How every human before 2007 managed without this

For most of human history, going to the bathroom was one of the least complicated things a person did all day. You went, you finished, you left. Studies of pre-smartphone toilet habits put the average visit under a minute — not because anyone was rushing, but because there was nothing else to do in there.

That simplicity wasn't discipline. It was just the default, the same way nobody in 1995 decided against checking emails on the toilet, because email wasn't in their pocket yet. The behaviour we now try to manage with willpower used to be managed automatically, by the plain absence of an alternative.

It's worth being precise about what that means: this isn't ancient humans having more discipline than we do. They required none. The moment a sufficiently compelling alternative arrived in every pocket, everyone's bathroom time stretched to accommodate it, across every culture it's been studied in. Not a personal failing — just the predictable result of handing billions of people a slot machine and unstructured time in the same fifteen-year window.

The interesting question isn't "why can't we go back" — nobody is giving up their phone. It's what was actually happening in that unstructured minute that's now filled with something else. Some of it was nothing, and nothing has its own quiet value. Some of it was the kind of unstructured mental drift that people now pay a monthly subscription for, in an app, on the same phone that removed it in the first place.

You don't need to romanticise 1995 to notice it had one advantage by default: a couple of minutes with nothing to do but the thing you came to do.

And that's why I urge you, for the sake of the human race and whatever's left of your attention span before dinner, to consider any product that hands back those two minutes without asking you to change anything else about your life. We happen to make one — drop it. Not a lifestyle. Just a box.