December 26, 2024

Hey Reader,


Thank you for coming back to my blog, I’m here with an update!

Approximately 4 months ago, I broke down and ordered a flip phone. If you feel inclined and have yet to read my original post, consider checking it out. It is not at all necessary as I'm completely sure you can guess the reasons as to why I would do this to myself.


December 4th was the first day I genuinely considered going back, 3 months after making The Switch. It wasn’t a terribly complicated day, at all. I hadn’t been sorely inconvenienced or denied anything because of using my flip today. Rather, the 4th was a rare day where I had time to reflect on recent and greater history. Comparing and contrasting my life before and after acquiring the flip phone, it seemed to me that not that much had changed.

In a disappointing discovery, I had not managed to spend any meaningfully less time on a smart device. In fact, I was more likely to leave the house with two phones instead of one “dumb” phone.


The reality for me was that even with the strong frustrated feeling that I was using my iPhone too much, I still needed to use my iPhone for a lot. Apps I didn’t think I’d still need proved pretty useful even without data to connect them to the internet. I still relied heavily on Google Maps, Spotify, and Camera apps out of the house. While apps like Discord, Signal, Chase Banking, and my transit apps proved necessary in the house, I was never without my iPhone. Even if I was technically looking at it more selectively, it never stopped being comfortable in my hand and a reflex to grab. It was still my most used tool.


Seeing it this way changed a lot of my understanding. I’m not disappointed with the length of my experiment because it seemed necessary to reacquaint myself with my iPhone: The Tool.

Yes, a communication tool first and foremost, and the easiest thing for me to reach out to people with. While fearing people would reach out to me less with my complicated flip phone, it was I who stopped reaching out to my friends. Texting simply doesn’t have to take so long and I do it a lot more when I can do it without friction.

My iPhone is also key in helping me to regulate my sensory experiences now. I have very sensitive hearing and a lot of noises can put me over the edge. My big headphones block out a lot but in many circumstances I need more help. Cue White Noises on Spotify. Literally every day these tracks save me from implosion in public and at home. It's been invaluable to be able to intercept auditory triggers without necessarily using anything stimulating. I'm learning to value my silence even if it isn’t necessarily a quiet silence, being able to decipher my own thoughts is an irreplaceable experience.

Then the iPhone has apps I don’t need in public but are objectively more helpful than harmful: navigation apps, banking apps, public transit apps, messenger apps, birding apps. These are programs that cannot profit off of my attention but are strictly providing a service that benefits me (while harvesting my personal data, but another post). They all also need internet data to work completely, some were helpful offline, most were entirely useless.


Now let’s talk about my attention. That’s the real issue and the real valuable thing that the tech companies want from us isn’t it? Turns out it’s a hot commodity! Attention Mining algorithms are a huge reason that I can’t put my iPhone down. These businesses quite literally find and produce addicting qualities in their apps to steal precious time away from us and our lives. My time is one of the only resources that I cannot earn back, I have an undefined amount, nothing more and maybe less. Why, on Earth, would I want to spend such precious minutes staring at a screen that isn’t producing anything important for me? It’s because they want you to! They profit from it, minutes are dollars! They tell us that we can connect, that we can learn, that we can spread awareness, and we can build support for important causes, but do we?


Personally, Instagram was the first thing to go. It was never a mainstay on my iPhone because I knew it was toxic for me but it cannot ever return. Aside from rare moments of needing to look up a business that only has Instagram, I have not come back to the site. When I was making a case to keep it, I told myself I used it to contact people and to keep tabs on loved ones. That has never been the truth as I text and call those important to me and I often do not care- at all- about the updates received via My Feed. I’m rarely in a place, mentally, to give or receive important information when I’m on social media and I naturally save that for in person or voice conversations. Nor has any information that is truly relevant to me ever been delivered exclusively on a social media site.

Important news I usually get from people in my inner circle, as a normal talking point. Important updates, again, come directly from those people to me and it’s better on a private platform. As for Important humor, which I hear about a lot as a reason to keep Instagram and X/Twitter. I have found there is a lot to laugh at out in the real world. Personally, I make myself laugh the most, and my partner, Kevin makes me laugh the second most. I think if you try a day or two without one or all of The Sites, you won’t even notice they’re gone. Other stuff naturally finds itself readily available to take your time.

Seeing vague, contextless, snapshots of friend’s lives made me feel farther away from them. Texting them, calling them, sending them my pictures, that has made me feel close. There have been plenty of ways that I have felt a part of something when I was willing to look away from socials. Honestly feeling quite lonely before, it is not fixed, I am not cured, I still can feel this way. What I am now, is I am creating smaller and more meaningful moments to prove to me that I care and am cared for. I do not believe I would have made the efforts necessary to feel those things, while waiting for them to come to me on Instagram. If that makes any sense. I feel like Instagram puts a general block between people, for me I needed to remove the block to see the people.


To be transparent, none of this has made me a more productive person. Which is good, I was not aiming to make myself one. None of this is connected to a “grind-set” and none of it was going to make me a better person than other people. None of it was going to make me more money.  What I wanted it to do was teach me how to do things that brought me joy or rest that weren’t connected to my phone. And I think I’m moving in that direction.

It’s been almost a month back on my iPhone and I have to say it’s still hard. I do and will still catch myself stalling after finishing a task, forgetting what I opened my phone to do in the first place, and getting stuck on a site forever, when I only meant to look for a minute. Little things that I think help add more friction to the iPhone experience include: Turning off Siri, turning off Face-ID, adjusting screen saturation, allowing only important post-notifications (calls, texts, emails?), and keeping it on Do Not Disturb most days. It is still a conscious effort every single day to set it down, leave it in another room, and choose to do something else when I have down time but I gotta say it’s been worth it.


This month I’m reading more, ironically I got a new screen: a Nook E-Reader, but that’s for another post. I’m reading more, I’m birding more, I’m sitting in silence more, I’m resting more. I didn’t really need a flip-phone for 3 months to make me start doing that but that be me privileged journey. My ultimate goal is to rest when I’m tired, create when I’m not, read when I’m in between, and eat when I’m hungry. Strangely I think my relationship with my iPhone was getting in the way of doing a lot of that, and still does.

It’s a work in progress, all this being said, thank you for sticking with me.

I hope you find what you need in your toolbox and have the good sense to work with what you have when you think you don’t.
Like I didn’t,

thanks again, Reader.

With Love and Happy New Year,
LK