Most of the stories I read these days aren't technically books but web serials. It can be tricky sifting good stuff from meh, but royalroad's reviews are much better than Amazon's, and Topwebfiction is a pretty good ranking board (as long as the serial is still being updated. Although Worm's been finished for almost a decade now, and as of right now it's #10 on the weekly leaderboard)

For games, I recommend small puzzle games. Microsoft freecell/solitaire. Match 3 games. There's some good ones, but you want the ones that really lean into being a mobile game and is not just a poor version of a full game (e.g. diablo immortal)

Regarding books, most of the books I read recently came from Reddit on /r/suggestmeabook - I am lazy, I just search for “page turner” on the sub, but I also like browsing and seeing people asking for subjects I wouldn’t have thought of.

You could run emulators on your phone if you want better games.

> Damn man, I was just thinking about how annoying it is that I can't find anything fun to do on my phone.

I feel your pain. As I've grown older I've found it more difficult to enjoy video games no matter what the medium is, and likewise the news seems to all read the same these days except for the "who" in the story.

I used to think that no video game or movie could scare me, and I craved to find that, but then I played Friday Nights at Freddy's on VR and quickly found my limits. I know now that video games can scare me - to the point of involuntarily crying out in a high-pitched girly voice (for reference, I'm a middle-aged grey bearded man). So that wasn't my thing either.

The games I enjoy these days (far and few in between - i.e. a weekend every blue moon) are pretty much the kind of games I made fun of fifteen years ago - Farmville type games. I don't want to examine a table and read the description of all of the worse-than-worthless items upon it (looking at you, heavy brass candlestick). I just want to water my plants and come back later. Maybe I'll come back fifteen minutes later while I'm still on my elliptical and get another round of harvesting in, or maybe I wont return for another month. These days I don't play games often, but when I do, I play very slow games. At this point I wouldn't put it past myself to play a game that revolves around paint drying.

Haha, yeah, VR horror is way too much for me too. Wow, it's like I'm actually being ripped apart by zombies!

I still have a blast playing games on my consoles/PC FWIW, I just don't like any of the ones I've found on phones lately

Just count yourself lucky you don't have many phone habits to kick. Don't try acquire more habits, you're already winning.

For mobile games, I would suggest Amanita Design studio.

Machinarium, Samorost 3, Creaks, Pilgrims, Botanicula.

They are available on PC, gog.com, Steam, Apple Appstore.

They are hand crafted point & click games.

I'm still in the phase where I pick up my phone and then don't really know what to do with it. Mobile games are mostly garbage I found. Hopefully sometime soon my brain will internalize the fact that the phone doesn't provide a torrent of hormones anymore and let me not pick it up in the first place.

One thing I'm trying is to put books in places I would previously do my doomscrolling in, coffee table by the couch for instance. Sometimes I pick up the book instead of the phone, read a page or 5 and then go do something else. Small win, yay me.

The thing I have to learn is that the phone is a tool, not a way to spend time because I don't know what else to do, at least not the default way.

To anyone working on maximizing user engagement, think about what you're doing to all of us, please.