My first year without an iPhone

Changing your mind, thinking deeply, and winning back your time

Last October, I switched off my iPhone, removed the SIM card, and inserted it into a Nokia 2780 that I ordered off the internet. I deactivated and archived my Instagram, left all the group chats, and got in touch with my European friends through email. Now, a full calendar year later, I can say without hesitation that I am never, ever going back.

My north star

Flip phones are somehow a contentious topic. This is because anyone that goes against the status quo creates a hostile environment. It’s human nature to be attracted to those who are similar to us (creates a sense of safety) and unfortunately instinctual to initially bristle against those who are doing something different than you. Whether that’s smartphone usage, political beliefs, or relationships with substances. It’s like how we hate people who do dry January or announce on social media that they are leaving social media.

I think I’m pretty average in that I tend to enjoy going against the grain a little bit, but generally conform as I value being in community above all. I often find myself attracted by differences once I learn a little bit more about what’s going on, and am certain that this person is not going to proselytize me about their thing, whether that’s an extreme diet, sobriety from anything, or in general, any ideology.

So with that said, I do not care about your phone usage, I don’t think I’m doing it “right,” and I unfortunately do not have a paid partnership with Nokia for my $25 phone. I got rid of my iPhone in order to align my life with my own set of values and achieve self-fulfillment—as there is no other reason to do anything.

This is mainly a guide for people who are using smartphones now and are interested in switching as I am focusing on the parts of life that are either amenable or totally incompatible with life disconnected. I’ll be honest about the parts of life that I simply have to live without, and I’ll be transparent about the techie workarounds but to be clear, I do not have a secret smart phone that I use everyday, lol. The last iPhone I had was a 12, and I lost it somewhere in the streets of Portland last winter when I was still carrying it around for my bus pass.

Some of you are absolutists, and that’s not going to work here. We can’t turn back time. You can absolutely live completely and fully without the internet, but you have to really change your life. You can totally live ethically with a smartphone, but you will also face struggles. In my opinion, living ethically in either path requires a lot of self-discipline and intentionality.

I work as an editor and marketer of books, and as long as I get my work done, I am not obligated to carry an iPhone for my job. Sure, there are apps like two-factor authentication that we use, and occasionally there’s social media marketing that I can’t do on a desktop, but those are pretty easy to work around, and I’ll explain how.

The other caveat is that I am still spending no less than 8 hours a day with access to the internet. I don’t want to make it sound for one second that I don’t spend a ton of time on the internet, because I do. I have wifi at home, I have wifi at work, and I spend 40 hours a week looking at screens (well, maybe 20% of that time I’m in meetings or reading printed manuscripts). With that said, when people talk about phone addiction or wanting to reduce screen time, I’m pretty sure they’re talking about how they use their phone in their leisure time. (Although of course, phone habits affect work and productivity, which I’ll get into below.)

The biggest, most granddaddy of all caveats is that life will, yes, no shit, be more inconvenient without an iPhone. The process of breaking up with your small screen might feel reductive, primitive, and straight up delusional. And that, my friend, is why it’s interesting.

(The “guide” is further down if you want to skip to there. I probably should have broken this up into a series of newsletters but I am not an “activist” for this nor trying to build a neo-luddite brand, I’m just sharing my experience. Below I cover MUSIC, WHATSAPP, iMESSAGE, my MARKETING job, AUDIOBOOKS, GPS and other various items of PROBLEM-SOLVING. But for those who aren’t sold yet, the next few paragraphs cover how I got to this point of going full flip, as we say [nobody says this except me])

My everyday essentials: traveler’s notebook, calendar, phone, camera, wallet (+ Garmin watch but I forgot it on this trip)

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Last year, I was feeling cosmic nudges towards deconstructing, living more simply and removing the layers of modern life that were feeling heavy and restrictive. I felt that the next phase of my life would be a radical undoing. Around this time, I learned that 2025 would be a Number 9 year in numerology; ending cycles, clearing out the old, cutting cords and making space for the new in 2026 (a Number 1 year).

This felt true on so many levels, at the end of 2024, J and I had just been married and were moving, ending multiple chapters at the same time. As 2025 swung into focus, we realized that we were probably never going back to Portland and that our goals for the future were, at best, obscure. I needed to make space for clarity, and to reduce input and mental crowding. (PS, this is not how I would have described it at the time—at the time, I would have said I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t remember anything, and felt like my days/life was slipping away without me realizing it—dramatic, but true.)

