Take Back the Wheel
Driving under the influence
A few days after switching to my Light Phone, I had to drive to Raleigh, a neighboring city 35 minutes away, for a birthday party. I had my iPhone with me, and I was able to plug in the address while we were still home and get Google Maps set up with Wi-Fi. Using this technique, Google Maps’ route gets cached and then you can use it without internet. We got to our location without a problem. It was the way home that posed some challenges. I tried to stay somewhat aware of our route on the drive over, and so I carefully attempted to retrace our steps.
Dear reader, I did not succeed. I ended up on the other side of Durham, in a different city altogether, Chapel Hill. I have lived in Durham for the past 2 and a half years, and apparently, I still don’t know the major highways that crisscross the Triangle. I find this shameful.
I can get around my neighborhood fairly easily, although as soon as I go outside a two-mile radius, I am completely useless. Even places that I go to on a regular basis, like my kids’ swimming class or Target, evade me. I went to my son’s swimming class 3 times a week for 7 weeks, and then once a week for a year after that, and I still managed to get lost the one time I tried to get there without Google Maps’ assistance.
Why is that?
It's not that I’m directionally challenged (although that might be part of it). The bigger reason is that I simply haven’t been paying attention. Every time I drove to swimming class, I had my smartphone to guide me and so I could tune out. I didn’t have to pay attention to my surroundings: to signage, or the numbers of the highways, or street names. I just had to mindlessly follow directions. At the wheel, I have been on auto pilot.
It comes down to presence. With the GPS fired up on my smartphone, I didn’t have to use my brain – one more way that our smartphones are stealing our precious attention. Attention is a muscle like any other, and without regular use, it withers.
As a sailboat captain, my father was notoriously strict with his crew. On long passages, he wouldn’t let crew members keeping night watch use the auto pilot (and the auto pilot’s motor was situated right above my father’s bunk, so he would immediately hear if it had been turned on). In his mind, relying on the auto pilot was the first step to checking out, and he needed his sailing crew to be alert. He couldn’t have them losing focus. They needed to be constantly aware of their surroundings. Small mistakes or a lapse in attention could have major consequences. As a frequent member of my father’s sailing crew, I learned this from personal experience. Thankfully, my inattention did not result in a major crash, but it was a close call.
Driving was one of the main reasons that I decided to get rid of my smartphone.
I had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the level of multi-tasking that was happening while I was driving. And the ability to multitask while driving was due to one major culprit – my smartphone. With my iPhone plugged into my car, I was always fiddling with Spotify, podcasts, Google maps, or responding to texts while waiting at a light. I felt that my smartphone was making me an unsafe driver and having two small children in the backseat – well, it’s not a good scenario.
Losing access to Spotify on-the-go was one of the things I was most worried about with the switch to the Light Phone. My children have become accustomed to Mama being their personal DJ, and they shout requests constantly from their car seats, fighting each other on which song or story must play at any given time. To be honest, it was very stressful to constantly keep up with their whims and demands, but it was just normal to me. I was nervous how my kids were going to react when I couldn’t play “El Patito Feo” or “Intergalactic” on demand.
From one day to the next, I made the switch from Spotify to scanning the radio airwaves and I am thrilled to report that my children barely bat an eye. We always say that kids are resilient, but damn! This was a surprise.
Listening to the radio was the self-care that I didn’t know I needed.
Chumbawumba. Third Eye Blind. Alanis Morisette. Goo Goo Dolls. Ashanti. Nelly Furtado. Barenaked Ladies. Give me all the 90’s/2000’s hits. (And listen to this
podcast about 2000s music making a comeback.)Being new to Durham, I’m not familiar with the radio stations, so I just scan until I find a song I like, and then repeat the process. There is a surprising number of stations playing “oldies” from my youth. I’m here for it. And apparently, so are my kiddos. Once in a while, they’ve asked me to play “the helicopter song”, and I gently inform them that that’s no longer an option. Then I pass them a book and turn up the radio.
I think they can feel that my vibe is chiller, that I’m happier singing along to pop songs than I was listening to “Chocolate con Almendra” for the umpteenth time.
