Feeling Lighter

On the journey to freedom from digital addiction

Behold! The Light phone! Isn’t it cute?

Hello from the other side! I am two weeks into my dumb phone experiment, and I have so many reflections to share with you all. I will do my best to synthesize my experience in this essay, but rest assured that I will continue to write about different aspects of my experience as the experiment continues.

First of all, I love it.

My new phone feels light in my hand, a welcome reprieve from the heavy burden that my smartphone weighed on my attention span and mental health. While at first I felt a bit naked leaving my house without my smartphone, I have gotten to the point where I don’t miss it. The other day, I misplaced my smartphone for a whole 24 hours and only went looking for it when I wanted to pay someone with Venmo. Using my husband’s smartphone, we were able to locate my smartphone under the seat in the car.

Some Reddit users in the Light Phone subreddit are adamant about getting rid of your smartphone as soon as you make the switch to the dumb phone; I knew this wasn’t going to be my recourse. But I did want to make my access to the iPhone as limited as possible in the beginning, to assess what I truly did or didn’t need from my smartphone.

The Light Phone II, the dumb phone that I chose from a whole market of dumb phones, is very thoughtfully designed. As I have gotten more acquainted with its capabilities, I have been pleasantly surprised by what it has to offer. Aside from texting and calling, it also has a GPS function for directions (which works fairly well), a podcast application, and music player where you can download your mp3s (who has any of those these days?). It also has a hotspot, which you can use to get a computer or smartphone online if needed. Interestingly, my cell phone provider is not wholly compatible with the Light Phone; while all the phone’s functions work perfectly fine, the only one that doesn’t is the hotspot, which I think is ultimately a good thing because it will take away the temptation to get online unnecessarily.

And yet, the Light Phone’s limitations are clear. Texting on the tiny keyboard is cumbersome, but there is a great workaround: voice-to-text. The phone’s voice-to-text function works great, although I have found that it isn’t always convenient to have to speak your texts aloud (in a loud room or when you don’t want another person to overhear).

Which brings me to my next point. Yes, the phone has inherent “stickiness” (a bad word in Silicon Valley), making it somewhat inconvenient to use. And yet, this stickiness, which is by design, is ultimately helping me achieve my goal of limiting my dependence on a device.

My texts are sparse and I send fewer of them. I am more likely to give someone a call instead of engaging in a lengthy back-and-forth over text message. Also, texting on the Light Phone provides no additional feedback, such as iMessage’s dots letting you know that someone is texting you back (“typing awareness indicator”) or read receipts. People may not realize that these “conveniences” or extra data are just ways to get users to engage more with their phones, to give them something to latch onto.

Every Light Phone user that I’ve come across has different ways of using their dumb phone. Some use a smartphone for work during the week and then the Light Phone on the weekends to truly unplug from their day jobs. Some users have switched their phone number to the Light Phone but have held onto their smartphone, which they use as an auxiliary device when they’re traveling abroad or need access to certain apps that are only available on smartphones, such as car sharing apps. Others use the Light Phone exclusively.

Since getting my Light Phone, I have been feeling it out, considering what other gadgets I might want to acquire to make the Light Phone a realistic long-term option for me. On Reddit, Light Phone users post pictures of their “everyday bag,” which usually includes some combination of their Light Phone, a digital camera, a music player (including some restored iPods, which I’m jealous of!), a kindle or paperback book, and a small journal or notebook. Some people carry with them a small handheld video game or other pastime to use in their downtime.

At first, I was very excited about the idea of using a digital camera and going back to my old ways of cataloguing photos. Every few weeks, I used to meticulously download my photos from the SD card onto my external hard drive and organize my photos by year, month and activity. Obviously, when I got an iPhone, this all came to an end.

But when my husband gifted me a digital camera for my birthday last week, I hesitated. In the past two weeks of using my Light Phone, I have relied on my old iPhone as a camera, taking it with me to birthday parties or using it so that friends could Air Drop photos they had taken during an outing. I haven’t been carrying my iPhone with me as a rule, but I have taken it with me for special events, as I used to do when I had an iPod touch during my flip phone days.

I have come to the decision that using the iPhone as a camera meets my needs to take decent photos and be able to share them easily with friends and family. But it feels important to me that I don’t get into the habit of always having my iPhone with me, at the ready to take a photo at any moment.

