Gentle Parenting My Smartphone Addiction

On a recent weekday, I sent an Instagram message to a friend of mine, an art adviser in New York named Stephen Truax, to gossip about an exhibition. Instead of messaging me back in the app, he texted me to say that he’d blocked Instagram on his smartphone during daytime working hours. Impressed, I asked him how he was accomplishing such a feat. Truax said he was using Opal, an app that makes your smartphone a little more like a so-called dumbphone, without requiring you to trade in your device altogether. He said that several of his friends swore by the app, and so he had begun using it, too. Opal is not new—its current iteration launched in 2022—but I took this word of mouth as evidence, outside of the app-hype cycle, that it might actually work. I downloaded it without any particular optimism; I considered my phone addiction to be an incurable case.