More personally, the wedding photos were what really sent me over the edge. I was so transcendently happy with our beautiful, chaotic, love-fest, backyard wedding on the sea. It made me physically ill to think that the memory of my wedding day was even slightly distorted by existing on social media. Not even that the photos didn’t get “enough likes” or anything, of course, they produced lots of likes and comments and engagement. What was chilling to me was that I had unintentionally reduced a truly sacred day to a meaningless, 4x5 block. The day felt wrong in that little space, disappearing on a timeline as soon as it’s posted, something to just glance at and rapidly double-tap in the chaotic, rapid-fire intake of the daily doom scroll. Showing our loved ones a few photos in person was so much more validating, and their reactions—priceless.

I started considering a flip phone as an experiment about which parts of the human experience are dulled or diminished by the way we use our phones. I wanted to know how I could squeeze more joy out of life. As Zadie Smith (flip phone user) put it, I care about other peoples opinions, so being constantly exposed to them makes me feel desensitized to real emotion and like I was reducing people to meaningless symbols. Earlier this year, I wrote about how getting rid of my phone contributed to well, better sex! I was inspired by Catherine Shannon, who wrote that feeling sexy is not frivolous, but something fundamentally important for happiness, yet, “[n]othing about our phones is sexy—from the things they allow us to do, to how they feel to use, to what they ultimately symbolize.”

Eros—carnal desire—is an embodied experience, and our phones do a terrific job of getting us out of our bodies and into our heads. In the digital age, we often neglect our bodies entirely, and use them merely as a way to transport our heads to meetings. (The rise of rave culture and physical fitness programs since the 1990s is perhaps evidence that we feel the need to fight against this.) No one feels connected, present, alive, embodied, or sexy when they’re on their phone all day.

At some point it also occurred to me that I was never going to get everything I wanted to get done, done, unless I made a radical change to how I view leisure time. I’ve done this experiment once before. I had a flip phone in college when I was working a full-time job in order to keep my apartment and attending full-time classes in order not to lose my scholarship. I was so unbelievably stressed out all the time and at that time I also identified my iPhone as something that was eating up literal hours of my day that I needed for study. When I was 19-20, my screen time was probably at its worst, 3-4 hours a day or more, and I would scroll before bedtime. I kept the flip for about 6 months and then COVID-19 happened and it would have been psychotic to be so unbelievably isolated during that time (TBH the experimentalist in me wishes I’d kept it up. Maybe I would have written that novel or learned to bake bread, at least.)

Since returning to iPhone life after college, I became immediately addicted to photographing and posting on IG stories every inch of my life. And I struggled to stay focused. I used to make annual resolutions to get up at 5am to have time to write before work, now, post iPhone, I have so much free time, I not only have time to write for myself and my own creative practice (RAYON), but I created time to take on freelance clients, which has boosted my monthly income by about 25%.

Here’s the real secret, no amount of pomodoros or productivity hacks will restore the deep focus you are craving. It’s a flow state that can only be accessed by putting your mind truly at rest. You know what’s not restful? Rapid-fire stimulation, ad clutter, and live-streamed war crimes next to photos of your baby nephew next to branded partnerships for an LED face mask.

I’m not a psychologist so I really can’t tell you if age of exposure has anything to do with it, but my final caveat is that I was born in the late 90s, so I don’t really know a world without phones. I considered my family as pretty slow to adopt the technologies of modern life, but that didn’t change my school system popping an iPad mini into my hands at the ripe age of 13 (I recently tried to explain Flappy Bird to my millennial husband… awkward), and even before that, I had been on Facebook and MySpace since I was 9 or 10. My first bout of underage drinking on a trip to Europe when I was 16 was busted because some girl put it on Snapchat and another student showed it to the teacher who was on the trip with us (we were so lame in so many ways).

Akin to the dysmorphic effects of the male gaze, the anxious generation has a meta awareness that everything they are doing is potential social currency (aka, postable on social media). There is no difference between public and private spaces, and in this state, you constantly walk around with a mirrored image of yourself, seeing yourself not only as if others are watching you, but as if others only watch you through the image of yourself you’ve curated via apps.

Yeah, so for me? It’s absolutely pathological. I needed a deep, intentional reset if I was going to have even the vaguest hope of realigning my perspective and my values system around my reality, unplugged.

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YOUR FIRST YEAR WITH A FLIP PHONE

MONTH ONE—Seeing new

Step one, get a basic flip phone. Keep your phone number by asking your wireless company to switch it to the new phone, if you have to get a new number, this is going to be more challenging. Here are a few more things you can do to make the initial transition easier:

• Add the most important contacts to your flip phone.

