Get Off that Damn Phone!

Some notes about my year without a Smartphone (kinda)

The last few weeks have been politically exhausting. In particular, White nationalists on Substack have been out in droves. While I’m not triggered or let alone scared of some losers in their basement, I’ve been relatively annoyed that I have to deal with idiots who think commenting “ur black” to me is a valid intellectual response. I come from the culture that produced intellectual heavy weights such as James Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois, Jacob Lawrence, Otis Redding and Madlib. I love the cultural forms that the Black Atlantic has produced. And by nature of my understanding of this culture’s richness, unlike many liberal or conservative POC, I don’t have an inferiority complex in regard to whites. Maybe it was the product of being raised by a Black man who wore dashikis in the house everyday and taught me to respect and love my culture, who knows?

While I don’t really have a desire to wade into political discourse, I think it’s important for people to study American history in this moment. Please read Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. DuBois or We Will Shoot Back by Akinyele Umoja. While OUR moment is unlike any other in American history, it is also quite similar to other periods where extra-judicial violence was quite common. Unfortunately for many of my leftist and liberal commentators, extra-judicial violence has been commonly exercised on Black people. Jim Crow is less than a century old. More over, the violence enacted by self identified white supremacist Payton Gedron where he gunned down eleven Black people at a Tops Grocery in Buffalo seems not to have sparked the same alarm.

But I digress, this is not a political Substack in the strictest sense which comes to the actual point of this essay, the fact that I believe one of the best solutions to most of our political problems is logging off or at least radically changing the way we interact with smartphones. This seems to have some acceptance the aisle, I watched a recent interview with the governor of Utah where he was like “touch grass”. If YOU are interested in combatting political polarization and stopping Civil War 2.0 : Electric Boogaloo as they were calling it back in 2020, turning the phone off and advising friends to do the same is a big one. So in some sense, this essay is me talking about that for the first time publicly. I have another essay that is a bit more political that should be out sooner rather than later. Okay, onto a brief anecdote.

I remember once, many years ago, with an ex, I was at a fancy French restaurant as couples tend to do. My phone had died. My ex was horrified. She kept asking “What would we do if my phone was dead too,” to my relative confusion. I did not see the lack of a smartphone as a complete disaster. In fact, often while I was in college, by some chance or other, my phone would often be dead anyways. So getting rid of my smartphone didn’t seem a big jump as much of my time with my smartphone, I’ve spent it with a dead one. Five or six years ago, the idea of going back to a flip-phone had begun bouncing around in my head. A year ago, I took inspiration from several friends who had already transitioned from smartphone to flip-phone or had just begun leaving their smartphones at home when they left the house, and began my journey. Having an existing community doing this helped a lot and to be frank, that’s worth a whole other essay.

I have a flip phone called the Jitterbug from the company Lively, a BestBuy brand, that I’ve been using in lieu of a smartphone. I think the phone is made for seniors, it has big buttons. The phone bill is very cheap. Otherwise, I have an iPhone with no Sim card or data enabled that stays in my house that I use mainly to check Instagram because I use Instagram to promote music, my podcast and this Substack. I don’t believe you are able to post on Instagram from the desktop. I try not to take the flip phone outside of the house though if I’m leaving my neighborhood, I will generally take itl. The long-term goal is to eventually get rid of the iPhone and have Substack be my only social media cause I enjoy it far more than Instagram, Nazis not withstanding. Unfortunately, the Nazis will probably exist regardless and perhaps people will take the threat more seriously if they get the occasional racist comment. Not saying that it’s good but I do think the Biden-era social media bans lulled many into a false sense of security.

But apart from Nazis on Substack, in terms of my usage of a flip phone, I’ve noticed and most enjoyed that I am forced to find other ways to entertain myself rather than constantly scrolling now I leave the house lacking a smartphone. This has forced me to do my favorite thing more frequently, reading! As literacy continues to decline at a rapid rate, my own reading practice is critical to maintain if only for my own sanity. As I’ve written about, books were my salvation when I was a young child, they took me to another place. I like being in that place even more now. While I don’t believe we should be engaging in escapism through books, I do believe that reading novels or nonfiction is a better alternative to scrolling endlessly. I’ve read more than I’ve ever read in my adult life now that I do not have a smartphone. As an aside, reading on public transit remains one of the most enjoyable experiences in my life. I’ve also developed a better sense of direction now that I cannot rely upon GoogleMaps remotely. Street names become more legible.

While I do enjoy audiobooks personally in addition harboring deep sympathies for people with learning disabilities that make reading explicitly more difficult as a physical task, I do believe that reading physically does engender a different type of concentration and retention. I am unsure if there is provable science on that, please fact check me!

In a more political note, I do believe that for those of us on whatever composes “the Left” who still have political hope and belief in social movements like myself, being able to do politics completely offline is going to be increasingly important. I don’t believe that getting rid of smartphones will solve all of our problems as there were plenty of problems prior to smartphones but it definitely couldn’t hurt. As free speech is coddled increasingly on platforms like TikTok which is now owned by Trump surrogates, it’ll be even more critical to have spaces for free expression outside of the Internet. I don’t agree with the idea that “the Internet isn’t real” because it’s clear that the internet produces real horrors like Payton Gedron, who I mentioned earlier. Despite this, the right wing radicalization of people like Gedron are often the result of these individuals being highly alienated from real life communities. In lieu of real friends, there are internet friends. And I’m not against internet friends, some of my best friendships began on the internet, the difference is that they didn’t stay that way. We got off the phone.

I think that’s the best way that the Internet should be utilized. Ideally, we use the internet to share ideas and hopefully eventually meet up to share those ideas. For the most part, that’s how I’ve used it in the most healthy ways. The unhealthy ways have been the scrolling, trolling and endless posting that was a product of an unhealthy relationship. The sad fact is many of us will spend our lives posting instead of living life as it was meant to be lived, not behind a screen, with all of the associated imperfections, tragedies and pain.

I truly encourage everyone to try getting rid of your smartphone and if you can’t do that, try to make a commitment to leaving the phone at home. That’s one of my other practices is that I rarely take my flip-phone outside of the house without me unless absolutely necessary. This practice forces me to be on time if I am meeting someone which is why for the first time ever in my life, I started rocking a Casio. In general, I think the constant availability that pervades in our culture and facilitated by the phone is a problematic one. We were meant in no uncertain terms to be relatively solitary in terms of communication. I find that leaving my flip-phone at home allows me to focus even more on the current moment that I’m in. I do enjoy using my flip-phone mostly to call my girlfriend, parents, brother and a few close friends. I also believe that calling people rather than “texting to schedule a call” is preferable. Calling, having a friend pick up and then having a long conversation is one of the joys of life. I do despise texting due to the awful feelings of intangibility and “ghosting” as a phenomenon. One avoids all of these things with a flip-phone where texting is especially arduous.

I’m coming up on a year living relatively phone free. I try to keep my smartphone usage to a minimum even in the home. When I’m out, I rarely even have my flip-phone although it is useful to have during trips. I do encourage everyone who reads my newsletter to think long and hard about our relationship to smartphones. I think life without them is better. I do think there are ways in which for people who work UberEats or use their phones in other ways explicitly for work that this can be harder but I do think it’s possible if we persevere and remain creative. I don’t think the way I interact with smartphones will work for everyone but I do think we should all re-evaluate our relationships to these devices beyond an app timer. Sometimes leaving the phone or buying the flip is the best option.

What do you think? Could you imagine not using a smartphone regularly?

Has any of this article felt upsetting or difficult?

If you are phone free, how long have you been? What’s your experience been like?