getting lighter

I’d like to think we’ve all been there: it’s 1:30 a.m, and despite your promises, your bedtime alarms, and your Sleepytime tea, your face is at most five inches away from your phone, and you’re in a deep dive, watching clip after clip … about what, exactly? 

That’s the thing. When I wake up in a haze after six hours of sleep (despite planning for nine), I don’t usually really remember (or care about) what was keeping me awake. I just feel the irritating itch of failing my day before I’ve even started it.

On the phone, as always

It was probably on one of those late-night scroll-dives (although I can’t remember) when I looked up, in a flash of self-irritation, “best flip phones” on YouTube, and among some classic tech comparison videos were a small batch of vlogs about people who decided to forgo their iPhone for a dumber, less connected model. There were a handful of reasons, but most of them boiled down to self-frustration, an urge to disconnect, and a touch of masochistic curiosity. After as little as a week, users cited a better connection with themselves, the world around them, and their goals. I could imagine many of them, whipping out a flip phone at a party, looking smugly around at the strangers as they triple-clicked to send a one-character text. I cringed a little bit at the thought, but I was also kinda jealous. 

Over the course of many procrastination breaks, bedtime YouTube videos, and bizarre research binges, I decided on a favorite low-impact phone, or as many users call it a “dumb phone.” Coming in at $300, the light phone promises to do basically nothing, and gives you just enough functionality to be present in the world and still connected. There’s a GPS feature, a way to download music files, talk, text, and a (new) calendar function. No camera, no internet, no apps, no photos. It was a fun fantasy. Now, after a particularly self-destructive scrolling session, I would open up the Light Phone website, and imagine I was a cool, disconnected yogini with pressed juices and no need for WhatsApp or Gmail.

I guess I knew I could do it, but outside of the price tag (and logistics of switching over a SIM card), I knew there was no way I would do it. What about my friends overseas I wanted to speak with? Work emails on the go? Venmo? Late-night Ubers? Still, the brain worm had been planted. Every time I caught myself watching Netflix instead of writing a creative project, or realizing four hours of my time had disappeared in the TikTok void (I’m not proud of it, ok?) my mind would flicker back to that imagined person, literally flipping their phone open at a party, and I would wonder if they felt more free than I did.

I decided it was time to do something. I deleted my social media apps…and re-downloaded them. I bought a book about breaking up with electronics and read the whole thing. It told me to plug my phone in across the room before bed and use the settings to move things into grayscale. None of it worked. I was getting up to get my phone from the other wall in my bedroom, but I was still spending the same amount of time, if not more, on my phone. Instead of teaching myself boundaries, all of these roadblocks were just teaching me a scarcity mindset, and a weird sort of binge cycle with my apps. 

All this failure to disconnect made me feel like there was something slightly wrong with me. Was I really and truly addicted? Why couldn’t I just be a chill cool iPhone user like the rest of the population? Was my recently TikTok-diagnosed-ADHD at fault? Lying in bed, eyes dry and wide open in a dark room, I thought nostalgically about my pre-smartphone life. It was hard to pinpoint when exactly the phone obsession began, but I couldn’t help wondering if my peers, all of us among the first preteens to begin using cellphones and social media, felt the same sort of helpless need for screen time.

When I was nine, young for middle school, I started commuting on my own, taking the subway or the bus four stops. I got my first phone, the teal blue Samsung Juke. It had a scrolling button shaped like a record on the front, and when you flipped it out in an unusual semicircle arc, it looked enough like a microphone that I could pretend to sing into it, in my bedroom mirror. I remember when friends started getting iPhones and iPod touches; the opportunities seemed endless, even if the app UI was so basic that we often had to wait out glitches. 

Me and my phone, before the breakup

When we hung out, some of us would forgo playing pretend, board games, or other non-tech activities to stare at the black mirror, play cooking games, take Harry Potter quizzes, and compete at Temple Run. Despite the plethora of tech in my life, that younger, pre-smartphone self seemed more inspired, more awake, and more organic. How did I go from enjoying the magic of the internet to being controlled by it?

There’s a real answer for this: the UI now used in most phones, apps, and software is designed to keep you scrolling. You probably already know that your interests, clicks, eye movements, and swipe speed are often recorded as a way to monetize your activity, leaving users to become the product, rather than the other way around. 

These days, my friends and I joke about it. We say “Free Trip to Hawaii” over and over again in our smartphone’s vicinity, in the hopes that the algorithm will hear and reward us. I’ve become used to (and occasionally pleased by) the amount that ads and algorithms (I’m looking at you again, TikTok) can adhere to small facts about my personality and re-present them to me as fun, novel, and digestible content. 

Even chatting in person with my friends has become something different, as we insert Tiktok jargon and video references that are currently viral before they become old news and we move on to another meme, song, or exclamation. Now, even our words off-screen aren’t completely ours, never mind organic, creative, or original. That’s not even mentioning how these viral trends often use LGBTQ+ and BIPOC verbiage and allow it to be disseminated without giving credit to the communities they originated in. 

The business model is working: we are becoming even more palatable for data purchasers and product marketers. They buy into our interests, digest what we like, and then sell us what we don’t know we want. But you knew all this. I did too.

