I Threw My Smart Phone Into the Sea!

Ok, I didn’t really throw it into the sea. I passed it along to my husband, who really needed a new phone. That being said, throwing cursed objects into the sea was absolutely the energy I was bringing to the table so…

In my last post, I talked about having a mind that creates slowly in the 21st century whirlwind of algorithms and visibility. I explained how I feel that my stories accrete at a pace that is not totally under my control. I ended with an assertion: That while I would never match the speed demanded by the modern market, neither should I revel contrarily in my super-special slowness, relishing how very uncommercial I am. Because that would be annoying. To me, and rightfully to everyone else too. And besides, I have so many stories I want to explore, and who knows how long I’ll get? I posited that there are things I can do to encourage story accretion. This post is about the single biggest thing I’ve found that does that: getting rid of my smart phone.

It was a long time coming, and to those who know me (and possibly you too if you’ve read my thoughts on art and AI) I think the biggest surprise was that I hadn’t done it sooner. If you’re curious about what motivated me to finally bite the bullet, you can look at the work of Nicholas Carr, Jonathan Haidt, Anna Lembke, Johann Hari, Cal Newport, or just scroll through the Resources page of Loreena McKennitt’s Stolen Child Project. Or you can spend a year working in a high school with no phone policy and just observe. Or you can watch this video essay (music video) by the noted philosophical duo (band) Wet Leg. Sums it up pretty well! Or maybe you’re old enough to remember life before smart phones. Just remember what that was like, and do an honest comparison. If you don’t remember a time before smart phones, I think you are justified in being angry, because something very important was stolen from you, and I think you should go on an actual quest to get it back.

So what do I receive phone calls on these days? I didn’t go as dumb as a could have; I didn’t go full flip phone (maybe someday). I got The Light Phone III. It can call and text, it has a camera, and you can download optional tools for navigation, music (not streaming, you have to download music onto the phone like it’s an mp3 player from days of yore), notes, a calendar, and a few other things. There’s no email, no browser, no streaming, no games, no socials, no distractions. It’s designed to be reparable rather than replaceable and as boring as possible. I love it. I love it so much, and now you could not pay me enough money to take the smart phone back. So what was it like? The transition to a post smart phone life? I’m sure I’m still in it, but I can certainly speak to the transition so far: It is at once both liberating and seriously challenging, and not in the ways I expected.

Turns out, even addictions you want to break are hard to break. I know, who knew? I pre-ordered my Light Phone III and waited about nine months for it. During that nine months, I was still using my smart phone just as I had been, even though I knew the end was coming. I was usually filling silence with a podcast or interview, down time was spent checking in on the news or reading think pieces. In retrospect, this is kind of funny. Because I wasn’t on Twitter, or TikTok, or Instagram, or playing games, I thought, well I’m not really addicted to my phone. I’m consuming long form content! I’m learning! I’m being informed! I only lurk on Reddit for good reasons! Which is adorable. I was doing “smart person” things so I wasn’t as addicted as the people with the socials? Please. That is some first rate snobbery and blatant self-justification. I was as addicted as anybody else, and no amount of long form content was going to change that.

While I was waiting for my Light Phone, I thought about modifying my habits to make the transition easier. I even decided to do exactly that. A couple of times. I even had the Freedom app to help. But did I modify my habits? Nope! I was helpless, and kind of resigned, and just waited like some damsel in distress for the good knight Light Phone to come save me from the dragon in my pocket. But then the day arrived! It was here! Did I tear the box open? Joyfully switch my sim card over and throw my smart phone off the roof? Nope. I left the box unopened by my desk for a whole week. Sure, part of that was resistance to the tedium of setting up a new phone. But I’d be lying to myself if I chalked all of my reluctance up to that. And one of the side effects of not having a smart phone is that it becomes harder to lie to yourself.

This is what is was: Part of my identity resided in that smart phone. In what I read, what content I consumed, what music I listened to. Whenever I thought about moving the sim card over and resetting the smart phone to factory settings, it felt like I was going to smother some part of myself. It felt disturbing and violent. I found the appearance of this feeling to be extremely alarming, and after about a week, its mere existence provided more than enough motivation for me to switch the sim card over. But did I then immediately reset the smart phone to factory settings? Nope. That took another month. You know, I had to “make sure that everything was working on the new phone first.” Yeah, for a whole month. Totally reasonable. I expected the transition away from a smart phone to be one of learning to live without the constant dopamine hit of new information—I had mentally prepared for that if not practically prepared for it—I was not expecting to discover that I had come see this thing as holding a piece of my personhood. But apparently somewhere along the way, that’s exactly what happened.

Where along the way? I got my first smart phone when I was 23, meaning I’d had one for about 15 years by the time I let it go, and I’d always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with it. It took about 6 years of having it before I consistently kept it on my person or in the same room as me. I was never especially active on any social media even back when I used it. I can’t say exactly when I gave a piece of myself to my phone, which, personally just makes it even more terrifying, but it definitely got worse in 2020. I know, big surprise. But I didn’t just have the pandemic to contend with. I had also just graduated from college and had moved to Belgium with my shiny new husband where my visa did not allow for me to work. And then, not long after that, my big sister’s cancer came back. I was confined to an apartment, isolated in a new country during a global pandemic, far from my family, without the guardrails of work or school, facing down one of the worst pieces of news I could imagine. The phone won.

