A few years ago I found myself in the toilet without my phone and experienced a surge of actual panic. How was I supposed to fill those three minutes? Don’t answer that. I’ve been waging war on my phone addiction ever since, with slow progress. That is, until few months ago, when I pressed the nuclear button. I’d heard the most successful people use dumbphones, or have no phone, and it persuaded me to embrace the unthinkable. Guys, I turned the internet off. And I need to tell you about the world I discovered.
First, specifics. I didn’t want to spend money or end up talking to a football for company. So I just turned off mobile data. I kept wifi enabled, could call and message. But I deleted all apps that former YouTube designer John Zeratsky calls “infinity pools”: any source of constantly replenishing content. All social media. Email. Google too, the scrollable sum of everything. “You can’t look stuff up?” my friends gasped. My phone was incredulous. “Are you sure?” it asked, for the first time ever. And pressing that button did feel like dying. You should never wake a sleepwalker, right?
The new world I found myself in was… unbearably irritating. I’d just started a new job. To access the building, I had to tap a personal code into an iPad, a new code for every visit. I’d jot this down from email at home, scrabbling for the scrap of paper at reception like Columbo. I’m surprised I didn’t need to accept cookies to use the toilet. I did not impress on the job. I couldn’t use Slack or Miro, and still don’t know what they are. I missed important emails, held up other people’s jobs. I didn’t know when buses were coming. I was lost all the time. My home life soured. “I can’t open that!” I’d grouch, when friends WhatsApped me a link to something fun. Sometimes I manually searched for the clips, which were never worth the effort. Nothing makes you feel more like a pervert than watching Instagram stories on a laptop, I don’t know why.
I followed sleep hygiene advice, and banished my phone from the bedroom. But without podcasts, I struggled to sleep. I slept through the puny beeping of my substitute alarm clock (which I’d received free with a shaver). One day I woke up at 2.41pm. The Luddite experiment dragged on for weeks. A low point was when I offered to take out a depressed friend for cocktails. The menu was QR only, so they had to pay. Another time, I ordered a book, for pickup in store. Without another four-digit emailed code, the bookseller wouldn’t hand it over. Until I wept snot. What dystopia is this? No bookshop should have anything to do with codes. I don’t care whether they are QR, conduct, dress or the Da Vinci. (I will accept bar and Morse, for a bit of fun.)
I see the world as romantic, our duty in it to be spontaneous and soulful. I’m like a male Amélie, delightful. The flip side of this is a kneejerk suspicion of anything too computery. I don’t understand the excitement over AI, surely a harbinger of our extinction, a black box riding a pale horse. Social media is self-hypnosis, a pocket Clockwork Orange. And I regard the phones glued to our hands as the root of all our problems.
Our collective obsession with tech may be a problem. But the term itself simply refers to applied science.
I admit I adore my sofa, toaster, heated dryer, novels, hearing aids, Dance Dance Revolution. It would be absurd to think technology equals bad. In my failed experiment, what I mostly struggled against was bureaucracy.
When we’re in thrall to something, we can make a bogeyman of it. Thinking of my phone as addictive gives it outsized power. The opposite of love is indifference. This tallies with something comedian and sage Sara Pascoe once told me, when I complained that I was wasting hours on social media. We don’t quit social media when we finally understand that it’s evil, destroying our minds and social democracy, she argued. We quit because we’re bored.
Dumbing down my phone was overcorrection. It’s impossible to move through the modern world like this, unless you have power to burn. B, t it broke the spell of habituation. When I redownloaded my apps, email, internet, something felt different. I could feel when my phone was doing its creepy, attention-jacking thing. And I started to find it boring; the way someone flirting too crassly can be boring. I began to see my phone as needy.
I no longer think of myself as engaged in a war; it’s more of a light boundary dispute. If you’re looking to spend less time on your phone this year, my advice is this: you need to see life on your phone as boring, and fall back in love with the real world.
So, no resolutions for me; rather, an inventory of my passions. Joy is more important than success anyway. I shall write down better, delicious, luxurious ways to self-soothe, and indulge them without guilt. Baths, cooking, eye-contact with goats, drawing on bananas. The analogue activities that get my heart pumping, even in midwinter. The people, places, things, artists and ideas and experiences that make me burst with the complicated joy of being here. And I’ll use my phone to schedule them into my week, a tiny romance every day. It’s what Amélie would do.