I got my first smartphone when I was twelve. Ever since, I have been trying to build a healthy relationship with it, and to this day that remains difficult. Social media, peer pressure and hours of scrolling are not the exception for young people. For most of us they are simply everyday life.
Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat shaped a large part of my days for years, very effectively, and without me ever deciding that I wanted it that way. These platforms are built to hold onto as much of your time as possible, and with me they succeeded. My screen time was far above the recommended two hours a day, while school, friendships and sport slowly moved into the background. A habit turned into dependency, and dependency turned into addiction. It peaked during the pandemic lockdown.
The hard part is that it rarely feels like a problem. It feels like a harmless routine. You come home from school and just want to relax for a moment. A few reels here, a few videos there, and three hours have passed without you noticing. The quick hit of dopamine from short videos works like a slot machine: brief, intense, and it always leaves you wanting more. From the outside it showed as fading motivation for school, friends and hobbies. When I eventually deleted every account, something else took its place: the pressure of comparing yourself to everyone around you, and the feeling of no longer belonging.
Those years are where the wish to change something came from. A problem as new as the smartphone itself needs both honest conversation and a genuinely new answer, especially for young people who struggle to put any distance between themselves and their phone. That is where freeself begins.
Before I arrived at this solution, I spent a long time trying to fix it with the tools already available. I used Apple's own Screen Time and set app limits for Instagram, TikTok and the rest. The problem was never the feature itself. It was how little stood in the way of ignoring it. One tap on "Ignore limit" and the block was gone, with no real resistance and without anyone noticing. I watched this repeat for months in my own use, and later heard the same from others: parents set limits, children get around them in seconds, and both sides realise far too late that software alone does not solve this.
Step by step I became convinced that it takes more than another barrier on the same screen. It takes a deliberate moment away from the device, an action you cannot dismiss with your thumb. That thought became the starting point for freeself: a physical object that works together with an app, so that unlocking or limiting your phone is something you actively do, rather than something you quietly allow yourself.