In the beginning, it felt very strange to leave the house without my smartphone, mainly because I was acutely aware that I could not take a photo of every adorable thing that my children did. And you know what? That’s okay. I think the astounding number of photographs that I have accumulated over the past three years of becoming a parent is excessive and unnecessary. How often do we go back and look at the trillions of photos and videos we take day in and day out? I definitely want to document special moments with my children, but I don’t think I need to have a camera on me at every moment of every day.

After the new year, my family and I made an impromptu trip down to the Florida Keys to check out a trawler that our friend had just purchased. We got there in the late afternoon and climbed aboard, oohing and ahhing about the ins and outs of their new boat. From the top deck of the trawler, we witnessed a glorious sunset over the mangroves, the sky a canvas of sherbet colors. Without a camera to snap a photograph, I balked. How could I not document something so special, so beautiful?

The experience made me highly uncomfortable at first, but I had no choice except to lean into it. With my boys, we described the colors we saw—orange, pink, purple, blue—and admired how they changed and deepened with every passing minute. We compared the swirls of color to ice cream. At one point, Mistral handed me an imaginary cone of ice cream clouds, a memory that is more poignant than any subpar photo I could have taken, which surely wouldn’t have captured the magic of the surreal colors or the sweet moment.

In this instance, I know that not having my smartphone allowed me to be more present in the moment. And there have been many moments like that over the past two weeks. Being present is a gift, one that deepens our connection to the world and the people around us.

After the sunset had darkened to twilight, we decided to go out to dinner and, while Norbert and his friend made some last-minute boat repairs, I was tasked with finding a restaurant that was child-friendly for our brood of kiddos. Without a smartphone to do a quick search, I could have gotten in the car (kids in tow) and driven up and down the stretch of US1, stopping into restaurants to check them out, before returning to the boatyard to inform the others about my choice. Instead, I grabbed Norbert’s iPhone and scanned the map for nearby restaurants, settling on one a few miles north of us that looked casual enough for the kids but also decent enough for a tasty meal.

At dinner, one of our friends chastised me for using Norbert’s iPhone to find the restaurant. I felt defensive; the point of my dumb phone experiment is not to never touch a smartphone ever again. The point is that my main cell phone will no longer be a smartphone, and the fact that most people surrounding me carry around tiny computers in their pocket is something that I will use to my advantage when necessary. In this case, I used Norbert’s iPhone as a tool to help me solve a problem: “Where are we going to dinner?” The cool part is it stopped there. I didn’t start at Google Maps and end up deep in my Instagram feed, or mindlessly scanning my emails. Instead of being taken on a dopamine-filled ride, I used the smartphone for my intended purpose, the way tools are meant to be used.

On Reddit, some Light Phone users banter about how to hack the phone’s inconveniences or stickiness, while others rejoice in it. Without turning every moment into an opportunity to be productive, you create opportunity for other experiences, even if that experience is something undesirable like boredom.

For example, someone was bemoaning the lack of a list-making app that they could add to easily while they were driving; other users argued that, if something was really important, you would remember to write it down in your notebook once you stopped driving. “It’s a normal part of the human experience to forget things,” someone wrote. But in our age of constant connectivity and over-productivity, forgetting is not allowed. And yet, in a philosophical sense, isn’t it important to let things go?

The other day, I was back in my hometown and grabbed a smoothie at a place that my sister and I used to love. With my smartphone in hand, I would have definitely texted her a photo of the smoothie. This unfulfilled instinct made me realize how often I have infused every moment that I was alone with some kind of digital stimulation—thanks to my smartphone device. Even though I haven’t been an active user of social media, I’ve developed the habit of narrating my life, even if it’s to people in my inner circle. This constant need to overcommunicate (in order to not feel alone) is something that I’m unlearning.

Instead of texting my sister a photo, I sat by the window and enjoyed my smoothie by myself—an odd feeling. I made a mental note to tell her that I’d visited our favorite smoothie shop the next time I spoke to her, fully cognizant of the fact that I might forget to tell her, which would be okay. A moment can be just for me, and still be meaningful and valuable.

Unlike the iPhone’s flawless interface, which responds to your every movement, the Light Phone’s functionality is far from smooth. It does not think two steps ahead of me, anticipating my every move. It does not respond to me as if it were an animate being, waking up when I pick it up and reading my facial features to access my bank account. Using the Light Phone does not feel effortless, fluid or “natural,” and I appreciate that. I want my phone to be inanimate again, to be an object—a tool—and not a living thing that I have a complex relationship with.

The antonym of technological is biological. I am a biological being. My phone is not.