Flip Phone Diary #2

Or, how expensive it is to live without the Internet in your pocket

A few months ago, I made a conscious push to get off my smartphone. I went to a big box store and bought a physical alarm clock, paper calendars, sharpies, a small black wristwatch, and a hundred dollar flip phone. My goal, as I wrote in my last essay on this subject, is to shift the transitive point between my body and Internet-connected machines from my pocket to a fixed computer. To do so, I’m doing everything in my power to outsource tasks I perform with my smartphone to dumb devices.

I bought an alarm clock so I wouldn’t need to reach for my phone first thing in the morning, a physical calendar so I wouldn’t rely on my phone to remind me of events, a wristwatch so I can see the time without looking at my phone screen, pocket notebooks to write in instead of the Notes app, and a flip phone so I’m contactable without being connected to the Internet. I’m going to buy a stopwatch so I can time myself without my cell phone and a record player so I can listen to music in my house, too. I want to put my smartphone as far away from me as possible without inhibiting my ability to live. Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done.

To use my flip phone, I had to create a customized, $55-a-month plan so I could still receive texts and calls from my family in the States. I pay for this in addition my $45-a-month smartphone bill. I need to buy a $115 Yubikey to do two-factor authentication at my job so I won’t have to bring my smartphone to work anymore. When I get a car next month, I’m going to have to pay over a hundred dollars for a dashboard GPS screen that doesn’t rely on a phone. Despite all this, I still won’t be able to call Ubers, access GPS maps, or see bus schedules at various stops without a smartphone.

I’ve spent at least $300 to be able to live without a smartphone and I’ll have to spend at least $300 more to take photos, listen to music, and navigate by car without one, too. It’s frustratingly expensive, but so far, it’s been worth it.

Being without my smartphone makes me feel like myself again. When I leave the house without it, I notice the tops of buildings I’d never paid attention to. I see restaurants I used to pass by without looking. I find tucked-away Auckland parks that were invisible to me before. I’m less stimulated, less stressed, and more at peace. I’ve read more books in the past two months than I have the past three years.

When overwhelming emotion comes upon me, like a wave crashing on the shore, I let it wash over instead of hiding from it by burying myself in my phone. I’m not afraid feelings will destroy me anymore. I feel like a human being with a body again, rather than a floating consciousness or a digitally distributed image. I feel integrated, consistent, and steadier.

On a comment on my last Flip Phone Diary, Nikkitha Bakshani wrote that “being attached to our phones is sort of a dream/fugue state that puts us on Elon Musk’s wavelength.” I live in Aotearoa New Zealand, and I want to think as little about that loathsome worm who throws Sieg Heils at inaugurations as possible. So I’m not going to. I’m pulling back from his website, and from the wavelengths of men who beat women on camera, and choosing where to focus my time and attention instead.

I want to travel to a new city soon without my smartphone and navigate it without the Internet. I want to be guided by smell to new restaurants, by sight to things that interest me, and by other people’s recommendations to concerts, museums, and things to do. I don’t want to cling to Google to tell me the best of anything anymore. I want to brave the world without the safety of the web and risk getting lost for the first time since I got an iPhone sixteen years ago. I want to feel excited about the future, and I think the only way for me to do that is to unplug in the present.

---

If you’d like to try this yourself, I strongly recommend spending $8 USD on August Lamm’s digital pamphlet “You Don’t Need a Smartphone.” She details how smartphones perform functions once performed by analog phones, record players, typewriters, film cameras, televisions, wallets, flashlights, calculators, alarm clocks, paper maps, radios, playing cards, letters, stopwatches, physical calendars, and more, and provides practical tips for how to get off yours.