If you know me IRL, you may have heard me say this week I think I’m ready to have a smartphone again.
But am I, really?
As I’ve been reflecting on where I go from here, allow me to carry you along while I muse/type out loud, as I know this is a experiment so many think of trying. Also, for the sake of fun, I’m accompanying this piece with film photos from my archives because why not.
No, definitely not expecting again, that I am aware of!
When I left Instagram about four years ago, I left behind the weird infatuation that a follower count of 80K people gives you (that’s way, way more than the number of folks living in my hometown!). It was a much more humbling experience than I had foreseen. Who was I, without that value attached to me? What could I do with all that free time? And what things is my attention capable of, if I give it the opportunity?
With social media gone, each step felt like the peeling of another layer trying to get to the core of those questions. First, I disabled data on my iphone. Then, I set it to grayscale and deleted most apps. Then, I started leaving it at home. And one day, after enough reading about people who had done it, I decided it was about time I got the dopamine from the action itself, and not from simply planning it. I was in Lisboa as I was there facilitating a workshop at the time, and just walked into a phone shop and asked for a flip phone. The cashier looked at me dumbfounded.
You want what?
A flip phone. You know… I imitated the gesture of a phone opening and closing. I had read about a certain new model of Nokia, so I went for it. Do you have the 2660?
He looked around and handed me a box.
Ah, you only have black? Was my question. I was seriously hoping for the pink one.
As I paid for it, I felt a slight sense of euphoria. Was I really doing it?
There you go with your burner phone to break in half and toss in the garbage after a dubious call. He accompanied this punch line by a pretty remarkable impression of what, in my own head, a mafia dude certainly looks like.
I looked him straight in the eye. I really plan on using this as my phone! Thank you! And left. The world of dumbphones was mine to conquer.
Let me preface what comes next by saying that my retired iphone is a used iphone 8, living its last breaths. The screen has been replaced more times than I can count, the home button doesn’t work, and it only stays on if connected to a plug. It hasn’t gone anywhere, but it lives in my office almost perpetually turned off. I use it for two tings only, which I’ll get to below. However, it’s mostly useless as the screen is a nightmare and doesn’t stay turned on unless it’s charging. But alas, it exists, in a way.
I also want to mention that my laptop has gained more use since I no longer use a smartphone. I use it for browsing, for WhatsApp, for reading the news, for checking the weather… And, most importantly, to work. So please don’t get the impression that I’m a luddite with 0 minutes of screen time. I’m here after all! My laptop is on for a good 6 to 7 hours a day. But once I close it, my screen time is capped. I head to the garden, I knit, I cuddle the baby, I help our eldest study for school, I hang out with friends, I take the sheep out to the field, I try out new recipes, I call my mom, I love my partner deeply. I simply am, with no distractions.
Frankly? It’s boring. My flip phone is boring as f*ck and even I can only play so many rounds of snake before looking for something else to do. And that’s why I love it.
What works
My BFF doing BFF stuff.
Minimal screen time, of course, since scrolling is off the table and could only happen on my laptop. It’s not very practical to bring my laptop to bed to browse Pinterest or The New Yorker while breastfeeding, anyway.
More long-form content, though I feel that I’m still healing my fragmented attention span. A study from last year showed that blocking internet on smartphones for only two weeks resulted in improvements in participants’ ability for sustained attention equivalent to the reversal of 10 years of age-related decline (1). These numbers gave me pause, too! We definitely owe our brains some more respect. And yes, I’ll be fully candid, it’s not always easy to focus for long periods of time over one piece of writing with a baby, as I’m dependent on nap times to use my laptop, so there is this sense that every minute counts. Maybe you can relate?
WhatsApp on laptop is great! I use it for group chats and conversations with faraway friends, so maintaining WhatsApp was a non-negotiable for me. It’s super easy to set it up on a laptop, though it will sometimes disconnect from your account if you don’t use it fora certain period, and I need to dig up my derelict iphone to reconnect. It feels like a little treat to open it at the end of the day to read messages (people thinking of me!) and reply to them using two hands. iMessage also works just fine on laptop, so honestly, I’m not missing out on much.
Work stays in the office (unless, of course, I bring my laptop down to the porch or the garden for an al fresco work session, which I 10/10 recommend). This is one of my heaviest factors for loving the flip phone so much. Once I close down my laptop at the end of the work day, that’s it. I can’t be reached, and I can’t casually check emails while waiting for the kettle to boil, or open Slack just to see what’s happening. None of that. When I’m done, that is sacred time for my family and I, for personal projects or for simply doing nothing and not feeling guilty. Just because you can be productive, it doesn’t mean you have to. This took some unlearning. In case you’re wondering, I work in marketing (Herbal Academy team!), but social media is the smallest of fractions of what I do since we have a dedicated team member taking good care of that side. And anything I happen to have to do on social media can be done just as well (sometimes even better, as I my attention is fully there) via the browser.
