Well, this one made me smile. There's a small $59 device making the rounds called Brick, and the trend it's part of, dubbed "bricking," is all about stepping away from your phone instead of staring at it. You tap your phone against the little gadget and your distracting apps, the social feeds, the endless scroll, get locked away until you tap again to bring them back.

I have to chuckle, because I remember when the whole point of a phone was to do MORE. My first cellphone made calls and, if you were fancy, played Snake. Then we spent two decades packing everything onto one slab of glass, and now people are paying money to unplug parts of it. My granddaughter Jess is always telling me I don't scroll enough, which I suppose is a compliment I'll take.

The idea is simple, and that's exactly why it works. Willpower is a muscle, and at 11 p.m. it's a tired muscle. Brick removes the argument entirely. Your apps are gone, your phone still handles texts and calls and maps, and the impulse to "just check one thing" hits a wall. It's the same logic my mother used with the cookie jar on the top shelf. The jar wasn't impossible to reach, it was just inconvenient enough that you mostly didn't bother.

The fact that people are buying a separate gadget for this tells you something. Screen time settings already exist on every phone, and most of us set them once, felt virtuous, and then tapped "ignore limit" the first night. A physical object you have to walk across the room to tap creates just enough friction. And there's a whole little community forming around it too, with folks comparing how long they "bricked" their phones the way we used to compare step counts.

Is $59 a lot for what amounts to a very firm lock? A little, yes, and I'd normally be the first to grumble about that. But compare it to what the doomscroll actually costs you, in sleep, in attention, in evenings that vanish into a feed you can't remember the next morning. Technology should work for you, not quietly steal your Tuesday. If a $59 gadget gives people back an hour a day, that's one of the better deals in tech right now.

I still say the best screen-time strategy is free: put the phone in another room and go outside. But I'm also realistic. I've watched enough tech revolutions to know that convenience always beats discipline in a fair fight, so sometimes you have to buy your discipline in a nice little box.