As I mentioned in my first post, I stopped using an iPhone 14 Pro and started using a TCL Flip 3 on February 1, 2025. The switch was pretty impulsive.

I woke up on that Saturday and went straight to my iPhone, where I opened up nytimes.com and scrolled through the headlines. In the opinion section was an article from a twentysomething who was advocating for people to switch from smartphones to “dumbphones.” That nudge was all I needed. Really. I fished my flip phone out of my closet, called Spectrum customer service, and had my eSIM switched over to the physical SIM of the flip. I navigated my way to a friend’s house for brunch that morning with the dinky little Google Maps application on the phone, missing a couple of turns on the way.

Obviously, it didn’t take much. But why? I had actually been having a pretty good winter, so maybe the theory in my first post of needing something in my life to change doesn’t hold up. Or maybe two things can be true: I had a good winter, and I was bored. Either way, the flip phone thing had been in the back of my mind for a long time. In August 2024, I first made the switch. I had been reading and watching lots of media about life with a dumbphone and, at the time, saw it as a way to get off of my phone, a past time I associated with unhappiness and anxiety. However, the August experiment only lasted about 36 hours, since texts weren’t coming through as SMS from iPhone users (they were still being delivered as iMessages and getting lost in Apple’s servers). I sheepishly switched back.

This time around, I was more patient, and the texts started to come through. The first couple of weeks were exciting. Then the novelty wore off and I adjusted to a life of inconvenience. I find that the longer I immerse myself in life without a smartphone, the harder it is for me to identify why I’m doing this in the first place. But I’ll attempt to capture both the differences in my life without a smartphone as well as the reasons I keep it that way.

1. My memory is stronger. When I used a smartphone, I treated it like an external hard drive for my brain. Maps, notes, calendars, to-do lists, etc. were operations that I no longer had to store in my head — they were all kept in my pocket. I used to think I had a bad memory. I think that, in reality, I wasn’t even trying to use my memory in the first place. Without a smartphone, I use a small notebook to replace a lot of my phone’s reference capabilities (for maps, I look up routes beforehand and write the directions down). But I’ve found that over the last couple months I refer less and less to the things I write down. The act of writing something down triggers a stronger memory for me. I now find myself driving to new places without referring to the directions that I meticulously inscribed in my notebook.
2. The internet is a place now. Whether this is a benefit kind of depends on how you view the internet. As I mentioned in my last post, the internet is, at its most basic level, a communicative tool. It’s pretty easy, though, for the internet to become a source of endless, mindless entertainment. By February of 2025, my experience using the internet had definitely become the latter. So, as long as I depend on the web for my work, email, maps, and banking, to name a few, better to at least create a system in which all these tasks can only be completed at a certain location. Now, I can only access the internet through my work and personal computers (I’m saving up to buy a desktop to replace my personal laptop to keep the limitation even more rigid). My theory was that this would encourage me to use my time on the internet more purposefully. That’s mostly turned out to be true, and though I still find myself mindlessly scrolling Reddit at my desk, it’s easier now to get up and walk away.
3. I embrace boredom. Once I stopped filling my spare time with my smartphone, I liked the silence. I still listen to music, but I do it differently (more on that in point #4). If I’m not doing something passive, like listening to music or scrolling through short-form content on my computer, I have to either actively engage in an activity — like working out or reading — or do nothing. And honestly, doing nothing is underrated. Sometimes nothing veers into meditating, where I clear my head and focus on my breath, but more often nothing means confronting my anxious thoughts, usually followed by journaling. I’m not saying that it’s better to sit at home than to go out, see friends, and live life (although I find small moments of boredom when I’m out in the world more often now). But the times that I’m intentionally bored are the times that I feel the most like me.
4. I listen to music differently. This one sort of ties into number 3, in that I’m no longer inundating myself with music in most spare moments of my life. I used to listen to music on Spotify when I was walking, showering, falling asleep, exercising, cooking, driving, or pretty much doing anything that didn’t fully occupy my mind. Without a portable music player (I haven’t purchased a Walkman… that feels a little too pretentious, even for me), I don’t listen to music nearly as much. And music has always been a central part of my life, so this aspect terrified me at first — in fact, no access to Spotify was one of my major justifications for not making this switch before. But now, like many things, I find that I appreciate the music I listen to much more. That’s because, in addition to listening to it more sparingly, I own my music now in the form of CDs. I had already started a collection last summer, so it was an easy transition. If I don’t want to listen to the radio when I’m driving, I have my own music to choose from. When I’m at home, I either listen to Spotify (with ads — I canceled my subscription) or put a CD on. And the best part about listening to full-length records is that they are a completely different art form than music as we know it in the streaming area. If I want to listen to the song “Inside” by Toad the Wet Sprocket, I first have to listen to the seven songs that precede it on the album. Sure, I can skip ahead. I can even put a song on repeat for an hour if I feel like it (I’m looking at you, “That’s So True” by Gracie Abrams). But it’s been more fun to experience full bodies of work by my favorite artists.