I hadn’t appreciated just how much my work, and later my educational work load, had shielded me from true dependence on the smart phone. I worked in ballet and in the service industry, meaning I’ve never had a job that allowed me to just poke around on my phone willy nilly. Even when phones did start creeping into those spaces, I didn’t want them there. In the ballet studio I needed to remain focused, and at Starbucks I didn’t want my phone anywhere near the eldritch horror that is the milk drain. In college, I kept those habits and never had my phone out during class, and the sheer amount of writing and reading I had to do for my double major (all of which I actually did) made sure the phone stayed in its place. Even post 2020 as a high school library assistant on Maui, that phone stayed zipped in my bag in my office so as not to fall into the hands of the teenagers.

With the exception of 2020, my life had kept the smart phone in a circle of salt. But as you may recall from my last post, I am once again without the guardrails of work or school, and I am once again far from home, and now my big sister is gone. The conditions are not unfamiliar. The only structure in my life is the structure I bring to it; the only thing keeping me from spending two hours looking at the news is me, and so it’s no surprise that, once again, the phone was encroaching. It felt like rest at first, but within a year, I realized that one way or another the smart phone had to go.

“But what was it?” you ask, “if not social media, or games?” It was the information! Articles, essays, think pieces, historical rabbit holes, cultural and political commentary, interviews with thinkers I found original and compelling, podcasts! I love learning, I love collecting information, I love hearing people discuss thorny topics that don’t have easy answers. I love synthesizing that information into my existing network of experiences, letting it all reflect off of each other in interesting ways and seeing what emerges in the overlaps and gaps and paradoxes. I literally live for this stuff! And the internet has an unending supply of fodder for it, and the internet lives in my pocket! I never stood a chance.

But this is where it gets messy, because I look at this insatiable curiosity as one of my good traits. It has certainly served me well! I know so much fun, weird stuff! So what’s wrong with feeding that curiosity? Well, nothing, in principle, but all those think pieces and rabbit holes meant I wasn’t feeding it with other things, like actual nonfiction books, or actual conversations with flesh and blood people, or—perhaps most importantly—my own opinions, thoughts, and insights that require space and quiet to take shape and surface. To accrete, if you will. It meant I wasn’t feeding my curiosity with beauty. It meant I was subject to what search engines’ algorithms, Spotify’s algorithm, YouTube’s algorithm, or Substack’s algorithm thought was most likely to keep me the most “engaged.”

And let’s just pause on that word for a minute: engaged. It is doing some serious heavy lifting. Engagements are social, relational things. They occur when two people decide to marry, they occur when groups of friends gather, they occur when someone is deeply occupied with practicing a skill or deep in thought. Can an algorithm “engage” you in any true sense? If we have a relationship with the algorithms that construct—and increasingly with the AIs that populate—our lives, it is surely the most toxic one we can imagine. I mean, would you ever let the romantic partner of your best friend, your sibling, or your child, treat them the way that the algorithms treat you? Making them angry because it enjoys watching them squirm? Isolating them in increasingly niche worlds that encourage distrust of friends, family, and neighbors? Provoking them with the premeditated aim of remaining the center of their attention? Enabling destructive habits or addictions because they’re getting a kickback on the side? No! Of course not! If what the algorithms get from us is engagement, those engagements deserve to be broken.

But we don’t break them. I didn’t. Why? What was I even doing? Dissociating? Sure. Ceding control of my own thought processes? Yeah. Constructing a world of abstract ideas and information to navigate because the real one was so underwhelming, or overwhelming, or painful, or just plain hopeless? Yes. I was lying to myself, abandoning myself, but I didn’t know that until I backed away from the blue glow. Interestingly, you know what my first visceral reaction to turning on my Light Phone was? Sobbing relief. Actually, that wasn’t my reaction exactly, it was my body’s. In that moment, I realized what I had been doing to my poor little brain. I had locked it in a cage for 15 years and constantly poked it with sticks. And when I finally stopped poking it and opened the door, it cried like a creature that had endured years of torture at the hands of the one person who was supposed to love it the most. A broken creature at last given a moment’s peace. And it felt that way because that’s exactly what had happened to it. What I did to it. What I did to myself. How could I? How dare I? What right had I to treat my sweet animal body this way?

Yeah. It’s depressing. I’m not going to sugar coat this part. When about four months in my self started to reassert—well—itself, I think I began to truly understand what I had done. What I had lost. Because it wasn’t just productivity, or focus, it was something much deeper: I had lost huge parts of myself. My intrinsic nature had been stifled, my growth and maturity had been stumped, my genuine individuality and authenticity squashed. If the language isn’t too mystical for you, I felt I had been holding my own soul down while someone else crushed it with the heel of their boot. When I look back, you know what I got from 15 years of smart phone? I don’t even know. Definitely nothing that mattered. At best, I got minor convenience. But what did I lose? Well, I’ll never know, will I? But you know what I do know? What I lost was incalculably vast and exponentially valuable. I paid a huge price, and for what? Let my experience give you pause, especially if have a lot of life left ahead of you and hope to fill it with works of meaning and beauty.

