6 Things I Experienced Ditching My iPhone For Yesteryear's Flip Phone

What started as a curious experiment in the unthinkable revealed a path of rediscovery and enlightenment.

Back in July I got a wild hair up my ass and took it upon myself to get a flip phone. This did not happen suddenly. It only came after a 3-year journey rebooting my relationship with the Internet and social media.

You must understand that I used to be a hardcore user of my iPhone. I was active on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram because I made content for those platforms and couldn’t resist the temptation to see their performance.

This had my screentime anywhere from 6 to 8 hours a day.

This amount of screentime was negatively impacting my ability to think deeply, produce good work and be present with my friends and family. I always knew something was wrong but didn’t have the wherewithal to articulate what was happening.

Eventually I discovered Cal Newport’s work and was able to recognize that my relationship with technology was upside down, kind of like the moment alcoholics realize there’s a drinking problem and something needs to be done. And what needs to be done isn’t as simple as “just stop drinking”. There are steps to take, and the road to recovery is gradual, realized over time.

Eventually, all my accounts on social media, both personal and professional, were permanently deleted. That is, everything but my YouTube channels, with this post on Louisiana Fishing Blog explaining why. After that, I had fewer reasons to ever look at my iPhone, but still found it to be dopaminergic. There was still a pang to look at it.

What’s the weather like? Rather than go outside and look, I’d use the iPhone. How long will it take me to get to the gym? Out comes the iPhone.

These things are frivolous and not critical to enduring weather or driving to the gym, but somehow my brain would default to them. It was still finding ways to utilize the Boredom Killer, and was still participating in social-snacking via text. Maybe it’s just years of Pavlovian training to use my iPhone or maybe it’s just engineered that well by the world’s best. Maybe both.

There’s certainly something to it. Whenever I would take a bike ride around the neighborhood, or walk around the block, the iPhone would always come with me. You know, “just in case”. Leaving the house without that seductive rectangle would be paramount to leaving the house without pants. What if I wanted to listen to something? What if someone needs to contact me? There was always that pang. It’s better to have and not need, than need and not have. Right? This pang had to die. So, back in July, I did the unthinkable and got a flip phone.

Now you are up to speed and understand that I didn’t do this cold turkey. It was a slow burn. Crawl. Walk. Run. Despite that, I still found that adopting the flip phone was a paradigm shift in my daily life. It was something of a major personal break through, which is hilariously pathetic given that I traveled the world without a smart phone in the years before the proliferation of them. Here are some of the things the flip phone brought to my life:

Thing #1: Geographical Awareness

It just happens that at this stage in my life I don’t travel out of town a bunch. For the most part, I remain in my parish but would still use Apple Maps or Waze in conjunction with Apple CarPlay to follow that brain-dead blue line to where I had to go.

This is really useful if there’s some destination that I have never been to. No problem. Perfectly innocent. Apple Maps is a good tool. But time revealed that I never quite learned exactly how to get to that destination without the blue line. This is a problem.

It’s a problem because in the past I had no issue learning new routes. When I’d drive home to Louisiana from North Carolina, I knew exactly where to go. The entire 900 mile route had been committed to memory.

Road Trip 2008. My buddy and I drove from Louisiana to California and back without a GPS or smartphone. No anxiety, no problems, we just had fun.

Yet the navigational crutch of Apple Maps caused my sense of direction to atrophy. I had been dumbed down and became something less of what I was.

So, given that my dumb phone doesn’t do anything beyond basic texting or calling, much less navigating, I must now stand on my own two legs without the aid of a crutch.

Then how do you navigate to someplace new?

Easy. I look at a map on my desktop computer beforehand. This has worked taking my children to appointments, making carline in time, and going to other places that are new to me.

I look at a map and remember where to go. That sense of direction is being put to use, once again.

Now I’m provided the healthy burden of realizing where I’ve been, where I am, and where I am going. This is pictured on a map that’s mentalized inside my head, just like it was for years.

It doesn’t run on a battery that needs to be charged every day, it’s totally waterproof, it doesn’t need a data signal, it can’t be forgotten on the kitchen table.

It’s the same Mk-1 Sense of Direction that got me and my buddies through the toughest streets in southwest Asia without getting lost or being harmed.

What won the day wasn’t a snazzy app made by some tech-bro in Silicon Valley. It was good planning, preparedness and thinking ahead.

Thing #2: Calling Is Better Than Texting

Texting on a flip phone is a nightmare, and I have no recollection of how we lived with this in the 2000s. Whatever that was, now that I’m back on a flip phone, it has become apparent that it is just easier to call the person that I need something from.

This, at first, seems selfish on my part. Everyone else is enjoying the convenience of modern texting, so why should they conform to my esoteric technological choices? But what I learned is that it’s actually better for me and the person I’m calling. Here’s why:

First, much is lost in translation via text. We humans evolved to hear tone and read body language. You can’t see body language over voice, but you can hear the tone and get a lot more out of what’s being said. How many times have you tried to be hilariously sarcastic over text and it came off as being mean-spirited? That wouldn’t happen with voice.

