dumbphone diaries
me vs. the urge to fling my iphone into the atlantic
I like my iPhone. It’s useful. It’s a decent enough pocket camera, it has GPS, and it has access to the internet which means I can find the answer to any question that pops into my head at any time. It connects me to people I’d otherwise fall completely out of touch with. I can write down my random thoughts and ideas in the notes app wherever I am. My local grocery store has an app I can use to store my grocery list, complete with current prices and aisle numbers. And frankly, without Siri and the reminders app on my phone, laptop, and watch, I would never remember to do anything. Seriously.
I also hate my iPhone. It’s always there, lurking within a four foot radius, begging for my attention. I have more information in my pocket than I could ever possibly need in a lifetime. It gives me the illusion of social connection without the benefits of actual connection. There are ads everywhere. There’s garbage AI content everywhere. Every app has its own TikTok-esque feature for some reason. You can scroll forever and not run out of things to look at. And for every app I’m trying to use less, there’s a team of people actively working to get me to use them more.
My iPhone is practically glued to my person. I can’t even go the bathroom for 32 seconds without compulsively reaching for my phone first. In the last month, I’ve spent an average of 5 hours a day on my phone, and that’s on the lower end for me. Historically, it’s been much higher. If my screen time were to remain as it is now for the rest of my life, I’ll have spent over a decade of that time on my phone. A decade! A few hours of screen time a day doesn’t seem so insidious until you zoom out and view it in the context of your entire life; then, it becomes absolutely terrifying.
For years, I’ve been trying to find the happy medium between chronically online and virtually unknowable, and never had any meaningful success. After the screen time feature became available on Apple devices, I tried using downtime and screen time limits to reduce my phone usage. It worked for a week or so, but then I got into the habit of bypassing the limits thus making the whole endeavor pointless. I tried using those same features with a passcode that only my partner knew. That was a bit more effective, but when I finally resorted to begging him to turn the passcode off, he did it.
I’ve deleted all of the social media apps from my phone, only to redownload them again whenever I felt like it. I’ve tried changing my social media passwords to random gibberish before deleting the apps in order to add an extra step to logging back into them. That kind of worked, but never for very long. I’ve tried turning my phone to grayscale. I simply disabled it. I’ve given my home screens a totally boring makeover to make them entirely gray, icons and all. Did it look cool as hell? Absolutely. It still didn’t deter me from doomscrolling, though. I once managed to go 108 days without social media while still regularly using my iPhone. To this day, I still have no idea where I managed to find that kind of willpower, and I’ve yet to find it again since. Despite the fact that my life remained virtually the same during those 3½ months offline, it didn’t really help change my habits in the long run.
The 2024 election and the proverbial ring-kissing that followed were what drove me to examine my relationship with technology. After the inauguration, I started getting bombarded with bad news that was sometimes accurate, but more often littered with half-truths and even blatantly incorrect. Most of it was designed to farm outrage and despair, which isn’t exactly helpful in such a precarious time. I was also getting a lot more conservative content on my feeds, even though that’d never really been the case before. I put up with about 4 weeks of that before deciding on a whim to get a “dumbphone.” I spent a couple of days doing some research on phones that worked in the U.S. and cheap plans that weren’t a total nightmare to use, and then I took the leap and bought a Nokia 2780 flip phone with a basic talk/text plan.
When my dumbphone and its SIM card finally arrived, I realized that I hadn’t really given this idea much thought. So, for the time being, I’m treating this whole ordeal as an experiment. I’m trying different things and seeing what works. The first thing I tried was leaving my iPhone at home all day and having my calls forwarded to my flip phone. At the time, we were still in the middle of kitchen renovations so our remote work and mealtimes were happening at a different location. Now that we’re back at home full time, however, that’s gotten a bit more complicated because even if my phone isn’t in my immediate vicinity, it’s still in the building. For now, I’ve been leaving it downstairs when I’m upstairs, and leaving it upstairs when I’m downstairs.
Most recently, I’ve started turning on my call forwarding right before bed and leaving my iPhone downstairs because in what world is it a good idea to stare at a device with access to all of the world’s information while you’re trying to fall asleep and immediately after you wake up? This strategy has been a game changer. If I only ever use my dumb phone for this purpose, it’ll be worth the cost because I’m sleeping better. I’m sleeping more, and I’m not starting my day with a good old doomscroll. Was I still up until 3:30am the other night? Yes, but not because I was scrolling through the horrors. Instead, I had my nose in a book that I simply couldn’t put down.
I’ve had my dumbphone for about 6 weeks now, and I’m still figuring things out. I have some things I want to try, like ditching my iPhone for a week or more just to remember how we used to live. Maybe I’ll start with just a weekend. I’d also like to leave my house with only my flip phone more often so I can be more present in my surroundings. When I think about how I used technology when growing up, I remember spending a lot of time online. However, the beauty of that era was that we could easily shut our computers off and return to the “real world.” There was a built-in sense of balance that is difficult to maintain now that we have mini-computers in our pockets at all times.
When I really think about it, it seems kind of ridiculous to have to get an entire second phone just to moderate my smartphone use, but for me, forgoing my iPhone entirely isn’t something I’m interested in right now. There are too many things I like about it; the same goes for social media. I do, however, think it’s worth trying to regain the balance that older technology allowed us. I think it’s worth embracing the quiet. The slowness of it. The ability to disconnect when we need to.
I don’t know where my dumbphone experiment will lead me, but I’m looking forward to finding out. And when I do, I’ll let you know.