While not a difference in my life, there’s also an argument to be made (that has already been well-developed in popular discourse) that companies like Apple and Meta are designed to turn a profit off of your attention with smartphones and smartphone apps. Can you really trust an institution whose main goal is to make money for its shareholders to use that power in your best interest?

There are absolutely downsides to this lifestyle. The big two features of my smartphone I miss are the iMessage group chats I was in and the ever-present camera/photo album. I’ve made peace with the fact that I won’t get as many updates from my rowing team or extended family. But if there’s important news, people reach out to me directly. This also ties into why I deleted my social media accounts a few years ago — the absence of brief, frivolous exchanges encourages me to reach out directly to my friends and family, which often leads to a more meaningful and fulfilling connection.

The same goes for the photos: I take fewer (with a physical camera that I don’t carry around as often as I carried around my smartphone), and the few are more special to me. I intend to create a physical photo album once I’ve taken more photos — I’m hoping that having to crack open a physical book to look at and share my photos will make them more valuable.

This post is partly a reflection of my experience to concentrate my thoughts and help me to understand why I’m doing this and partly a source for someone who is considering getting rid of their smartphone. It takes preparation and a lot of patience. If peer pressure is your thing, for every two reactions of “that’s so cool,” you’ll get one, “are you ok?” But if you’re considering it, I encourage you to take the dive and try the inconvenient life. Life is too precious to outsource.

I tend to go down rabbit holes.

This week, I’ve been wondering – “what would life be like without the internet?” To be honest, that train of thought initially started out as, “how can I live without the internet?” which I only really considered after canceling my Spectrum home internet plan before hastily resubscribing (they charged me an $18 installation fee for a service that was already installed) once I realized that I couldn’t do my weekly virtual therapy sessions, guitar lessons, or family video calls without home internet.

Anyway. Today I worked backwards through my logic. “What would life be like without the internet?” I asked myself this question only after I had spent a couple of days desperately feeling like I couldn’t spend the rest of my life staring at a screen. But reading Paul Miller’s 2013 article in The Verge about his year of internet abstinence helped me realize two things that have led me to alter my course.

One, the internet is a force of connection. Two, the internet is not the source of my shit, which will all still be there when I’m offline.

So, assuming both of these statements are true (if “truth” is still an objective phenomenon in the year of our lord, 2025), maybe I can use the internet for good. Maybe I can harness my creative energy and create rather than consume content. To be honest, my mindless content consumption is the habit I’m actually looking to change. On February 1, I switched my SIM card over to a TCL Flip 3 from my iPhone 14 Pro. There are countless reasons why I did this, but after two months of reflection, I believe the central reason to be that I was generally dissatisfied with my life – or, more specifically, my own perception of my life, which was colored by lifelong anxiety – and was looking for something to change.

The switch has been a net positive. I’m more present in my everyday life and can appreciate the small moments. I’m more comfortable sitting alone with my thoughts. I’ve even come out of my shell a little more, striking up conversations with strangers out of necessity (I’m frequently lost without a GPS in my pocket) or just boredom. There have also been some negatives. Specifically, the point about my own shit still being there rings true for phone-lessness. I’m not necessarily happier day-to-day because I don’t have a smartphone with me; I’m just more present in the physical world than the virtual one. My attention has been redirected. Which is what I wanted.

I have found, however, that when I’m home and have access to internet via my computer, I spend an awful lot of time consuming useless information online. This has led to some frustration, culminating in this week’s desire to completely disconnect and live a life of phone books, physical maps, and snail mail. But, maybe the answer is self-control. If the internet is a connecting force (and one that I need for my job, anyway), what’s the use in disconnecting just because I have trouble stopping myself from scrolling? Maybe reinforcing the good can steer me away from the bad.

The good, in this case, are things that makes me happy. Writing makes me happy. To be more precise, communicating original ideas that resonate with other people and contribute to the development of a world that I believe in makes me happy. So, I’m hoping that with this website, and through the internet, I can publish some of my ideas for what a better world looks like. Along the way, I’m hoping, selfishly, that I make myself happier.

I guess if this first post had to have a lesson in the vein of contributing to the conversation about a world I believe in, I would say this: I still believe the internet has enabled a lot of ugliness in this world. But the internet isn’t responsible for that. We’re responsible for that. The internet is just a communication tool. So, if you’re like me and unhappy with what the internet is doing to your life, take a step back and consider that maybe you’re unhappy with what you’re doing to your life. And then take the first step to fix it.