Trading In My Smartphone

I want to be enchanted again.

I finally did it, friends. I pulled the trigger and bought myself a Light Phone. When it arrives, it will replace my current iPhone.

As readers of this newsletter know, I have never been comfortable being a smartphone owner and user. When I finally succumbed to owning a smartphone in 2017, I felt like I was entering the land of no return. I knew that once I gave into the convenience and constant connectivity of the smartphone, there was no going back. And I was not wrong. It’s a hell of a habit to break.

Since then, our modern world has become even more smartphone-centric. Many aspects of our daily lives require smartphones, like using a carsharing app to unlock a vehicle that you’re renting, calling an Uber, sending someone a pin of your location, or Venmo-ing money to a friend.

I rely heavily on my smartphone all day every day for useful functions—as well as many not-so-useful purposes. Ever since pulling the trigger and buying the Light Phone, my days have been peppered with sporadic realizations of all the things I won’t be able to do anymore, like taking a video of my child dancing to Beastie Boys’ “Intergalactic” and immediately sending it to my family, or sharing a BeReal with my friends. I think about all the things I’ll miss out on, like photos of my friend’s brand new baby or spontaneous free giveaways on the neighborhood parent group chat that I started. What will I do when I can’t check the weather or my bank account balance with a simple click?

For those of you who aren’t familiar, a Light Phone is a very stripped-down version of a smartphone. Mainly, it is a phone. You can use it to make calls and send texts. It does not have a camera, nor does it display images. It does not have a web browser or email client. What does it have? A directions function, a calendar, and a podcast tool, which I appreciate. Otherwise, there is no app store, no never-ending feed, no bells and whistles.

It will be a process of unlearning — unlearning all the ingrained habits and small but meaningful ways that I have relied on my smartphone these past seven years. Without a smartphone, I will need a different kind of attention. I will need to think ahead because what I might need in the future won’t be readily available to me. For examples, I’ll have to print out concert tickets before leaving the house, because I won’t be able to pull them up on a whim at the door. I will no longer be able to save my boarding pass in a virtual wallet or record a voice memo. I won’t be able to find out if the craft store is open on Tuesdays nor while I be able to listen to my favorite Spotify playlist. I won’t have my email at my fingertips, or my Google docs, or my Dropbox. I won’t be able to read the New York Times on the can or pull up a YouTube video of Curious George when my kids are losing their minds on the third hour of a road trip.

The most significant loss for me will be WhatsApp, which I use all day to communicate with friends and family all over the world, not to mention coordinating kid schedules between my husband and my au pair. This will have to switch to regular messaging, and I’ll survive. Also, I’ll still be able to access WhatsApp on my laptop, which relieves me but also worries me because WhatsApp is the gateway drug that got me hooked on a smartphone in the first place!

But the truth is, I desperately need to be shaken up in this way. For a long time, I have been falling deeper and deeper down the smartphone rabbit hole, it’s attractive pull becoming impossible to resist. Although I have maintained some good habits (such as never bringing the phone in the bedroom or downloading social media apps), I am not proud of the amount of time that I spend hooked on my device on a daily basis.

My attention span is utterly shattered at this point, and I can feel the negative effect that my smartphone habits is having on my relationships, chiefly my lack of presence with my husband and children. I see my short temperedness worsened when I am distracted by my phone, even though most of what is holding my attention is usually wholly unimportant.

I don’t like who I’ve become.

I need a reset. To start anew. To dry out, like a drunk.

Part of what impelled me to do this thing that I have been wanting to do for years was reading

Katherine May

‘s book, Enchanted: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age.

May writes about Mircea Eliade, who “coined the term hierophany to describe the way that the divine reveals itself to us, transforming the objects through which it works. When we make a tree or a stone or a wafer of bread the subject of our worshipful attention, we transform it into a hierophany, an object of the sacred.”

This notion of “worshipful attention” transforming an object into something sacred struck a chord for me. Is this not what we are doing with our smartphones day in and day out?

May continues: “Writing in 1957, Eliade argued that the world we live in had lost its hierophanies—that all things were part of the same flat reality. The numinous had given the world ‘a fixed point, a center,’ and without it we are left with a broken place, a ‘shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting only of an infinite number of more or less neutral places.’ Meaning had seeped away, leaving us with nothing more than the demands of industrial society in the place of profundity.”

Ooof. That last line — meaning had seeped away, leaving us with nothing more than the demands of industrial society in the place of profundity. Replace that with capitalist society and it’s pretty spot on regarding our current reality.

“I need a better way to walk through this life. I want to be enchanted again.”

Katherine May

I think May’s quote is the synthesis of why I’m opting out of my smartphone. It’s hijacked an outsized place in my life for far too long and I want to make space for other things: enchantment, curiosity, wonder, magic, delight, boredom, poetry, serenity. I want to be healed from the current state of my frazzled consciousness that feels as though it is being tossed about in an angry sea.

I am afraid to embark on this journey because I am afraid that I will fail. I am afraid that the inconvenience will be too hard and it will be too easy to fall back on the good ol’ smartphone. I’m afraid I will feel left out of my group chats and that I will miss out on the joy of documenting my life and sharing it with others instantaneously. But the truth is, my own sanity and wellbeing is more important than sharing cute pics of my children with the grandparents.

I came across this quote by George Bernard Shaw and it seemed apt:

“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most people dread it.”

I’m going to give it the old college try. No promises that I’ll succeed. But I can promise that I’ll keep you posted on the experiment.

Best wishes for the new year!