Bluebird
Today (Yesterday oops) I am 30 and my fire alarm wont stop chirping. Like a metronome marking time until someone pays attention. The sound is cutting through the philosophical reflections I was planning to have about no longer being in my twenties. It’s distracting.
Last week, I bought myself a flip phone. The model I’m using is called “Bluebird.” Blue like its name suggests, with physical buttons that click when you press them. I have to manually load it with MP3 files, use T9 to send messages.
I know that right now the dumbphone movement is big. Even my Dad referenced it when I told him I couldn’t open the links he was sending me anymore. Maybe I’m a fad-follower. But I’ve also been moving towards finding a phone like this for years. Attention economy and all that.
After surviving my first year of teaching art to teenagers who couldn’t hold a pencil for more than three minutes without checking their phones, I felt like I needed to do something radical for my own relationship with surveillance capitalism.
My brain is currently rewiring itself. The parts of my brain accustomed to small but constant hits of dopamine are reaching out for literally anything. But all I have is this fire alarm chirp. No algorithms or data miners. The fire alarm just knows its battery is dying and it needs attention. No psychological manipulation or engagement metrics or “behavioral economists.” Just dead battery equals noise until resolution. Some sacred clarity.
My partner brought home the 9 Volt battery we needed to stop the chirping. He also brought home birthday candles. My siblings made me a pistachio cake. I made a honey, bacon, egg, and cheese on an English Muffin this morning. I ripped old episodes of cartoons from youtube and cut them together with Nickelodeon bumpers and McDonalds halloween commercials. I checked my phone for birthday texts. One out of two parents forgot. Not too bad, considering. One remembered.
Digging up the exact texture of Saturday mornings from my own childhood, before everything became algorithmic, before phones knew us better than we knew ourselves. My siblings are Gen Z, so they didn't grow up with these same cartoons, but they watched them with me anyway, curious about the world I was trying to reconstruct. There's something beautiful about sharing your nostalgia with people who didn't live it the first time.
For the first few days of shutting down my smart phone, I was unusually quiet. People noticed. I was afraid to leave the house without the internet in my pocket. I’ve read two books since then.
The past few days, we've been sleeping in the same room again, my sister in my bed with me, my brother on the futon mattress on the floor.
This reminded me: when we went from two kids to three, we spent so many nights like this. My sister and I in bunkbeds, our baby brother in a crib nearby. The same breathing rhythms, the same whispered conversations in the dark, except now we're adults and the conversations are about different things but the feeling is exactly the same.
What is it about bodies in proximity that changes everything? The way we become more ourselves when we're not alone, but also less ourselves, blurred at the edges.
The one parent who remembered my birthday sent a text. Not long, but not short either, the kind of message that felt like someone trying to maintain the complicated relationship we now have with one another. We haven't heard each other's voices since October 2023.
I don’t know what to say here. Just that things feel really different. They have for a long time.
The space where constant input used to be. My brain keeps reaching for something that isn't there anymore, like tonguing a missing tooth.
The Bluebird sits on my kitchen counter.
Choosing inconvenience over manipulation, choosing to be unreachable sometimes.
Okay, love you.
Liah Bean