Freedom. Apple Screen Time with adult content restricted. My password handed to someone I trusted so I couldn't change the settings myself. Later, the newer tools that scan what's actually on your screen rather than just matching a blocklist.

I found a way around all of them.

Not immediately, and not every time. But over months, one by one, every barrier I put up eventually came down. For a long time I read that as evidence that I was the problem. It took me years to understand that it was evidence of something else entirely, and that the answer wasn't a better blocker.

What blockers genuinely do well

It would be easy to write these off, and that would be wrong. Blockers do something real.

Most use isn't planned. It happens in a gap: ten minutes in bed, a dead half hour, a moment of not knowing what to do with yourself. In that window the decision is made in seconds, and anything that interrupts those seconds genuinely changes the outcome. A blocker turns a two-second action into a fifteen-minute obstacle course, and quite often you don't bother.

That matters most in the earliest days, when the pull is strongest and you have the least to fall back on. If a blocker gets you through the first fortnight, it has earned its place. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

The problem isn't that blockers do nothing. It's what they're built to do.

They target access, not demand

Every blocker on the market works on the same assumption: that the problem is availability. Remove the supply and the behaviour stops.

But you're not using because it's available. It's available to nearly everyone with a phone, and most of them aren't stuck in a five-year loop trying to stop. You're using because it does something for you. And a blocker doesn't touch that. It leaves the want completely intact and simply puts a fence in front of it.

So now there's pressure on one side of a fence and nothing on the other. That holds until one of two things happens. Either you're tired, stressed or low enough that fifteen minutes of effort stops feeling like a deterrent, or you go looking for the gap in the fence. There's always a gap. A borrowed device, a browser the software doesn't cover, a setting that resets after an update, an account that isn't yours.

I'm not going to list the ways round, because that's not useful to anyone reading this. The point is that you don't need me to. If you want it enough, you'll find them, and the finding is easier than the wanting is to sit with.

The accountability partner problem

Handing my password to someone else was the strongest version of this I tried, and on paper it should have worked. The obstacle wasn't technical any more. It was social. Getting round it meant either asking them for the password or admitting why I wanted it.

What actually happened is more revealing. Shame is a powerful deterrent right up until the moment you need relief more than you need to avoid it. Then it flips, and it becomes something you have to manage afterwards rather than something that stops you. You get better at the conversation. You find reasons the setup needs changing. And the whole thing quietly slides from a barrier into an admin problem.

Worse, the shame doesn't disappear when the barrier fails. It compounds. Now you've let someone down as well, which for most people is a reliable route straight back to the thing that makes bad feelings go away.

The newer tools have the same blind spot

The screen-scanning tools are a genuine technical step up. They aren't limited to a blocklist, so they catch things older filters missed, and the coverage is broader.

But better detection is still detection. It's a more sophisticated fence, built on the same theory of the problem. It's arguably harder to get past, which mostly means the workaround takes longer to find. It doesn't make you want it less, and it doesn't tell you why you wanted it in the first place.

What the search for a workaround is actually telling you

Here's the reframe, and it's the thing I wish someone had said to me at nineteen.

When you find yourself at eleven at night methodically working out how to get past a filter you installed yourself, stop and look at what's happening. That is a lot of effort. It's deliberate, it's sustained, and it's aimed at something you have already decided you don't want.

Something is generating that much pressure. And whatever it is has nothing to do with the filter.

For me, it was almost always the same shape. There was something I was supposed to be doing and didn't want to face. A deadline at school, later at work, something I'd looked at, found harder than I wanted it to be, and put down. Or something bigger and vaguer sitting underneath: what I was doing with my career, things in a relationship I wasn't dealing with. The habit was reliable at making all of that go quiet for a while.

Read that again, because it's the whole point. A blocker cannot help with a deadline you're avoiding. It cannot help with a career decision you're frightened of. It removes the fastest way you have of not thinking about them and leaves you standing in front of them with nothing.

Which is why the fence comes down. Not because you're weak. Because there's still a reason to get past it, and the reason was never addressed.

How to actually use a blocker

None of this means uninstall everything. It means demoting them from solution to scaffolding.

Use them early and expect them to expire. A blocker is most valuable in the first few weeks, when you need the friction while you work on the rest. Treat it as temporary support, not a permanent fix. Anything that stops working the moment you're tired isn't a foundation.

Treat every workaround as data. Don't just note that you got round it. Write down what was going on in the hour before. What you'd been doing, what you'd been avoiding, what you were feeling. After a few entries the pattern is usually obvious and usually isn't what you assumed.

Stop escalating. If the last three blockers failed, the fourth won't be different. Adding tools feels like progress because it feels like doing something, but you're solving a problem you don't have. You never lacked obstacles. You lacked a reason not to want it.

Do the harder thing underneath. If it's a deadline, the answer is a plan for the deadline. If it's a decision you're avoiding, the answer is facing the decision. That's slower and considerably less satisfying than installing an app, which is exactly why most people keep installing apps.