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12 months without a smartphone

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I’m sat at my desk, and my alarm goes off to remind me to take a break.  Should I go outside and get some fresh air, or maybe go downstairs and make a coffee?  I do neither, instead I pick up my phone, open the Twitter app, and before I know it its time to get back to work.


Filling the white space


My smartphone had become the filling in all of the gaps in my day.  Where before I would have daydreamed, thought about stuff, or just done something, those things had now been relegated to the lower divisions and replaced by my phone.


I don’t know about you, but for me the phone barging its way in and barging out other activities was a gradual one.  So gradual I hardly noticed it, a bit like the boiling frog.


Time well spent


I’m not sure where it came from, but from somewhere I got the idea of calculating the number of working weeks I’d spent on my smartphone.  To do this I calculated the following:  average number of daily hours I spent on my phone (1) multiplied by number of days in a year (365) multiplied by the number of years I’d been using a smartphone (10, I got mine in 2014) divided by 40 (hours in a working week)...


The result was like a punch in the gut, unless my maths was mistaken, I’d spent the equivalent of 91 working weeks on my smartphone since I had it.


Let’s be honest here, I was definitely spending more than one hour a day on my smartphone, so the 91 hours is a very conservative figure.  I had to calculate this a few times, as that just couldn’t be right.  It was…


Deathbed question


“If you were on your deathbed right now, what regrets would you have?”.  When I asked myself this question, the answer definitely wasn’t regretting that I hadn’t spent more time looking at my smartphone, and in fact the reverse was true, my regret was spending so much valuable time gazing passively into that tiny screen.


How did my smartphone affect me?


Where do I start?  My concentration had plummeted for one.  As a meditator of over 20 years, I’ve always prided myself on my powers of concentration, but whether its correlation or causation, since I’ve had a smartphone those once mighty powers had definitely declined.  I’d also stopped doing as much thinking, and always felt a nagging urge to be checking in case I was missing something on my phone.


Society has changed


Mobile data has been ubiquitous since 2014/15, and we’ve all been swept up y the idea we need to be online more because that’s where life is.  Smartphones themselves, apps, games and social media are designed to maximise the amount of time we spend on them.  It makes perfect business sense, why create something people want when you can create something they depend on?


The seduction of comfort and convenience


In H.G Wells novel ‘The time Machine’ Wells talks of a future society where the Eloi are a future version of humans who have become weakened by the rise of technology that leaves them idle, to the point where they become food for the Morlocks an underground dwelling race.  It seems far-fetched, but our reliance on convenience and ease is definitely changing us.


What I did


In august 2023 I decided that enough was enough and I got rid of my smartphone and replaced it with what’s now called a ‘dumb phone’ (the irony being that I actually feel far smarter since I started using my dumb phone). 


I put my coat on and headed down to my local Argos and flicked through the pages of their catalogue and phone a nice new Nokia 8210 (just like the one I had many years ago) for the handsome price of £24.99.  It’s very simple, pretty much indestructible and only needs charging every few weeks.


When we want to give up an unhealthy food we don’t leave it in the cupboard and do our best to avoid it, we remove it from the house.  If its not there we can’t eat it unless we go to the shop, and I applied the same thinking with my phone.  If I haven’t got one I can’t use it.  Simple.


Bumps in the road


I knew it was going to be difficult, after all I’d been using a smartphone daily for a decade now, so I gritted my teeth and prepared for the inevitable withdrawal symptoms.  And waited.  And waited.  But nothing happened.  I didn’t die, and the world definitely didn’t end.  It was a bit like waiting for the millennium bug, where we were all expected everything to stop working and for pandemonium to break out.  Only for nothing to happen.


I was surprised how easy it was to not have my digital sidekick glued to me like Robin to Batman.  In fact, it felt rather good.  There were a couple of things though, one being my need to rely on my still smartphone using girlfriend to use her phone to show our boarding passes on a recent flight to Prague, and the other being unable to reconnect to the Whatsapp desktop platform without a QR code.  Newsflash burners don’t do QR codes, no matter how much you beg them. 


But crazy as it sounds, I’ve actually come to prefer not feeling the urge to stay updated with everybody’s coming and goings on Whatsapp.


Quality over quantity


Just because we can digitally immerse ourselves in each other’s lives 24/7 doesn’t mean its automatically a good thing.  We’re all saying a lot more but have maybe got less to say.  It definitely feels as if its quantity over quality.


My lack of smartphone has meant that it takes longer to type out a message to somebody and am therefore only doing so if I have something meaningful to say rather than just communicating because I can. 


Its also made me value face to face interaction much more as now that I don’t have the ability to see what everybody’s up to all the time via Whatsapp I feel the urge to arrange to meet people more so I can hear how they are and what they’ve been doing.  It feels more valuable this way somehow.


It’s definitely not impossible


Before I started this experiment, I watched loads of YouTube videos and listened to a number of podcasts on giving up your smartphone, and just about all of them came to the conclusion that its pretty much impossible to live without a smartphone in the modern world.  I’m going to politely disagree and suggest that maybe those people either didn’t try hard enough or didn’t really want to to/didn’t feel ready to part with their phone.


I’ve been surprised at just how easy it’s been.  In fact, it’s been so easy I wish I’d done it ten years ago, that way I might have sunk those 91 working weeks into something that would give me a greater return on my time.  Imagine if I’d spent those 91 working weeks reading a few pages at a time or tweaking an existing skill.  Who knows what I might have achieved.


Will I go back?


You can probably guess the answer to that question, but who knows what the future holds.  But what I can say for sure is that right now I can’t see myself owning a smartphone again, but maybe there will come a day where you physically need one just to exist in the modern world.  But until that day comes, I’m more than happy with my little red burner phone and its loveable limitations.



Jonathan Pittam

Wellness educator


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