I recommitted and doubled down. I posted on Instagram in a way that I hoped wasn’t too cringy, telling friends and family that I’d be “stepping back from socials,” and then asked my partner to change my passcode. I watched a few documentaries of varying quality about social media and the demise of culture. I re-invested in Freedom, a computer add-on I used in college, which allows users to block websites from themselves for a scheduled amount of time. I bought an alarm clock that I could use without a phone. I deleted TikTok, again, but I still found ways to spend 4+ hours on my phone, watching YouTube, surfing through articles, using the internet as a social crutch in an awkward elevator ride, on the subway, etc.

Then, for my birthday, (he was probably tired of hearing about my frustration) my partner bought it for me. The Light Phone. The device to unlock all my fears and desires. Ok, I’m being dramatic, but I would be lying if I didn’t tell you my first thought was oh, no, now I actually have to do this. Gone were the pleasant passing fantasies of being disconnected, and very, very present was the new need to prove I could walk the walk.

I put it off. I needed my iPhone for stuff! How was I supposed to track my time for the race I was training for? What about the international trip I was planning? What about scanning my tickets for the Taylor Swift Eras tour that I had fought for? Eventually, I ran out of excuses, and on the first day of June, I moved my SIM card over, with no expectations but a lot of hope that I could power through any discomfort and make it my only mobile device. 

Was I worried all my friends would forget about me, and that I’d get reprimanded for non-responsiveness at my job? Yes. But, I bookmarked the Venmo website on my laptop, downloaded FB Messenger, and dove in.

the first photo I took on a borrowed phone, after “going light”

It was…easier than expected. In the first month of Light Phone use, I kind of thought I would go through a form of withdrawal--I expected social anxiety, confusion, frustration with the world, and loneliness, too. In the first few days, I was more responsive to text messages than I’ve ever been in my entire life. Texts were the only thing happening on my new device and boy, did I get excited when the Light Phone buzzed with a new one. I did a lot of phone checking in that first week too: clicking the lock screen on for notifications and information, and then feeling silly because I knew, despite my ingrained habit, that the Light Phone had nothing for me.

In the last month I’ve sent memes over email, replied to a few confused “Were you hacked?” and “are you having a breakdown?” texts from worried friends, and I’ve completely powered down my iPhone, except for the occasional double-check on a phone number that wasn’t transferred correctly. I’ve also, thanks to the slow movement of the e-ink screen on my new device, made an annoying amount of butt dials and typos via text.

In the first month, I didn’t feel sudden exponential loneliness like I feared I would. My friends have been kind enough to adapt to the green-bubble way of texting, and with the help of my computer, I don’t really even feel that disconnected. I still can contact friends on WhatsApp, and (unfortunately) can still scroll on the TikTok desktop browser. (I’m working on it, OK?)

I brought my iphone out for a trip upstate in July and took this pic.

II guess I don’t feel sudden exponential freedom like I thought I would, either. I expected, after fifteen years of avid cellphone use, that removing the addictive qualities of a smartphone from the equation would be the equivalent of removing a veil from in front of my eyes. I thought colors would seem brighter, the world would seem lush, and I would be inspired to write ten pages a week instead of five. 

The feelings have been altogether more subtle. My screen time is, obviously, lower. I finished three books using subway time alone, and have become a little more accustomed to facing the pauses in everyday life without fear. I don’t miss the constant notifications, the frequent distractions, or even (surprisingly) Uber. I just try to head somewhere with a friend, or give myself extra time on public transit.

I also don’t miss the uncertainty that my iPhone instilled in me, without my notice. I never realized how much I double-checked and second-guessed myself because I had a tool in my pocket that could do the thinking for me. I was nervous about being able to trust train times posted in the subway, being able to find places I’d been before, or even following simple directions, just because I knew the phone could do it better than I could. 

Now, when I walk to the Trader Joe's where I’ve been shopping at for two years, I don’t feel the need to type in directions. If I’m going somewhere I’ve never been, the Light Phone GPS is functional enough to get me there, but I probably will have to actually read the map on my screen rather than follow a blue dot and line.

Pancakes, pre-light-phone

Of course, there are things I do miss: taking photos of a meal that I’m proud of cooking so that I can send it to my mom, video chatting, accessing my Spotify playlists on the go. I miss being able to share exciting things en masse with people too, but hey, that’s what a blog post is for, right? If I really want to, I can always power on my iPhone, connect it to wifi, snap a picture, and then send it via email, slow and steady. 

A few times this month, to my occasional surprise and confusion, a friend will know what I’ve been up to before I tell them, and I realize that they've received information from social media, based on a picture that I cannot see. It’s a funny thing, really, knowing that people are looking in at your life through someone else’s window. I guess that’s something we’ve all gotten used to. The fear of the ugly tagged photo still haunts me, though. Even though I’m not posting, I still want to be well-filtered.

So really, in my first months in approximately twelve years without a smartphone, I haven’t become the perfect, Zen meditation master of my dreams. I still feel plugged into the world. Maybe in another six months, I’ll decide to try out my trusty iPhone again. Somehow, though, I doubt it. I think this feeling of freedom is only going to get more powerful.

In an awkward elevator, I’m getting better at just standing still (or reaching for a book), and in one month my phone has stopped becoming the path through every minor problem. Instead, I get to trust myself with the solution.

**Edited by Richard Khavkine