how long do you think i'll last without a smartphone? taking bets now.
The novelty of my dumbphone gimmick has been one of the few bright spots of my Seasonally-Affected, Disordered week. So far, I...
...ordered a glossy blue Nokia, which arrived, but the phone inside the box was actually a matte gray. Packaging error.
...found out this phone also came in a gold color, which sounds much more fun, so I ordered that too. Should arrive next Monday.
...planned to return this supposed-to-be-blue-but-was-actually-gray phone, but I briefly put in my SIM card and explored its basic features just to see what I’m getting myself into. It has a camera! It has a browser! It even has Facebook! (Which I don’t intend to use!)
I’ll be starting my Great Offline Experiment this Friday evening, which marks the start of my holiday vacation until the New Year. (I'm just staying at home with family, which makes things easy.) I’m going for an elimination-diet type of reset, whereby I cut everything out and slowly reintroduce stimuli one-by-one, to better understand what affects my mental state the most.
My whole master plan actually makes for pretty dry reading, so I’ll just tell you about Phase 1: The Clean Slate. The goal here is to make any tech usage very deliberate, and cultivate a healthy degree of boredom. Reset all my habits. No mindless scrolling, no notifications, no easy dopamine.
No smartphone for personal use — feature phone only
If I’m still in Phase 1 after going back to work: I need to use smartphones for prototyping and QAing features, but nothing is allowed beyond that. Keep phones at desk, no SIM card, no usage outside of work hours.
No social media (IG / Twitter / Tiktok) for personal use, on either computer or phone.
No streaming video (Netflix / Youtube) — I don’t watch much, but it’s still too easy to fritter away my time on it. I’ll make an exception for watching stuff on the TV with family, since I rarely do it and it can be a good shared experience.
No Apple Watch — I might add this back in for the fitness features, and I don’t have notifications on it anyway, but it’ll be good to remind myself what life was like without it.
Non-social-media computer usage is OK — I’ll need it for things like listening to music, or finding restaurants, or Facetime calls with friends.
Messaging (email / iMessage / etc.) on computer is OK, watching Youtube / Tiktok links people send me is OK — I’m not trying to be a total antisocial hermit! (Notably, I’m trying to find the prosocial uses of digital life while avoiding social media, which can be quite an antisocial experience of simulated intimacy.)
I'll try to spend at least 4 weeks in this phase — maybe even 6 weeks (til end of January) — before reintroducing things. I honestly don’t know how long I can go without using a smartphone as my primary device, and I’ll certainly need to adjust whenever I have to travel, but I hope to make it 6 months.
How long do you think I'll last? Taking bets now.