• Make sure your laptop has all the rest of your contacts and important info (that one note that has all your passwords, make sure its synced to your laptop), same with photos. PS. If you are going full August Lamm and getting rid of your laptop too, god bless you.

• Identify the apps you use for things like two-factor authentication and see if you can switch to receiving a text message or phone call instead.

• If you’re someone who relies heavily on ride-sharing (using it everyday), I’m not going to lie, this will be tough. Research a good taxi company, add the number to your phone.

• Write down your bus routes and your subway stops, etc, things you might not know by number without your phone.

• Do you know what to do at the gym without your phone? Write down your exercise flow, or join a class instead for the next couple weeks.

• Then, sorry, but there’s nothing to do besides turn off the iPhone and put it away.

Then, enjoy. Enjoy the hilarity of whipping out a flip phone next to your friends, enjoy getting lost going to the grocery store in the city you’ve lived in for 10 years, enjoy the first time you just choose to witness something like a dog laying in the sun, or your nephew smiling, without ripping your phone camera out like you have short-term memory loss and are at risk of never remembering anything again.

2 WEEKS—Problem-solving communication

Wow you’re really doing this thing! Two weeks is enough time for folks to start wondering where the hell you’ve been. Especially if you were a frequent poster or texter. Here’s where I want to talk about Whatsapp… Oh, Whatsapp…

Not to sound like a total conspiracy theorist, but there’s a reason it’s hard to get off the phone. Whatsapp is owned by Meta, and you can be damned sure that they’re not going to make it easy for you to use it without the vehicle for their success: the smart phone. These companies want to funnel users to their mobile apps because simply, you get way more addicted there, also, there’s much better tracking capabilities on a phone than on a desktop.

The easiest solution I’ve found is just to use Facebook Messenger instead of Whatsapp. This is totally desktop friendly and even if you get logged out and need to use two-factor authentication, its going to be a text message or email. If you get logged out of Whatsapp, you have to scan a QR code with your phone in order to reconnect.

PROBLEM-SOLVING WHATSAPP—

• Pull that f*cking iPhone out of the drawer

• Download Whatsapp app for desktop or iPad, whatever you want to switch it to

• On the phone, log into Whatsapp and link your devices

• Turn the phone off and put it back in the drawer

• The issue is that if you don’t use your phone for 14 days, linked devices will log out automatically, so you’ll have to repeat this process every two weeks. Small price to pay if your happiness hinges around Whatsapp.

I personally just simply don’t use Whatsapp anymore because I found this to be exhausting and also irritating. I use a mix of email, video calling, Facebook messenger and iMessage on my laptop to stay in touch with friends overseas, depending on what they vibe with. People with family in China already have to deal with this workaround, and just use iMessage (you can use on an iMac or Macbook with email), Skype or WeChat. In regards to not having access in your pocket, It’s really nice to come back at the end of the day to see messages waiting for me, it’s giving AOL circa 2005 !

PROBLEM-SOLVING iMESSAGE—

• Messages on desktop —> Preferences —> iMessage

• “You can be reached for messages at:” myemail@icloud.com (unselect your phone number)

• Unlink your phone number from your iCloud account

• You can now send iMessages from your email to your friends. I recommend only using this for people who live abroad (people you do not text on your phone), because it gets really wonky if your friends add this email to your contact. If they do this, then their texts will always go to your laptop first. Not necessarily a problem until you’re out at a bar with only your flip phone and someone’s iMessaging your laptop to let you know that they’ll be 45 minutes late. One way to solve this is for your friends to make separate contacts for your iMessage and phone number, and they will just know that they might not get an immediate answer from you if they iMessage you. Again, it’s like AOL.

I also want to note that iPad users might have an easier time compartmentalizing their screen time. The iPad is compatible with all of the iPhone apps but so unwieldy that you’re not really whipping it out on the bus or doomscrolling horizontally with it. I have an iPad that I keep at home and I only use it to read the news in the morning, on the couch, with my coffee, in my bathrobe, like an 70 year old woman. I also use it for Duolingo (though IMO Duolingo on browser is a better, ad-free experience), because the streak must live.

4-6 WEEKS—The depression

You’ve made it a full month, congrats! Why are we doing this again? You’ve definitely caved a few times to do something that can somehow only be done on a smartphone you might be carrying it around as an expensive iPod, but one way or another, you’re still with us. So what’s next? Depression, unfortunately.

