My jaw dropped to the floor when I read that an old work colleague of mine had gone three full years without a phone. Yes that sounds wild at first to read, but when you really think of the impacts our phones have on our daily lives and how we interact with the world, there are very few touch points where we do not use our mobile phones. I had to know more, so I reached out to Nate to share this glimpse into his phone free life with all of us. Could you do it? Read his perspective below.
Notes on Year Three Without a Mobile Phone
One thing about being a bachelor in a town of 100 souls: You can make some pretty hard-left-turn experiments with your life with minimal impact on others. Not many of you will be able to—inebriated on your back patio and watching your freshly spiderwebbed Motorola screen issue its spasmodic farewell flickers to a laughing desert moon—just decide right then and there you’re not replacing it because, as I reasoned at the time, “F*ck that thing anyway.” Nonetheless, you may be inspired to find your own ways to reclaim a corner of your inner life away from the corporate surveillance state, and be amazed at what grows there. Small freedoms are good. Seize them when and where you can.
Probably the thing I miss most is having my playlist in the car.
Music and motion is my favorite drug combo. Being without it has highlighted how busy and frantic my head is a lot of the time. More than 30 minutes behind the wheel without my lifetime’s worth of curation riding shotgun…those are bleak miles.
Positives of not having it in the car: Reengaging my senses and remembering that cities have UX, too. I’ll look something up before I go, making note of major intersections, pin those in memory, then use my sense of direction, signs, and street labeling to get there. It still works. I have also noticed that about 30% the people I pass on the two-laners near my house are looking down and to the right.
It’s highly instructive to see how the greed for mobile data has made me a second-class consumer.
Get verified on LinkedIn? Mobile app only. Deposit checks remotely? My credit union just relaunched their online banking app to include...tablets. Use my Mac's camera to snap a pic of a check on a secure desktop app? Nope. "Let us follow you everywhere or you go to loser tier" is the proposition. I’m still not budging.
I have an iPhone 12 with no service.
I keep it for the camera, primarily so I can get closeups of boardgames (I didn't realize that when buying my GoPro Hero 10 Black, I'd need a lens mod to shoot anything inside a foot). Unbundling your life functions from mobile takes work, I am not kidding you.
I don't have any transformational spin on this.
But when I'm unhappy, I get to process it more slowly and in private. A big part of this was so I could reset my life to Nate speed, not phone speed. But the phone was just a more agile tentacle of the same monster: Scrolling when you could be living. I found I could make myself just as miserable on my laptop, so the follow-on project has been to be conscious of when I’ve reflexively hopped on a social tab, looking for dubious parasocial nourishment, things to be mad about, exciting and tangy ways to confirm the world’s growing and irremediable doom.
My replacement is a VoIP service that runs me about $33/mo.
I'm around my laptop 85% of the day. I figure that's plenty connected. (I have also come to hate this service, but I’m not switching phone numbers again only to find out I’ve locked myself out of three important accounts where I’ve enabled two-factor authentication. Mobile capture again rearing its ugly grill.)
I like getting dressed and leaving the house without having to accommodate a rigid, sandwich-sized object in my clothing.
That’s the post.
Social coordination can still be tricky.
Mobile protocol has turned us all into over-reporters on low-stakes missions: “we’re parking!” Who cares? You know where to be and when, quit jamming my comms with trivia. “at the store, you need anything?” I need you to shut up. The best technology is simply being where you say you’ll be, and when. This simple proposition governed us for millennia, but re-adopting it unilaterally is jarring for others.
At the end of the day, there’s no way out of the panopticon without doing some extreme sh*t, but I still like the small measure of agency I felt when I removed a major contact point between myself and the data brokers, the attention thieves, the merchants of bright meaninglessness. Ultimately, it makes you confront the ultimate problem: How messed up the OS of the Self can be, and the patient work needed to shore it up.
Just the same, the times I wish I still had a mobile phone are vanishingly rare, and the spans of time where I don’t even remember carrying one are substantial. I’m calling the experiment a win on the whole.
Nate Warren is a copywriter, PR guy, and host of Breakup Gaming Society, a podcast about board games, booze and hip hop. He lives in Starkville, Colorado. Keep up with him on LinkedIn, Instagram or Mastodon.
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