Abigail writes about relinquishing her phone for a few days. She concludes that:
it wasn’t difficult to relinquish my phone. But it was inconvenient. I realized that I didn’t miss accessing the world, or connecting with people — sorry, everyone. Instead, I missed the other technologies that are contained within my pocket-sized device. We marvel at the relatively recent developments that allow us to do what was considered impossible only decades ago, like using FaceTime to reach someone on another continent or face-recognition identification for a wide range of accounts. But perhaps I value its simplest features — alarm, radio, camera, notepad, flashlight — the most.
This is interesting. As many of our readers will know, I am, without a shadow of a doubt, a “tech guy.” I love gadgets. I’ve wired my house with up-to-date stuff. I’ve been coding since I was ten. But, like Abigail, if I were asked to describe the week I spent in 2016 without my iPhone (or a computer, or anything else that was connected to the Internet), I would say, simply, that I “didn’t miss” it. Who knew?
It was September, 2016, and the Trump v. Hillary election was in full flow. Back then, my wife and I lived in Connecticut, and we’d just had our first child. He was six-months-old. My whole family had flown in to the United States, and we were scheduled to meet them down in Orlando, Florida, where we’d rented a house with a pool and a grill within striking distance of Disney World, Sea World, and the rest. Before we left for the airport, on a whim, I did something that I’d never done before and I’ve never done since: I turned off my iPhone and placed it in a drawer in my office. Usually, I’d worry about doing that in case something happened, but . . . well, what could? My wife and son were coming with me, and my entire family (I have a very small family) was going to be staying with us in Florida. I wasn’t going to be writing; I had no outside projects that needed tending to; and I’d printed off all the tickets I needed for the trip. Sure, having no phone felt weird at first, but only because I was accustomed to the alternative.
Within a day, I was happier for the absence of my phone. Certainly, the pace and intensity of the presidential election season made the contrast more acute, but, as a general matter, I really did not mind not knowing every last piece of news that the media threw my way, or miss reading every text message and email that I was casually sent. We are told by the PR people that the constant barrage of information “opens up the world,” but I actually found that the opposite was the case: Before long, the world felt much bigger and richer than it had been before — in part, perhaps, because I was paying attention to it. Without alerts coming in all the time, I focused more on the conversations I was having with real people, I looked more closely at my immediate surroundings, and I thought about what was happening in the real world rather than in the ether. I was 31-years-old back in 2016, which put me right in the middle of the road: I was young enough to be comfortable with ubiquitous web-technology, but old enough to remember what life was like before it. As I soon rediscovered, there was a lot to be said about that life.
Seven years have passed since then, and, for various reasons (my family is rarely all around me; I work a lot; we are probably even more tied to our devices now than we were in 2016), I have never repeated this exercise on quite that scale. I have, however, tried to internalize its lessons. Last year, while on vacation in Italy, I checked my email just once per day, and, unless it contained earth-shattering information, I ignored it. At the weekends, I sometimes put my phone (and my watch) in my bedroom, so that I can hear it if it rings but I’m not tempted to open Twitter or Slack or any other app that might take me out of the house. Abigail is correct when she says that the iPhone has a lot of useful features — “alarm, radio, camera, notepad, flashlight,” etc. — but it’s not those features that are addictive, is it? What’s addictive is to be able to easily connect oneself to the universe — a technical marvel that, it turns out, can be thwarted with nothing more sophisticated than a locked drawer and a cheap flight down to Florida.