I Gave Up My Phone For A Month. Here’s What I Learned.
“Hey, sorry I didn’t text you back the other day. I didn’t use my phone this week.”
I received this text from a friend of mine, and immediately began to panic.
“What happened?” I quickly responded. “Did you lose your phone? Did it break? Are you severely depressed and withdrawing from the world?”
“Nah. It was a challenge for school. Who could go the longest without their phone. I won. One week.”
“Oh,” I texted back, breathing a sigh of relief. “Well, congrats.”
“Yeah. It was really hard. I mean, I bet you couldn’t do it.”
I paused. Looked at the words on the screen.
“I could do it,” I typed back. “I could do it for even longer.”
“Fine. How about a month?”
So began my one month hiatus from using my phone.
The rules:
- I couldn’t use my cell phone or anyone else’s.
- I couldn’t use the messaging feature on my mac.
- My phone had to remain off for the entire challenge, not just in airplane mode or with wifi turned off.
Why I did it
I was a late smartphone adopter. I didn’t get my first smartphone until 2014, and only got one because, for the past few years, my dad would argue with me about it.
“It’s the fucking 21st century Jen! You can’t walk around with that flip phone anymore!”
I’d ramble for a few minutes about how I didn’t believe that people should be connected to technology at every moment of their lives until he’d cut me off.
“Look — you wanna be part of the family plan? Then you need to get a smartphone, period.”
So in 2014, I caved. I still believed that smartphones were filling a void that perhaps should just be a void. Maybe people shouldn’t be “on” every second of the day. Maybe if I start wondering which season of Top Chef Richard Blais first appeared on while I’m on the phone with my grandma, I shouldn’t be able to look it up in that moment. Maybe I should just eat my food instead of taking a picture…
