Could a Dumber Phone Be the Key to a Better Life?
How disconnecting can help us better connect.
The day that Roe was knocked down, I was flying back to New York from a 48-hour-long trip to California (awful for the environment, I know) without a cellphone, which I had lost before leaving for the airport. Through the miracles of public Wi-Fi and good old-fashioned stuff like planning in advance, I managed to navigate my way from two hours outside of Los Angeles across the country to a rental house I’m staying in about two hours north of New York City. I didn’t learn about the ruling until I logged on to the airplane’s Wi-Fi with my laptop and saw the news in a group chat. As I watched everyone around me doomscroll on their phones, I leaned into not having mine and decided to avoid social media altogether. Instead, I cried a little bit, sat in my thoughts and feelings for an hour or so, then opened up a new Word doc and wrote last week’s edition of this newsletter.
When the driver who picked me up at JFK asked if I was “losing my mind” without my phone, I explained that, actually, aside from losing my equal rights, I was feeling pretty chill. More chill than I could remember feeling since, well, the last time I lost my phone. When the replacement arrived the next day, a Saturday, I waited a full 24 hours before I took it out of the box. I was phoneless, but not completely without technology, and in that time I wrote a new section of my novel, penned a meaningful email to an old friend I hadn’t spoken with in a while, read the newspaper (online), FaceTimed another friend from my laptop, and dined out with yet more friends and acquaintances. In short, I continued to exist—and in fact, I was thriving. The Earth did not swallow me whole because I was phoneless; in fact, considering the state of the world, I felt relatively at peace.
Why shouldn’t I have? For the first time in ages I was able to walk through the world and have complete thoughts, conversations and feelings without the uncontrollable interruption of world events through push notifications, emotional disruption through texts, or the addictive distraction of scrolling through other peoples’ semi-formed thoughts, feelings, and emotions as expressed on social media. I was fully present with the people I did engage with and I dove more deeply into my creative work.
My junior high school was not remarkable in any particular way, save a seventh grade course called “Future Extrapolation,” which I can honestly say helped to shape the person—or, at least, the thinker—that I am today. The teacher would present a news story (say, an article about the release of low-cost VCRs) and we students would have to game out how this development might affect us, our families, our city, our country, and then the world. (Hollywood, I hate to break it to you, but some kids at IS 227 predicted the decline of cinema back in the late ’80s.) The point was to not only hone our strategic-thinking skills and to understand real-world cause and effect, but to also prepare us for a world that would soon be inundated with new technologies—to arm us with the ability to assess the pros and cons of adopting these technologies, not only for ourselves, but for society as a whole.
While I stuck with the strategic thinking, I, like many of us, somehow allowed myself to become the frog boiled by a tiny computer that lives in my pocket.
My first phone, purchased at Spring in the summer of 1999 (complete with a 917 area code), was a total dummy. It flipped open and could barely text, but it was still a revelation. It helped liberate me from my shitty, wasp-infested first apartment, enabling me to make plans and keep in touch with friends from whatever Starbucks I was sitting in between job interviews. The flip phone became a BlackBerry, the BlackBerry eventually became an iPhone. Meanwhile, a cool thing named Facebook was rolled out. There I found all of my old friends from my analog days, and started to “keep up with” them. Then I joined Twitter and Instagram. I opted in for push notifications to stay informed of breaking news, because why wouldn’t I want to be more informed? But I adopted each innovation more carelessly than the last, and over the years, I stopped extrapolating out the implications of new features for me, the people around me, my country, and society at large. I just kept saying, “Cool.”
Had I actually done that extrapolation, I might have been able—as Gary Shteyngart did so brilliantly did in his 2010 novel, Super Sad True Love Story—to see that all of this digital connectivity is actually just a connection to the devices we are using, and not to the people we are supposedly communicating with. In Shteyngart’s dystopian novel, published a mere three years after the birth of the iPhone, characters suffer from profound loneliness. They spend entire nights out ignoring friends in favor of their phones, dating has been reduced to ranking people’s photos, and “discourse” is largely limited to rants on the internet. The book was prescient, but maybe not dystopian enough.
What Shteyngart missed was the onset of apathy about the plights of our fellow humans. I say this with empathy for people who experience it. When you are entertaining your toddler in a park and get a push notification about yet another mass shooting, what other response can you have besides quickly putting away your phone? Likewise, shock and despair over war or social injustice inevitably get flattened when reduced to an Instagram meme that you’ve scrolled past many times.
While working on my next novel upstate, I discovered a float-tank spa around the corner and decided to give it a whirl. If you’re not familiar, floatation (or float-therapy) tanks are pods filled with a saline-water solution heated to body temperature and buoyant enough to float in. For 45 minutes or more, in a darkened room and with earplugs in, you lie there and … float. That’s it. It promises to leave you more lucid, recharged, revitalized, and creatively open; all benefits that I found personally to be true. It is also, I realized, the opposite state of how most of us live now, bombarded as we are with synthetic stimuli.
I came home from the float tank and decided that I would prefer to have a dumber phone and a sharper, possibly happier me. I deleted every social app and turned off my push notifications. I’m not trying to deny the state of the world today; I’m just trying to control my existence within it.