I've played endless mind games when it came to my iPhone. I went off social media a long time ago (never happier) but my iPhone remained a problem. I am a nanny and have always been really consistent with not being on my phone around the small humans. However. I could feel my iPhone whispering to me from my pocket: 'Just look at me for a little bit.. Come on.. Hold me.. ' Such a horrid restless feeling. It's steeling away one of the most important things we possess as human beings: attention.
I dropped my iPhone and it broke. I ordered a dumb phone and thought: let's just see what happens and work out solutions as I go. Here are a couple of problems that have arisen so far and this is how I dealt with them:
Banking. My bank only exists on an app. I bought a second hand iPad mini that hangs around in the kitchen. I am not watching YouTube (especially YouTube shorts turned out to become a huge problem)
Train tickets: I take the iPad mini for a little trip outside with the downloaded tickets on them or I print them.
Directions: Now. This was my greatest worry- I suck at directions. Sometimes my fiancé just follows me to see what happens because it seems like I know where I'm going but I don't. This turned out to me a false narrative. I live in London and I know my way around the city pretty well. I just gotten used to always letting my phone do the work. I am 37 so I know life before smartphones. My brain just had gotten lazy. I look up directions before I leave the house and if I do get lost, there's a millions of people around me to ask.
Catching up with family/friends: My family lives abroad. I have signal installed on my iPad and in case of an emergency they know to call my dumb phone. I find myself picking up my phone and calling friends more often (which confused them in the beginning. They would pick up and shout: What's wrong are you ok??') I miss things from groups chat's etc but I find myself thinking: how important is it really? What I don't miss is the constant noise.
Like you, my smart phone is designed to be dumb. It became less dumb because of Substack so I recently went nuclear and followed all the Substacks I was following with my rss reader instead, and deleted the substack app on my phone. Now my phone is back to reading only, no notifications, but still all the useful things like maps and digital tickets. I’m so with you though that it’s annoying how much effort it takes to have the glass slab be a good part of our lives instead of a bad part!
Thanks again for sharing your experience. I’ve been loving these.
My focus in this piece was on the social and psychological effects of smartphones and dumber-phone alternatives. Privacy is a separate issue.
Some of the options I talk about aren’t great for someone whose foremost concern is privacy because they’re just Android phones with a different design (Boox, Clicks). Some have stripped down versions of Android so they may be a bit better (Light, Mudita, Sleke). For the privacy maximalist, the clear route is getting a Pixel and loading GrapheneOS (or a dumbphone, obviously). I’m hopeful that we’re building toward greater compatibility for Graphene so more of these devices can use it. (Clicks with Graphene is already a popular request.)
Personally, I have been more focused on extricating myself from individual ecosystems and integrations (which is what I talked about in my last piece). This is in part because I’m on iPhone at present, where at least the business model isn't primarily built on data collection.
Focusing on size as part of the problem and google/apple saying "that's what you want so here it is" made me think of when we tried to buy a used car and everyone said, no small used cars because nobody bought the new ones so they stopped making them - all we could find were suv's, all the little ones were bait and switch...so that's why on the road there's one person per huge car! You want to protest, but you need a car, so...
100%, I feel inundated by the experience of “the thing you want doesn’t exist because nobody wants it”. I go back and forth between believing either that I’m an alien or they’re just lying. (It’s probably both.)
I've played endless mind games when it came to my iPhone. I went off social media a long time ago (never happier) but my iPhone remained a problem. I am a nanny and have always been really consistent with not being on my phone around the small humans. However. I could feel my iPhone whispering to me from my pocket: 'Just look at me for a little bit.. Come on.. Hold me.. ' Such a horrid restless feeling. It's steeling away one of the most important things we possess as human beings: attention.
I dropped my iPhone and it broke. I ordered a dumb phone and thought: let's just see what happens and work out solutions as I go. Here are a couple of problems that have arisen so far and this is how I dealt with them:
Banking. My bank only exists on an app. I bought a second hand iPad mini that hangs around in the kitchen. I am not watching YouTube (especially YouTube shorts turned out to become a huge problem)
Train tickets: I take the iPad mini for a little trip outside with the downloaded tickets on them or I print them.
Directions: Now. This was my greatest worry- I suck at directions. Sometimes my fiancé just follows me to see what happens because it seems like I know where I'm going but I don't. This turned out to me a false narrative. I live in London and I know my way around the city pretty well. I just gotten used to always letting my phone do the work. I am 37 so I know life before smartphones. My brain just had gotten lazy. I look up directions before I leave the house and if I do get lost, there's a millions of people around me to ask.
Catching up with family/friends: My family lives abroad. I have signal installed on my iPad and in case of an emergency they know to call my dumb phone. I find myself picking up my phone and calling friends more often (which confused them in the beginning. They would pick up and shout: What's wrong are you ok??') I miss things from groups chat's etc but I find myself thinking: how important is it really? What I don't miss is the constant noise.
Taking pictures: simply replaced by a camera.
Like you, my smart phone is designed to be dumb. It became less dumb because of Substack so I recently went nuclear and followed all the Substacks I was following with my rss reader instead, and deleted the substack app on my phone. Now my phone is back to reading only, no notifications, but still all the useful things like maps and digital tickets. I’m so with you though that it’s annoying how much effort it takes to have the glass slab be a good part of our lives instead of a bad part!
Thanks again for sharing your experience. I’ve been loving these.
Interesting thank you. No comments about privacy tho...? Or lack thereof. I just started following you, maybe u wrote about it already 🤷♀️
My focus in this piece was on the social and psychological effects of smartphones and dumber-phone alternatives. Privacy is a separate issue.
Some of the options I talk about aren’t great for someone whose foremost concern is privacy because they’re just Android phones with a different design (Boox, Clicks). Some have stripped down versions of Android so they may be a bit better (Light, Mudita, Sleke). For the privacy maximalist, the clear route is getting a Pixel and loading GrapheneOS (or a dumbphone, obviously). I’m hopeful that we’re building toward greater compatibility for Graphene so more of these devices can use it. (Clicks with Graphene is already a popular request.)
Personally, I have been more focused on extricating myself from individual ecosystems and integrations (which is what I talked about in my last piece). This is in part because I’m on iPhone at present, where at least the business model isn't primarily built on data collection.
Great, look forward to reading more about all this
Focusing on size as part of the problem and google/apple saying "that's what you want so here it is" made me think of when we tried to buy a used car and everyone said, no small used cars because nobody bought the new ones so they stopped making them - all we could find were suv's, all the little ones were bait and switch...so that's why on the road there's one person per huge car! You want to protest, but you need a car, so...
100%, I feel inundated by the experience of “the thing you want doesn’t exist because nobody wants it”. I go back and forth between believing either that I’m an alien or they’re just lying. (It’s probably both.)