Leaving "Phoneworld:" Reflections on my First Weekend without an iPhone
On Friday, March 28, I bought the only basic phone the T-Mobile store offered. Like a religious incantation, I’d been saying for months that I needed to get rid of my iPhone. Once I finally decided to do it, the Phone’s continued presence in my pocket became psychically unbearable. I chose a barely functional alternative not because I thought it the best of competing options but because I couldn’t stand the prospect of researching, deliberating, and optimizing. Like a hand recoiling from a stovetop, I needed, instinctively, to be done with it.
There is an abundance of essays in the “phone bad” genre. My thoughts on the subject are not especially original. I think the twin ascendancies of the social media platform and the smartphone have accelerated our descent into Trumpian unreality. I think the Phones in our pockets make us worse along social, psychological, and political dimensions. Generally speaking, I think many of us should get rid of our smartphones, and I suspect it’s easier to do than we’ve been told. Most importantly, I’ve been heartened by the examples others have set by de-phoning. (For an arresting piece of writing that deals with smartphones and much more, see Kate Wagner’s “the eternal present;” as far as I can tell, Kate coined the term “phoneworld.”)
Much less rigorous than whatever objective argument I could make against smartphones, I want to talk a bit about my brain as I feel it changing. I’ve now spent a weekend without an iPhone. The changes to my mental states have been immediate and substantial. This essay, then, is as much for me as anyone else, a record of my own mind before I acclimate and all I’ve noticed is lost to time. One major caveat: though my symptoms are mild and manageable, I deal with clinical depression. I say this not to offer a major statement on the condition but because there is evidence that those with pre-existing mental health issues interact with their smartphones differently than others. What follows, then, might simply reflect my psychology. Yet to whatever degree my experiences can be chalked up to idiosyncrasies, I am highly skeptical they tell the whole story.
You might very well see yourself in what follows. You might be better off without a Phone.
The first thing I noticed was a simple yet profound sense of wholeness. Eating dinner with my partner and her dad, I felt I was really there, a whole person distinct from the half-person I’d so frequently become. Whether with family, or in my office, or on a walk, I was invariably torn between the real world and phoneworld. This duality stretched my mind thin, one pole tethered to life in front of me, the other yearning for the screen. Often, the most effective way to reverse this mental fission was to disappear down the numbing, darkening depths of an infinite scroll.
As of this writing, three days de-phoned, that sense of mental wholeness is still palpable. Yesterday I finished a puzzle the three of us had started the day before. We devoted hours to it, and now, on the dining table, there’s a cartoon cat peeking wide-eyed behind variegated foliage. Time and attention brought that color to life.
In the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’d wondered if the faint agoraphobia I’d developed had followed from the sheer amount of time I’d spent holed up in various apartments. I now suspect that the real culprit was the Phone. Being in my apartment meant more time scrolling, a totalizing habituation that encoded in me new expectations around socialization, gratification, and stimulation. Why go outside when all the (para)social relationships I could ask for were at my fingertips? Why venture into reality, unruly and unpredictable, when I could cocoon myself in a dazzling imitation dictated by digital inputs and outputs, the former leading instantly and mechanically to the latter, a process of lifeworld construction over which I exercised complete control? Why leave the safety of phoneworld when it had so suddenly become my most reliable source of both psychological and literal comfort? Just as the Phone delivered dopamine on demand, so too could it conjure salty foods and sugary drinks on the back of gig economy labor.
Yesterday, I agreed to go on a walk with a friend. My mind whispered no warnings that I’d be vulnerable and exposed. I’d relinquished the Phone. Without the submersive depths of its screen coaxing me back to the couch, the open air beckoned with neither pretense nor threat.1
I was addicted to my Phone. It softened the hardest parts of my existence, distracting me from my own psychological discomfort. My depression could be tamped down by the Phone’s bountiful amusements, a carousel curated by Silicon Valley’s most prolific data harvesters. Ironically, this made doing the things that actually ensured my well being much more difficult. To ask whether I preferred working out or watching YouTube videos is to answer it. All this to say nothing of the time I could have spent reading, writing, conversing, creating.
Like Twitter before it, I’d become addicted to BlueSky in particular. I think polemically about smartphones, yet it’s clear to me that social media offers certain benefits not readily replicated elsewhere. I’ve met people online who I then later met in person, the closing of an enriching circle of social relations. I got the news, kept up with my colleagues’ research, and laughed at many good jokes while scrolling my feed.
Yet the Phone made it impossible for me to take these experiences and leave well enough alone. On social media I have also found sorrow, rage, and, ultimately, a creeping nihilistic detachment. There is so much cause in the world for fury and despair. Yet when algorithms serve them up in a ceaseless spectacle of traumatic happenings followed by takes on those happenings followed by takes on those takes, all amounting to little more than water on the rocks of actual institutional decision making, nihilism sets in. Everything is anything is nothing.
Since de-phoning, the proportion of things I do deliberately rather than reflexively has skyrocketed. I tend to experience each moment as the product of conscious choice. This is a stark departure from how things felt before. Daily tasks—cleaning, cooking, reading, showering—were often mindless, cognized as obstacles between me and the dulling frivolities (or debilitating terrors) of my Phone.
The new phone is a pain to use. Once I become more oriented to life after phoneworld, I might invest in something with a full keyboard. For now, having to focus so intently on the simplest of communicative tasks makes every text sent intentional, every text received meaningful.
I’m sure I’ll occasionally miss the convenience of a portable GPS; of an infinite music library; of the internet in my pocket, arming me with factoids that I can provide in lieu of an uninterrupted conversation. Ultimately, I suspect that having to write down directions; to sometimes go without songs, podcasts, or earbuds; to fight to remember the fact on the tip of my tongue will prove to be valuable developments in and of themselves. I don’t think we’re meant to inhabit our own seamless and algorithmically bespoke realities.
I don’t want to insulate myself from the horrors and struggles of the world but to more consistently confront them in the world. That means finding my way back to it, leaving the simulation I’ve created behind. I worry it’ll be much harder than it’s been so far, but perhaps some optimism is warranted. There are powerful interests with powerful incentives to instill the belief that a state of technological affairs less than twenty years old is inescapable. So far, rejecting that common sense has been smooth sailing. I hope only that people continue to test the waters for themselves and find that same truth waiting for them on the other side.2
To be clear, this is about my experience. No less complicated than our relationships to our phones is the myriad effects of the COVID pandemic. For me, what I thought was a residual emotional response to long hours spent inside per se was, I think, actually the result of long hours spent inside on my phone. I fully appreciate that not everyone’s relationship to either COVID or their phones will mirror mine, either in part or at all.
Again, our relationships to technologies, food, media, politics, mental health, etc. are varied and complicated. These experiences are my experiences. But for those who’ve found anything relatable here, it might be worth giving de-phoning some consideration.