I want to tell you why half the drafts on this site started their life on a BlackBerry. It began almost by accident. I was clearing out a drawer at my parents’ place last year and found my old BlackBerry Bold, the one with the actual physical keyboard, the one I used back before touchscreens took over everything. I charged it out of nostalgia more than anything else, expecting it to be dead within the hour. It wasn’t. And on a whim, one slow evening, I opened the notes app on it and started typing instead of reaching for my laptop. What struck me immediately was how different it felt to write. There’s no autocomplete finishing your sentences.

No AI suggesting the next paragraph before you’ve decided what you actually think. No browser tab one swipe away where you could just ask something to write it for you instead. Just a small screen, a keyboard that clicks under your fingers, and whatever is actually in your head. It turns out that’s a much smaller list of things than I expected. I want to be clear that this isn’t an anti-technology stance. I work with data pipelines, product roadmaps, and yes, AI tools, every single day. Some of the biggest efficiency wins in my own work have come from exactly the kind of automation that a lot of people are (rightly, sometimes) nervous about. I’m not writing this from some purist corner where machines are the enemy. I’m writing it because I noticed something specific happening to my own writing, and I wanted to do something about it. The thing I noticed was this: when a tool can produce a plausible-sounding paragraph in two seconds, it becomes very easy to stop asking whether that paragraph is actually true, or actually mine. Not because the tool is malicious, but because the friction that used to force a decision is gone. You used to have to sit with a blank page long enough that you were forced to figure out what you meant. Now you can skip straight to something that reads like you meant something, without ever finding out if you did.

So the BlackBerry became a small, slightly absurd solution to a real problem. If I draft something on it first (a blog post, a reflection, sometimes even a difficult email), I know for a fact that every sentence in it passed through my own head before it hit the screen. There’s no shortcut available even if I wanted one. By the time I move a draft over to a laptop to clean it up, the thinking part is already done. What’s left is editing, not outsourcing. I don’t expect this to be a permanent habit, and I don’t think everyone needs a 15-year-old smartphone to write something honest. But in a moment where it’s never been easier to produce something that sounds right without ever checking if it is right, I’ve found it useful to have at least one part of my process where that shortcut simply doesn’t exist. Staying genuine, for me, has turned out to be less about big principles and more about small, deliberately inconvenient habits, this one just happens to have a keyboard that clicks.