Personal Ethics: Why I am getting rid of my smartphone

A week ago, I woke up to a dead phone.

I tried charging it, but the cable wasn’t working. I thought about buying a new one, but I was pretty sure my checking account was at zero, and I felt too lazy to make a transfer from my savings via my laptop. So I went about my day with no phone.
It was the best day I had in months.

This was the clincher to a debate I had long been having with myself about how much I wanted and needed to have a smartphone in my life. I have felt, especially for the last two years, a troubling mass growing in my pocket. The mental, emotional, and spiritual weight of having access to anything, anytime I want it had become too much to bear. Anything is wonderful in theory, right? It promises infinite possibilities. But the more time I spent with “anything”, the smaller my world became. I would wake up and reach for my phone. Naturally, I’d check my messages and emails, but would be easily tempted into scrolling, as a sort of pacifying action. The things presented to me hardly ever improved my life; most were either entirely hollow or outwardly troubling. I was tracking multiple threads of societal decline interspersed with sports betting ads. I started having regular nightmares about the end of the world.

My history as a drug addict, I think, made me more sensitive to the effects of my phone. My relationship with it felt no different than my relationship with drugs and alcohol. I drank and got high every day because it was my first instinct. Totally thoughtless—I got high in the morning because that’s just what I did. After the first hit of the day a sense of doom would creep in, and I would get high again in hopes of keeping the feeling away for another moment. The phone was no different. Wake up, look at some things, feel terrible, sit back down and look at some more things, hoping to see something I liked; a nice text, some good news; but of course something would spoil that delusional sense of hope and I would keep feeling terrible. And I would do that well into the night until finally sleeping, albeit not very well, usually feeling mentally “full”, like my head was overflowing with noise.
God willing, I will have four years of sobriety in a week and a half. I hardly ever think about drugs and alcohol anymore, despite them being around me all the time, despite my career taking place in bars and clubs. So if I could quit drinking, why can’t I just quit my phone?

My phone had reached a point of actively taking from me in the same way as drugs and alcohol had. I did not feel virtue in bearing daily witness to suffering. It did not help me create a better world. It did not motivate me to help others. True, it gave me some tools. It allowed me to access anyone or anything I needed instantaneously; but with that came a constant anxiety—why, if everything was instant, was this person not responding? Why was this thing I needed not available? It made me hyper vigilant, insecure, paranoid. I came to think of my own speed at responding as inherently virtuous; but in reality, the only reason I responded quickly is because I couldn’t go five minutes without checking my phone.

The dead phone showed me all the things I had told myself—that it would be overly difficult to live without a smartphone, that I needed it for work—were totally wrong. Everything that needed to happen that day happened. I biked to an ATM, made a transfer from my savings, then proceeded to hang out at bars and restaurants all day, using their Wi-Fi to check my messages and call my dad for his birthday. I decided that the next day, I would go buy a flip phone.
I instantly felt a weight off my shoulders. There was of course a rush of novelty; I hadn’t used a phone like this in a long time. It was familiar and comforting in a way. I will not deny that I felt cooler; that I was now “girl with a flip phone”. I gave my fair share of “Hey, just so you know, I don’t have a smartphone anymore” speeches. But I felt the black hole in my pocket disappear. The first day of my experiment went well. I felt happy with my choice.
But then, I found myself scrolling on my iPad, and opening three tabs at once on my laptop. A quick relapse. So in my most extreme action of Luddism yet, I got rid of my Wi-Fi. This was extremely easy, as “my Wi-Fi” was really my neighbors Wi-Fi. So I made all my devices forget the network. And that was it. No more black hole, not in my pocket, not in my home.

Of course, I still need to use the internet. My livelihood depends on my ability to maintain contact with people who do not have my phone number. But now, in order to use the internet, I’m forced to leave my home. I pack up my laptop and iPad and head to the library or a coffeeshop. I check my messages, respond to anything that needs responding to, and then get all my ducks in a row for work that can be done off-line. I prepare my shipping labels, I send invoices, I give my phone number to anyone who might need to talk to me after my “office hours”. I have not really felt tempted to scroll as much, I think because I recognize that I’m setting aside time to use the Internet as a tool, as a necessary part of my job. And of course, how embarrassing would it be to scroll through reels on a giant iPad in public?
My “office hours” are usually two hours long, which I’ve found is plenty of time to do everything I need to do. I finish up when I start to feel like my tapping around is not actually yielding any tangible results. If it ain’t making me money. I pack my shit up and leave.
When I get back from office hours, I take my dog for a walk and listen to several of the internet radio stations I have on my flip phone. If I don’t like the song that’s playing, I pick a different station. If nothing I like is playing, we walk in silence. I go about my day like this, biking from task to task, letting myself be surprised either by the radio or the sound of the air.
Throughout the day, the thought crosses my mind—what if I just put the SIM card back in the dead iPhone sitting in my drawer? What if I just go back into my messages with my neighbor and find her Wi-Fi password again? But I ask myself something that is asked by any addict considering a relapse: “can you wait until later?” The thing that is causing me anxiety—a message I’m waiting on, a reply I want to send to a client—can always wait. Anyone who would need my help with any urgency has my phone number, and anyone who wants work done or wants to book me will likely not rescind the offer in the matter of twelve hours. And if they do, why the fuck would I want to work with them? So I tell myself that it can wait until later, and I feel relieved to have not scratched the itch.

At the end of the day, if I feel like checking some messages or messing around online, I go to Sportsman’s, grab a beer, and look at my iPad for an hour or so, maybe even getting some more work in before the end of the day. Then I bike back home, walk the dog again, watch some TV (the only device still connected to my neighbor’s Wi-Fi), and go to bed.

I sleep a lot better.