When your mind loses its instant-gratitude reward system, you start to feel a bit empty. When you find yourself texting less because it’s physically challenging/annoying, you realize how much you were relying on casual communication to keep relationships afloat. You start to miss that one friend you only message memes back and forth with. You feel like you’re missing out on stuff, because you’re not seeing it on Instagram.

Let’s take a beat and think realistically about this: you probably have less FOMO because you’re not seeing all the cool stuff you weren’t invited to. And also, the events calendar thing is an excuse; community resources exist! There are plenty of ways to find out what’s happening in town. Find them, this is part of rewiring your brain to be an observant participant in life, it’s all good practice.

This is the good part. this is when you start to really realize how much time you have. The novelty of not having a phone has worn off, and the world is your oyster. You have somehow become unbelievably sexy and mysterious for falling off the face of the earth.

I don’t need to tell you how to spend all of your new free time. In fact, you probably have an astonishingly long list of crafts, hobbies, and second personalities that you hope to develop when you go offline. But in case you’re feeling a little isolated, here are some of my favorite things to do on a night where I’m feeling lonely:

• Call your friends, don’t text and ask if its a good time to call and get stuck in scheduling a catch-up like you’d schedule a “quick check-in” with your boss, just call.

• Sit with your legs up against the wall and really think. I’m 100% serious.

• Send a long email (Beautiful World, Where Are You vibes) to a friend

• Research community events, a life-drawing class, a wood-working session, a ceramics studio

• Practice handwriting. Write a letter to a friend

• Set up dates throughout the week so you know your friends love you and haven’t utterly forgotten about you (and vice versa)

• Buy a disposable camera to take 1 photo of a beautiful thing that normally you’d photograph 32 times from different angles on your iPhone

• Really itching for some screentime? Well you’re already on Substack! People on here love to romanticize phone-free life, it’s fun to get a little boost of camaraderie. How about “doomscrolling” the Public Domain Archive? I was pathologically online and even I can only take so much Pinterest, treat yourself to a little 20 minutes of Pinterest, go on, you’ve earned it. “Slow media” is a good way to slowly ease out of a social media addiction. It’s hard to go cold turkey.

• Read long-form journalism or subscribe to newsletters to keep up with the issues that matter to you. This one is a no-brainer for me, but if you’re addicted to the Twitter/24/7 news cycle, this adjustment will be hard.

• Have patience with yourself, slowing down is painful. Books might feel fucking boring, your daily walk might seem like a drag, you might be tired of starting projects that you no longer have the attention span to finish. We’ve been wired to be obsessed with speed, to give up, to look up the answer, to Youtube something without giving it an honest go. Learning to crochet from a library book will be hard, and … that’s the whole point!!

Around this time you might start really missing music and audiobooks as well… Music is fairly easy to manage, I have CDs, records, and Spotify on my TV. Lots of people have Apple or Garmin watches (I don’t have an Apple watch but I think ? that you can still use it for offline functions like synced music even if the phone is offline. I personally have the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music, which is great, can hold 500 songs, will grab playlists directly from Spotify and only has to sync to an iPhone or an iPad [what I use] for the occasional updates, or to add more music, etc), you can also get a player like Mighty. These are good investments if you think you’ll stick with the flip phone life and don’t want to purchase MP3s.

For Audiobooks, not all watches allow them. Libation is a great resource for converting Audible books into MP3s for downloading onto any flip phone/iPod/anything. Then you can listen with earbuds. I have a long commute and I’m an audiobook reviewer so I get a slew of MP3s monthly, and they are super easy to listen to through my flip phone or the derelict iPhone 5 with a shattered screen that I keep plugged in my glove box that has no battery life, is too old to update and can’t download any apps. I have to upload the audiobooks by plugging it manually into my computer and clicking and dragging. Oops, I guess you discovered my secret iPhone!

MONTHS THREE THROUGH SIX — Acceptance, and hitting the stride

It starts quietly, you realize that you have been hitting small goals that were impossible before. You write everyday now, or you’ve somehow made time for meditation, maybe you’ve been really going deep with friends or your partner and wondering what did we talk about before this?