JOMO (joy of missing out) is real! I don’t need to be in all group chats, I don’t need to know the latest gossip, and I don’t need to respond straight away to a message. If it’s important, people in my circles know they can just call.
What doesn’t work
Example of a photo taken by the Nokia
The ease of quick photos! My Fujifilm XT100 is a bit large (and honestly, way too precious) to nonchalantly carry around. The Nokia’s quality is pixelmaxxing at best. Often, I’ll borrow my partner’s iPhone for a quick photo and just WhatsApp it to my number or airdrop to the laptop, if it’s something I want to share later.
Browsing for a podcast and simply playing it. Listening to a podcast during an afternoon walk after work is one of my deepest forms of self-care. But whereas before that meant just popping my headphones on and picking an episode as I walked out the door while putting the leash on the dog, now it means finding a podcast episode on my laptop > fetching the hyperlink > podcast to mp3 converter > opening my flip phone’s case to remove de micro SD > sliding it into the SD adapter since Mac doesn’t have a slot > pasting the file into the card > getting it back into the flip phone and closing it. If it sounds like it’s too much, imagine doing that with one hand only, carrying on a hip a baby that is ready for their afternoon nap. I could do two things here, though, to make it easier: either borrowing our daughter’s mp3 player, which only requires a cable to transfer files into, or be a more organised person and load episodes ahead of time.
Spontaneous video calls. Because most times on my laptop I’m working, any video call coming through is generally bad timing. My best friend lives in France and I don’t have an international minutes plan, so WhatsApp is our main vehicle of communication. I love calling her from my kitchen while we’re both preparing lunch and/or eating it, but it’s not very practical to carry the laptop around, up and down the stairs, often with aforementioned baby on aforementioned hip.
Payments through payment apps. Though these are very rare, maybe once a month or so, it’s something that has to be done through the derelict iPhone (and I need to make a note not to forget to process the payment once I get home). So this and reconnecting WhatsApp on my laptop are the only things that I still need to do on my iphone.
Blackberry picking with my dear friend & neighbour & most talented creative Emmi!
Unexpected things that happened along the way
Of course, no experience isn’t without its surprises, and there are a few that bloomed out of this.
Since my phone doesn’t have internet or anything important work-related, I feel confident handing it to our almost-11-year-old daughter when she goes ride her bike on the hills with her friends. She doesn’t have a phone of her own, and the fact that she gets to experience what a phone is for (calling, occasionally texting, a game or two of snake and eventually a few blurry photos) sounds to me like a healthy first approach to this technology. I also like that I am able to model a relationship with a phone that presents it as tool, and not as a vehicle of consumerism, distraction, or mindless entertainment.
Since Spotify isn’t that practical to use anymore, and anyway I had deleted it from my laptop a while ago, we got a home stereo with a CD player and I hoarded some of our old family records that were stored away at my mom. How I missed starting my days to Anouar Brahem echoing through the house! It lives in the living room and it’s also super easy to connect to my laptop via bluetooth, which makes it great for podcast listening, too.
I call my friends more often now. The T9 keyboard is more of a pain in the bum than I remembered, or maybe it’s just this Nokia model, and even though I have predictive writing turned on, texting is fun but calling is better.
Got a pretty badass record of 277 points in snake.
So, where do I go from here? Maybe, just maybe, I’m not ready to go back after al. I lied. The tings that I find that don’t work are all about friction and how much of it I’m willing to endure.
Is a bit of friction the price to pay for a more balanced mental health? Personally, it might be and I’m okay with it.
Of course, what works for me is just that.
If you’ve done the transition, or are thinking of it… How is it going for you?
On a completely separate note, but before I go to bed with a good book… I’ve shared this on Notes, but giving it a more permanent space here:
My book, The Wild Craft, has sold out in the last month or so. What does this mean for you? Well, since there are no plans to reprint soon, if you want to get a copy for yourself or for holiday gifting (*cough* makes a lovely gift!), here’s what you can do:
👉🏽 Buy it now if you see it online or physically, as stock may not last
👉🏽 If the online shop doesn’t have it, tap the “notify me” button and, in the physical store, ask them to order it. This signals to the publisher that folks want more! ⚡
👉🏽 If you have bought a copy in the past, please leave a (good, please) review on Google, Amazon (I know you don’t like supporting Jeff Bezos’ online store either, it’s okay!), or Goodreads. Sustained reader engagement means more than many of us think.
And with this, my friends, I bid farewell for now. Blessed Samhain, everyone. See you on the other side of the veil?
Noah Castelo, Kostadin Kushlev, Adrian F Ward, Michael Esterman, Peter B Reiner, Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being, PNAS Nexus, Volume 4, Issue 2, February 2025, pgaf017, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf017