Second, whatever it is that needs to be discussed can be knocked out right then and there. No endless going back and forth. Just get it handled the first time. Another advantage to this is the fact that you can then put your phone away. You don’t have the pang of checking it for an update from that person. This is how conversations have worked for the entirety of human existence: there is a beginning, middle and end. When we depart each other’s company (or hang up the phone) the conversation is over. This has applied to letters, the telegraph, radio, and even email. But texting has this weird characterization of being a rolling conversation with no polite ending. That’s a whole other article to write. Moving on.

Third, people can get distracted during texting, causing the conversation to become discombobulated or out of turn. Depending on the importance of the information exchange, this could be less than optimal.

Last, but not least, I just have way more enjoyable conversations with people. They can hear my voice and tell that I care. The simple act of taking time to call offers evidence that I must care if I had taken that much time and effort to do so. Now that I’m away from the hyper communication of texting, it just seems dismissive and crude. This is the opposite experience of when I was knee-deep in screentime. Whenever someone tried to call me, I was irritable and short with them. I didn’t want to talk on the phone.

“Can’t you just text me?!”

It’s like there was an ambient anxiety embodying socializing with people outside of the digital medium. It’s very hard to put into words. That’s the best I can do. I’m sure there’s some neuroscientist who has written about this subject and better understands what’s happening in our brain to cause this. Either way, whatever negative feelings I had when someone would call are now gone. Strangely, I don’t get them when people text. I just call them and see what’s up. Which leads me to Thing #3.

Thing #3: I Can’t See The Stupid Shit People Send Me

A lot of human interaction over phones has devolved into “look at what I found on social media today”. I used to have epic group chats where my friends and I would banter and give each other a good bollocking. Good times.

But then it atrophied into link previews to whatever content they found while doom scrolling Instagram (or TikTok or whatever). They’d “post and ghost” the link without any acknowledgment of whatever else is being bantered about in the group chat. It’s like they’ve become a bot or something.

Anyway, like I mentioned before, this journey in my relationship with tech has been a long one and for a couple years my friends have gotten the memo that I don’t do social media anymore. But sometimes they go into “bot mode” and just don’t know what they’re doing and send me whatever the Attention Factory gave them.

Well, the flip phone has no idea what to do with a URL and, even it does, viewing content on that brick would be a disaster.

Thing #4: The Battery Lasts Forever

It’s nice not having to remember to charge something every day, or be reliant upon something that needs to be charged every day. Because a dumb phone isn’t constantly uploading data about you, or being used by you, the battery lasts for days. I charge mine every week or so.

Thing #5: People Look At You Like You’re Crazy

People aren’t sure what I’m doing with a flip phone. Sometimes they look at me like I just stepped off a spaceship and asked to be taken to their leader. I enjoy this.

Thing #6: The Pang is Gone

The end result is that the pang to check my phone is gone. I went from looking at my iPhone upon waking up, to only checking a flip phone once or twice a day to return phone calls. Not social snacking. Not answering Apple’s Pavlovian training.

I go on bike rides without it. I can enjoy a walk without the electronic tag-along. I can be free. I am free. This has led to more of my thoughts being uninterrupted, an increased ability to focus and go deeper, and a sense of autonomy. All these things and more had been slowly eroded over years, but I’ve built them back.

What I feel is more of the same that’s been reclaimed in this journey: peace, quiet, solitude, depth, presence, happiness, contentment and more. Now people’s technological habits are far more obvious. When I’m present with others it is so much easier to see how much they are not present with me. They can’t hold a conversation, they check their phone, “keep going, I’m listening”, stuff like that. There’s work to do.

Will I always have a flip phone?

I was really curious to see what this experience would be like. The plan was to rock it for a couple weeks, but now it’s been about 60 days and I don’t see any reason to put the SIM card back into the iPhone.

I’ve already endured taking my child to the emergency room and, most recently, Hurricane Francine. Both times I didn’t wish for the smartphone. What got me through those emergencies was taking the initiative and being prepared. There’s no app for that.

I’ll just keep what works and see what happens. You know the old saying:

“If it’s not broke, don’t fix it”.

Putting It All Together

The objective here isn’t to be a Luddite. It’s not anti-tech. In fact, you may be shocked to learn that I make my living online, own two websites and a smart phone app. You can cut the irony with a knife. I laughed, too.

The objective here is to take responsibility for setting the precedent of what our relationship with technology looks like. By and large, that precedent has been left to the Nerd Gods of Silicon Valley. Look at how that worked out. What’s important is to be deliberate with our use of tech, and demand that it serves our best interest and matches our values.

After that, your human brain is like a muscle: if you leave it free-floating in the zero gravity of mindless tech, it will shrivel and diminish. If you exercise it, challenge it and put it to work, then it will always be there for you.

Over To You: So what is your relationship with your phone. Is it smart or dumb?

If you’d like to share, then please comment below. Commenting is a good way to let me know who’s reading and how impactful (or not) my writing is. Either way, I thank you for your time and consideration.