Do you remember how life used to feel?
Flip phone February: how I downgraded my phone and upgraded my life
I owe a great deal to writer, painter, and anti-tech activist August Lamm, who inspired me to downgrade and wrote a terrific guide, You don’t need a smartphone: a practical guide to downgrading & reclaiming your life. You can purchase it here.
I claimed to be a victim of my phone—an inanimate object I could, in theory, toss into traffic—for literal years, maybe even a decade, because I didn’t want to sit down and think seriously about how to change my life. I didn’t want to feel even a little bit of friction. My phone offered me so many “benefits,” so much “convenience.”
These days, we’re all pretty good at the sales pitch, rattling off the benefits of something. We’re not great at a clear-eyed interrogation of the costs. I think this tendency comes from a good place—a desire to be optimistic—but this means we’re constantly overstating the benefits, downplaying the costs, and wondering why things are not as good as we hoped they would be. Yes, smartphones offer countless benefits, but the cost of smartphone addiction is enormous, tremendous, and far too high (literal years of your waking life).
I have been without my smartphone for a month and my life is so much better I can hardly find the words. It’s painful to admit: up until now, I’d been complaining about the handcuffs around my wrists while simultaneously holding the keys. Do the corporations who engineer these devices and apps to be as addictive as possible deserve our scorn? Yes, they do.1 But we also have free will. You can move to Italy. You can quit your job. You can decide to buy a flip phone and actually use it.
You really can. Here’s how I did it.
Step one is admitting you have a problem
I wrote about how smartphones are hollowing out our lives in my essay, Your phone is why you don’t feel sexy. I re-read that essay recently, and honestly, it made me feel like a hypocrite. Not only had I come up short on offering practical solutions for smartphone addiction (I offered none), but here I was, vilifying the smartphone, something a thousand people have done, and yet I still spent hours on mine every day. When I wrote it, I was nine months pregnant and sure that I would use my phone less once the baby arrived.
I was wrong.
I scrolled a bit before bed, sometimes in the middle of the night after I fed my son, and often first thing in the morning. More often than I’d like to admit, my husband would ask me a question, and I’d have to ask him to repeat it, sometimes twice, because I was sucked into the void of my phone. I felt my phone’s constant pull—and its maddening, mind-scrambling distraction—when I was meant to be present with my family. Often when I was most exhausted or stressed, I wanted to curl up in bed and “go on my phone.” This drained me further.
All of this made me—makes me—feel ashamed. Shame is a hard emotion to deal with, and often, our first reaction to feeling shame is to double-down, even if we know what we’re doing is wrong. I’ve known I’ve had a “phone problem” for years, but I’ve always attempted to rationalize it to myself.
A few of my many excuses:
“This is how everyone lives now.” (A lie.)
“I’m not as bad as other people, some people are on their phones for like seven hours a day.” (Like I have never done that before.)
“I’m reading.” (Twitter.)
“I’m urgently looking up information essential to my or my child’s well-being.” (I’d probably find the answer more easily on desktop. And if it’s truly an emergency, you don’t look it up on Google, you call the doctor or 911.)
“I’m working.” (Scrolling Substack Notes.)
“I need to stay connected to what’s happening in culture.” (As if I cannot read and do not own a computer.)
“I’m looking at photos of my son.” (When he’s right in front of me.)
“I’m catching up with people.” (Reading a text and marking it unread in order to reply later.)
“I’m learning.” (Half-listening to a podcast or YouTube video.)
These are the words of an addict. The only legitimate excuse is that these devices and apps are quite literally designed to keep you on them. Some of the brightest minds of my generation have literally devoted their lives to getting people—getting you—to stay on the apps and click ads, monetizing your time and attention for their own benefit.2 We’re all doing a terrific job funding their Tahoe houses and sumptuous dinners overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It’s really depressing. Now that I’ve been without my iPhone for a month, the amount of information and stimulation I subjected myself to on a daily basis astonishes me.
