The joy of going phone free
A few months ago, I dropped my phone in such a way that the only edge exposed by the case I was using landed on concrete with enough force to crack the screen. It only affected the front camera and the top centimetre or so of the screen, but as the phone was only a few months old it was mildly annoying. I resolved that at some point I should get it fixed, but knew it'd be a pain.
At the end of July, the phone went to a local repair shop. They needed to run some tests before they could decide whether to repair or replace, which meant that I'd be without a phone for about a week.
In the end, I was without a phone from Monday until Friday. And that week was glorious.
I've had a smartphone since mid 2009. It's possible to tell almost the exact day, as my faithfully maintained and automatically backed-up photo library suddenly balloons in August of that year, full of artfully filtered Hipstamatic images. A few friends had an iPhone that year and I was bowled over by how amazing it was to find nearby restaurants and check emails. It was undoubtedly the future.
Until that phone-free week, I hadn't realised just how much I've come to rely on it since that time, and how demanding it makes on me.
My phone acts as my alarm clock. At 6:50 I pick it up and look at the news, email, and social feeds for ten minutes before a shower.
After a shower, I look at it again to see what the weather will do for the day.
I'll glance at it before getting in my car to go to work...
...and once at work, I'll glance again to see if anything's come in while I've been on the road.
At my desk it'll vibrate and glow every now and then, demanding some interaction. I'll often write a text message response.
At lunch it plays music while I'm out walking, and I'll have an ongoing text conversation with my wife.
Once I'm home after work, I'll check the news again...
...and inevitably have more message conversations.
When I settle to do something I want to do - listen to records, write, read, watch television - I'll pick up my phone every few minutes.
At night, I'll check before I put it on charge.
The very last thing I do every night is press a Bluetooth button next to my bed. It turns out the lights in the room. Inevitably, it's connected to my phone.
Oh, and have I mentioned my watch? It's one of those ones that connects to your phone too. If my phone doesn't alert me, my watch does. And it adds other alerts too, asking me to stand or walk or move about every now and then.
I don't consider myself an addict at all. I see people at work and in the street who are on their phones seemingly much more than me. New research released this week shows that the average person in the UK checks their phone once every twelve minutes, and that seems so extreme. But if I'm honest with myself I'm probably not too far off that sort of average.
It's easy to not realise. It's easy for that simple pull-down-and-refresh action to become compulsive, second nature. It feels social, like you're surrounded by friends who all want to talk, like you're only gaining new information all the time. It feels like you're intelligent, data-gathering. It feels good.
I was anxious about being without connectivity for a while.
I studiously sent small emails to a handful of people whom I talk to a lot, written in a tone vaguely like text messages with subject lines like Hey, why isn't Ben liking my amazing memes? I was apologetic, sorry that if they needed me they'd have to write cumbersome emails that might take a while to get a response.
I disconnected my watch from my phone. Without an accompanying data connection, the watch wouldn't work. Farewell, exercise analytics. A nagging worry that I'd be lazy, that I'd become unhealthy, that the lack of devices would make me somehow unwell.
I apologised to my wife. I use my phone to see where she is, to check she's ok, to offer love and reassurance throughout the day. I know she does the same to me.
Apologies made, I handed in the device on Monday lunchtime. After half an hour of forms and checks, I was sent away into the world with no connection.
I can't overstate how refreshing those five days were, and how much I enjoyed them.
I read an entire book. Usually I pick at a chapter or two over the course of a week, but now it became so much easier to concentrate on the prose. Similarly, television programmes are better when I'm not scrolling through Wikipedia articles reading the synopsis of the episode, or the career of one of the actors.
I walked outside without flitting across to a screen. My pace was slower, but my enjoyment was so much greater.
I had ways to stay in touch with friends, and though I wasn't as present as I would otherwise have been, our conversations still worked. I still kept up to date with the news and my friends, but in smaller discrete blocks in the evenings and mornings through a laptop.
In fact, connections with people saw by far the greatest improvement over the week. I'm terrible for needing something to fidget with, and a phone provides an ideal opportunity to do something with my hands. Without it, I listened and conversed much more naturally and openly. On the Monday evening we went for a meal with my parents in law, and the conversation was so easy and smooth. They still had their phones and took photos of us and the food. I wanted to as well, but it wasn't a big problem that I didn't.
The irony: a device which enables connectivity isolated me, made being in the moment much more difficult.
There were disadvantages, of course. Keeping track of spending was tricky, and I was fortunate that I didn't have to make a long car journey without GPS and a way to call someone if the car broke down. But that was as much as I could think of. Everything else was an improvement.
I resented my phone's return. I restored it from a backup and once it was full of my data and connections it resumed its habitual glowing and buzzing for attention. I kept it at arm's length. I didn't want it to win.
I refused to start wearing the watch again. I'd been using an old analogue watch all week, one my father had bought for me as a sixteenth birthday present which still worked perfectly twenty years later. I didn't want to be hassled, even though I loved the stats and the motivation that my watch gave me to be fitter and exercise more, something I always wrestled with otherwise.
But, inevitably, it's been a week since that time and both have resumed their place in my life. The phone wakes me and I spend ten minutes in its glow before starting my day. The watch taps me at ten minutes before every hour, begging me to stand and move about a bit. I get notifications about free lattes I'll never redeem and emails I'll immediately delete. My reading is interrupted, and writing's a difficult chore.
The whole situation feels a bit... icky. I love these sleek devices, but I'm not sure they're healthy for me. They prevent work, both the professional day-to-day and the fun hobbyist things in the evening.
I want to get rid of them. I've got a plan of how to do it: take a small tablet computer with me if I need a data connection while I'm out, and get something like the Punkt phone to give me voice and text. Done. Easy.
But that anxiousness returns. Giving up a smartphone for a week is one thing. Giving it up permanently is quite another. My wife hates the idea and is certain that I'd make the change for a few months, then get a shiny new smartphone once again. She's probably right.