I grew up at a time when analog technology was transitioning to digital. I owned radios, mp3 players, desktops, dumbphones – the whole lot – before smartphones took over everything. I enjoy the reliability of pressing a button that always does the same thing, of doing my computer work at a desk and not having my laptop open when I am sitting with family and friends, of getting up to answer the phone, hanging up, and then returning to the present. If smartphones let me do the same thing in a more convenient package – why not?

Going analog is the means I am using to answer this question. By isolating parts of my daily interactions with my smartphone and computer and distributing it over single-use devices, I am trying to understand what purpose this technology serves in the context of my life and its objectives.

I can’t control how Spotify and Whatsapp are programmed, but I can control why and how I interact with them. I can’t tell people to not use Whatsapp simply because I don’t like it, but I can use it in a way that minimizes my frustrations with it by paring it down to the essential role it plays in my life. I can’t stop the march of technology, but I can step away from it for a bit and think. This is what Core Purpose Thinking means for me.

Over the next few essays I will be writing more on this theme, and how my efforts in this direction are turning out.

Footnotes

I typed out a definition of what I believe Core Purpose Thinking to be and deleted it, since it is quite self-explanatory and if not, then perhaps better illustrated with examples. I also tend to get bogged down in definition ad absurdum, so I am trying to avoid that. ↩︎
I hate being called so much that I have never set my favorite tune as my ringtone: that would be the shortest path to start hating that song by association to the experience I have with calls. ↩︎
Moving from a smartphone life to managing several different devices is a major lifestyle change that I have attempted before and failed at. I was obsessed for a long time with the idea of having a dumbphone for calls and texts, and using old-fashioned devices for everything else. It all seemed so romantic and avant-garde. But these aren’t sustainable reasons because they aren’t tied to any real, practical problem I was trying to solve in my life, and they create several more problems that I haven’t anticipated. ↩︎

Further reading/watching:

1. Dankpods videos that helped solidify my approach to using old devices for single use:

2. Louis Rossman on the cult of Apple: