I use a polaroid camera these days. It is messy and wrong and dark and unreliable and bulky and expensive; the exact opposite of the (awesome! but also generic and boring) iphone in my pocket.
Leave some room for frivolity in your life.
A protest to the tune of approximately $1 per photo. I love my 35mm SLR but shooting on it is extremely cost prohibitive. Digital photography doesn’t have to be inhumane, it’s more about the user than the technology.
Slides/print film and processing did not used to be cost-prohibitive. But I shot a few rolls of 35mm on my old SLR a few years ago and was stunned at the costs to just have them processed and scanned to digital files.
I used to do my own (B&W) processing as a kid and paid for it with paper route and lawn-mowing money; I don't know what that costs these days but it sure seems that film photography is no longer a reasonably cheap hobby.
Unless there was some time sensitive event, I might not look at them for weeks. Then I'll discard nine in ten.
You’d think I’d burn hundreds on film but no. A roll might last days or weeks or even longer. Every shot is different. I spend more time framing and making sure the exposure is correct. It forces you to slow down and think. The cost becomes hardly a thing because if I start worrying about $25 a month if that on film and dev, I have bigger problems.
You answered your own question — because you'd "give [yourself] a headache of 4000 photos with dozens of near identical shots to sift through".
It isn't the dollar-cost; it is the attention-cost.
When I shoot digital I might take forty shots of the same subject because there's movement and fractional differences in subject distance will visibly miss focus, so 10 fps.
When I shoot digital I might take one shot because exposure correct for highlights can be post-processed, so frame and focus.
I think, there is an early-digital point and shoot revival going on.
Atleast it will be much cheaper than film.
And you can take not shit photos with it as well!
If you have somehow made your phone inhuman, that's not on your phone.
If you feel like you can take pictures you couldn't take otherwise, start playing with the settings on your camera app.
However, the refills are expensive and the camera itself is very rudimentary (manual focus, limited control). OTOH, thanks to the simplicity, it is very easy to take apart and fix.
Very annoyed when we asked about that to find out they became a black hole for negatives.