Since getting rid of my smart phone, my writing has so much more space, so much more room to breathe. It’s fed by things in my actual world. People. Physical books read cover to cover. It’s fed by silence. It’s fed by the quiet stream of my own thoughts. And if I need to look something up, or want to check the news or the weather, or want to hop on a zoom with fellow writers, or take courses online, or peruse Etsy, well my laptop is still sitting upstairs on my desk. The internet is still there, but it’s back in the computer, where it belongs. You’d think that getting rid of your smart phone means you end up spending more time on the laptop to compensate, but that has not been my experience. My experience has been that I spend less total time on technology than I did before. I just don’t want it as much. It has less to offer me. It turns out I prefer my real life and my own mind. And here’s another unexpected side effect: good things that used to take willpower just… happen now.

Like, how hard is it to spend 30 minutes quietly in nature everyday when you have a smart phone? The answer: Harder than it should be. I love being outside, like, more than I can tell you, and even I was saying to myself, “After I finish reading this essay I’ll go; after this interview is over I’ll go; after I find this answer I for some reason need right now I’ll go.” And did I go? Maybe. Sometimes. But it took an active mobilization of willpower to put the phone down. But let’s say I made it outside. Good job, me! But I’m still waiting for that email. I’ll just check real quick. Does it look like rain? Hold on… let me… oh look, there’s a new post on Substack. I need to go to the grocery store, but I don’t want to go if they’re still out of my probiotics. I think I have their app, let me just check if they’re in stock. Oh, thunderstorm warning… let me just check… And on it goes!

It takes willpower to not act on any of those thoughts, especially when you can “handle” all of the issues they bring up in a matter of minutes. But it never stops. You end up saying sternly to yourself, “No, this is my outside time. I’m not checking my phone. It’s my nature time. I’m not checking my phone. I love nature. Look at the water. Notice how beautiful. Wow, it is beautiful... I wonder if that email has come in?” You can never just relax! You can never just be present! Even if you leave the phone inside, the thoughts and the compulsions are still there!

How does this go without the smart phone? I look out the window and think, “I’d like to go outside.” And then I do. And that’s it. No battles. It’s the best. I can even bring my phone with me. Things that could feel awfully “self care” before—sunlight, quiet, fresh air—are now just things that happen in my life because they’re good, and I enjoy them. Zero willpower required. There is so much more time, so much more space, so much more peace, so much more quiet. All the things my stories need to accrete.

I think I’m just getting to the point—here at about seven months—where I’m really beginning to see the effects of my Light Phone on my writing, because that first six months I had to deal with a lot of stuff I had been numbing out. It was not light, and it was not pretty, but now I’m dealing with it—the actual stuff of my life—and this too is conducive to my creativity. Yes, getting rid of your smart phone can make you more productive by giving you back some of (or a lot of) your time and attention, but that’s not all there is to it. Assuming you don’t replace it with another distraction, it’s going to force you to face yourself in a way you haven’t had to in a while. You might have a bit of a fight ahead of you, but you should do it. You should fight. On the other side of that fight is yourself, and you are worth fighting for.

But what if you genuinely can’t get rid of your smart phone? You might not be in a position to do it; not everyone is. Maybe you really do need to keep it. But if you’re a fellow slow person who wants to be creating art and beauty, I urge you to be extremely mindful about how you use it. Make it as boring as possible. Delete nonessential apps. Download apps that block other apps, or make it emotionally costly for you to open them. Get a brick. Apparently friction maxxing—adding friction to your digital life—is a thing in 2026, so you can even feel trendy for doing this stuff! And don’t keep your phone on your person when you are home unless absolutely necessary for reasons having to do with health or safety, your own or those for whom you are responsible.

In short, treat the phone like the treacherous, tricky imp with a bottomless gullet that it is. The less you feed it, the less of you it will rule. Don’t rely on your willpower, and—this is important—don’t feel bad about not being able to rely on your willpower. Relying on your willpower in this instance is akin to relying on your willpower to never think of sugar again whilst being forced to live in a world that only feeds you sugar. Or for the nerdier amongst us, it’s like your level three party accidentally broke into the lair of a beholder. You’re not going to win! The tech companies are better at this than you, and you will not beat them by sheer force of will. Free your will of that burden, and watch it joyfully extend itself towards better things. Do whatever you have to do to turn that smart phone back into a tool, and be sure to at least sometimes choose silence.

And for anyone who doesn’t need the smart phone for work or health reasons but still feels that they can’t afford to get rid of it, I invite you to seriously consider the opposite: What you really can’t afford to do, is keep it.

The art featured with this post is Miquel Carbonell Selva’s “The Death of Sappho,” 1881. Sourced from Wiki Commons.