Maybe you’re realizing it’s time to let some things go. Were there things in your life that you were over-romanticizing and actually don’t mean anything to you without the constant pressure of competition with the most beautiful and rich people on the internet? Or maybe these material things do matter, but now you’re noticing the joy of putting together a suave fit just for yourself, not to be photographed or posted. Maybe you’ve gone through a transition of some kind, and you’ve rediscovered the joy of announcing things in person, of sharing news IRL and experiencing reactions outside of an omg did you see this text. Around this time was when I had:

• Started a long, life-giving letter correspondence with a friend who lived in NYC because I never saw her IG updates anymore and wanted to know about her life

• Cut all my hair off and didn’t tell anyone (I waltzed into a Christmas party with my pixie cut and my friends were absolutely wilding, 10/10 recommend)

• Invested in a good camera (actually, a gift from J for Christmas) to take photos of my life without the purpose of posting, just to have them

• Stopped linking my inherent worth with material items (aka, photographable things)

• As mentioned above, started to really hit my goals with writing every day. I also undertook an epic job search and found my dream job in publishing at this time, and in order to do that, I spent a lot of time networking and I used my free time to build out my website, resume and to schedule informational interviews

Around this time, I had a few chances to problem-solve traveling abroad and domestically without a phone (I cannot afford international data so this actually wasn’t that different than my normal travel experience) and traveling in the U.S. alone without a phone (I had the best weekend of my life in Boston getting extremely lost and discovering the city I’ve visited a million times before with totally new eyes). Some more travel tips:

• I found that I love printing physical tickets (plane, train, etc) for the keepsakes. Sometimes I’d annoyingly have to go to a box office early to get a printed ticket but I always turned this into a fun adventure

• IMHO, looking up restaurants and coffee shops on the fly just leads you down the same boring tourist experience that every other Boomer is having. It takes time and research (and knowing a local) to suss out really special spots. Following guides from Vogue or NYT that shepherd you from hip cafes to sleek, modern restaurants always makes me feel like I’m having the same indistinguishable vacation over and over in cities stripped of personality by global monoculture, but that’s just moi

• On that note, enjoy the analog planning process. Find old maps of a city, mark it up, write down all the restaurants you want to go to and their addresses, read guidebooks (how about the books I worked on? or the utterly timeless Monocle?). I for one could not care less what the kinds of people who leave Yelp reviews think about a place, I would much rather get a curated collection of addresses from a person whose vibe I trust.

• Renting a car was easy, it just took a little planning and again, printing out the documents I needed. Same with Airbnbs, I just wrote down all the details in my beloved traveler’s notebook

• Most dumbphones have a very rudimentary maps app based on Google Maps. You can search for locations and it tells you addresses, phone numbers, and operating hour, and spits out directions, MapQuest-style, to follow. Or, you could just be a total romantic and draw maps to get around

• Or just get lost and walk (Here’s a great book to convince you of this)

• TBH when traveling with people with iPhones, I tend to encourage them to live like a flâneur and just be willing to get lost, but you don’t want to proselytize so just roll with it and be grateful you’re with someone that will get you out of whatever mess you find yourself in when you’re lost and starving in the middle of Prague

• Go to art museums and take no photos of the art, just absorb, just look

• Go to dinner by myself and read or write

• Go to dinner with my traveling companion and either sit quietly playing cards or doing nothing because we’re so exhausted from the day, or let the amount of time we’ve had together create new ways of communicating beyond our regular set of questions and topics. When you feel like you’ve run out of things to say, that’s when the magic starts

• Take digital or film photos that you don’t upload or develop until you’re home

• In Europe, I’ve always found it pretty easy to just buy a SIM card preloaded with minutes and slip it into any phone. You might need to do this so that you can call restaurants, etc and make reservations (IMO in old world Europe and even small Paris bistros, so few restaurants take reservations online anyways).

• You’ll have to talk to locals. Give your social anxiety a firm kick in the rump and romanticize the hell out of it, whatever it takes, you’re on holiday. There’s a reason Duolingo teaches you the phrase “I’m lost” within the first lesson of any language.

• If this doesn’t convince you to travel unplugged, then you’re beyond my help.

The way my fellow Gen Z girls love an analog moment! The blonde girl carried around a camcorder for her entire year in Paris. Priceless.

6 - 9 MONTHS— WORK

We fight for so many things—better pay, PTO, good retirement benefits—yet we don’t feel comfortable asking for a balanced tech intake. There’s no such thing as a work/life balance if you’re expected to have your work email on your phone with notifications on. How is that different than being expected to stay at the office all evening as well?

