To other people, this home screen probably looks impossibly noisy. For me, this is what being out of the world looks like. No social media on the front page – those apps are buried in the back with notifications turned off.
Five instances of news, if you include Reeder for RSS. WhatsApp is mostly for family, Signal is for work and close friends who hate WhatsApp. App In The Air is on the front page because I have travel coming up. The blue icon next to the phone app is Spark for email, and the red one next to that is Downcast for podcasts.
Soma FM because I spend a lot of nights on my own and its Drone Zone channel helps me sleep. BBC Sounds because I’m British. And Wikipanion may be the single most useful app I have: literally the biggest encyclopedia on the planet accessed by a touchpoint on a bit of glass.
Oh, and those are three different note-taking apps in the top right because I just can’t settle on one.
For me, this is, perversely, the quiet phone. Every action available on the home screen demands direct considered intent and every result output is teaching or calming. When your brain and heart try to kill you every now and then, and you still have a lot of work to do, this is part of what living in the contemporary condition needs to look like.
What does yours look like? Do you think about this? Or am I finally sliding from pre-senile to actual-senile?