But on top of feeling less stressed because I’m not playing DJ to my children’s fickle whimsies, I’m also more relaxed because I don’t have the temptation to fiddle around on my smartphone. I’m able to be more present as a driver, and I have to be! Otherwise, I’ll end up in Chapel Hill again.
The Light Phone has a pretty decent GPS system, but it doesn’t hook up to my car’s screen, which makes it pretty inconvenient to follow directions from the phone’s tiny screen. It’s great in a bind, but after my disastrous drive home from Raleigh, I’ve made the resolution to actually learn how to get around my new city (and the surrounding cities). And I am happy to report that it’s working!
The other day, I went to a sportsplex in a neighboring town to use the pool. It was my first time visiting this community center, so I followed the Light Phone’s directions and made it through the 20 minute drive without a problem. I made sure to pay close attention to every turn and landmark, and on my way home, I did it without any assistance. And I actually made it! The next time I went to the sportsplex, I got there without a hitch, and without using a GPS. I realized that being GPS-less doesn’t mean that I’m up a creek without a paddle; this may sound crazy, but road and highway signage are actually quite helpful. On my drive to the sportsplex, I noticed that there are multiple large signs pointing me in the direction of my destination, something I wouldn’t have noticed if I had been on auto pilot.
It may sound silly, but I know I’m not alone when it comes to people who truly can’t tell you if their favorite thrift store (or somewhere they frequent often) is north or south or east or west of where they live. We have our phones to thank for that.
After a while, I started to notice how, when I plugged in an address on my smartphone and followed the path laid out for me by my handheld machine, my focus was invariably on my destination. This may sound woo-woo, but that’s not the way that I want to live my life—always striving for a destination, living for the future instead of for the moment. Without the constant reminder of how many minutes until I reach my destination or how many miles to go on this highway, I can be more attuned to the present moment. I am, in a sense, forced to be mindful, to pay attention, to cultivate awareness.
Instead of operating on auto pilot, I want to gain a sense of direction and spatial awareness that allows me to inhabit place—and my own body—more deeply.
In the news:
🌟What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation, The Guardian
A boarding school in Massachusetts banned smartphones and gave every student a Light Phone. Students experienced more in-person connection with teachers and peers.
“People are engaging in the lounges. They are lingering after class to chat,” said Beck, who estimates that he’s now having more conversations than ever at the school. “All these face-to-face interactions, the frequency has gone through the roof.”
Hi Carmella! I was a newsletter recipient of yours pre-Substack so I'm glad I found you here!
Directions/navigating is near and dear to my heart. I had a horrible sense of direction until my mid-20s when I moved to the Bay Area and started driving there with paper maps and no GPS (I was driving my now-husband's van from the 70s that didn't even have a rear view mirror!). Then I moved to Austin, TX and was car free for the first year I lived there - so I relied on buses, Car2Go (I didn't have a smartphone and they used to have cards that would unlock the cars!), and the occasional taxi. It taught me how to navigate like a total boss! I ended up with a car and a smartphone for a few years (for work as dog walker) and the designation as the Human GPS in my friend group. I just knew how to get places and how things were laid out and frequently just wrote directions down for myself. It's made me a pretty bad backseat driver at times, so I do have to work on that. Now I'm navigating a new and old place :(my home state of Maryland) and it's wild what I can and cannot remember. My sweet husband takes the same route to work every single day and gets lost easily - Google Maps is also his guidepost. I kind of like the thrill of no navigation? I love that my car has built-in GPS and will often turn it on just to see how far away I am from somewhere that I want to go. I went back to a flip phone in 2016 and the last time I was truly lost I was trying to follow the saved directions on my tablet and that was a mess. Next time I'll just write them down. Or print them out! My parents (that I live with) have a printer and I am loving printing things!
Obviously, I can go on about this a lot, lol.
Love this, Carmella, thanks for sharing! Before I had a smartphone, I had a flip phone, and I got lost SO OFTEN. I remember biking around Boston with completely no idea of where I was, finding the subway tracks, and following them back towards downtown to get my bearings. So the GPS in the phone has been amazing for me, but I also get that it's a huge amount of distraction while driving. Glad you have found a way to drive more safely and comfortably!