Adjusting to work without a smartphone is going to be a very personal thing, I think you have to be honest about how much of a yes-man you’re making yourself by always being the one to respond to emails first, offer to problem-solve something off-hours, etc. Or maybe its the work-from-home thing? Do you leave your desk during work hours to go do something else, and you have to have access to your email because you are actually not where you should be? I personally think the boundaries have gotten quite lax with WFH and am an advocate for stricter expectations. I’m not alone in this, some of my colleagues in this industry have an email sign-off that says exactly when they can be expected to be checking their email, and not to expect responses after hours.

I work in the publishing field so we are certainly not operating on the cutting edge of social media marketing. My daily marketing tasks include website design, social media management, designing posts, writing copy, and creating and maintaining a posting schedule. This is all (half of) one person’s job (lol)—as it is for many of us Gen Z’s who get roped into social media marketing just due to our age—and all of this I find fairly easy to do without my own iPhone.

• This first tip is sort of a cheat, but: Ask for a work phone! It can’t hurt to ask, and it will dramatically help to keep those worlds separate. I don’t really have a work phone but I cleared it with my boss to repurpose the aforementioned glove box old smartphone as a “work phone,” that’s only usable with Wifi. It has exactly one app downloaded (Instagram) and its logged into the work IG. It sits in the glove box in my car, and I haven’t taken it into the office in weeks. I would estimate marketing specifically on social media as around 2% of my job. And, in my professional opinion, instagram posts are still unmatched when it comes to reach and brand building.

• Almost everything I need to do can be done on the Meta business suite on desktop. I search for creators there, create and schedule posts there, run all analytics and monitor the various inboxes. And you can even create stories there, the single thing you can’t do on desktop, in my experience, is reshare a story or post. If you absolutely need to reshare a story or post, that’s what the work phone is for. Or make your assistant do it, IDK.

• Lastly, I personally think that as a marketer, I gravitate towards more grassroots practices. In books in particular, many companies are realizing that # of followers does not necessarily mean # of readers, and that for many genres, #booktok is NOT the vibe. Personally, my job requires engaging with older millenials through 65+ audiences, so it’s best for me to be able to understand a wide variety of marketing practices. Customers value authenticity and my philosophy is that trend-hopping is not best practice for an heirloom brand like my company.

• Okay, OR, hear me out. Maybe you should have a secret iPhone that you use everyday. If part of your work is staying on top of trends in order to copy them for short form content, then yeah, you need to know. If part of your job description is having your company account be the first to comment on the Cracker Barrel re-brand fiasco or to use a trending audio, then you should probably use an iPhone at work. To have a more balanced life, I would suggest scheduling in market research time like you would any other task. I do that too, I make time to scroll through other publishing houses’ social media accounts on my desktop. Again, this whole thing is about learning moderation and avoiding falling into addictive patterns—work is work, treat it as such, and fight for whatever you define as your boundaries. Scrolling Tiktok at midnight “for research” sounds like hell to me but if your boss demands that, then honestly good luck with the burnout.

• Another moment for the secret iPhone (which is really just your old phone): If you have a work trip and you’re responsible for chauffeuring clients and calling Ubers, etc, you might need a work phone or to just temporarily bring your iPhone back into your life. There’s truly only so much you can force your way of life on other poor souls who just want to know where the nearest Sweetgreen is or have Starbucks catered to the conference room.

MONTH TWELVE—Upgrade

Now that you’re never going back, it’s time to make it official.

Wisephone or Lightphone, again Dumbwireless is a good resource here. I pre-ordered the Lightphone III and I’m waiting patiently for it now. I chose the Lightphone III based on its strong GPS system and full keyboard. I’m really looking forward to leaving T9 texting fully in the past. Also, I really vibed with the way designers talked about the color theory for their camera tool. “Taking inspiration from our favorite point-and-shoot film cameras, it has a dedicated two-step shutter button, with center focus and a fixed focal length.” (Lightphone)

OR, QUIT!

Has this been a fun experiment and you’re done? Fine! At least you can say you went a year without a smartphone and fully broke your smartphone addiction. Now maybe you can reintroduce apps without falling back into addictive patterns. I personally don’t think this is possible for me, as 1) I’ve already tried that and fell right back into it, and 2) it’s never really been me that was the problem. I’ll take some responsibility, but mainly it’s, you know, the widely-condemned, powerful, psychologically-addictive, Capitalistic forces at hand. But there are other ways, you could have an iPhone but chain it to the wall? You could “hang up” your smartphone everyday when you get home? What will you do?

I do this for my son

Q&A in the comments if I missed anything you’re curious about!