The Wind-down
Four takeaways from my final month with a smartphone.
“Who are you trying to avoid?”
“You know AI is about to take over, right?!”
“I’m supportive of this but it’s so unnecessary.”
“You might want to consider how this could affect your career.”
“I love this for you - you are my hero.”
Those were a handful of the messages I received from friends and family—some via WhatsApp, others a phone call—when I told them I was trading in my smartphone for a flip phone. Many of the reactions made me feel like I was going through a major relationship break up. There was genuine concern, not to mention deep skepticism, from some people.
When I made this decision back in March, toward the end of our three-month stay in Montenegro, I created a laundry list of things I needed to do before I shut down my iPhone for good. Get in touch with friends and family were atop the list. Then, clean out my photo album and wallow in nostalgia. Export my contacts, Notes and Apple Music. Get one final marathon scroll session in, until my head ached. Sign out of apps. In general, declutter.
The exchanges with family and friends were not easy (more on that later). But reviewing the stats from my digital fingerprints on my iPhone left me wincing. I’m not going to lie—I tried to talk myself out of this numerous times. At one point I made it so far to tell my wife my justifications for why I shouldn’t go through with this, to which she responded:
“You can’t change without first giving up something big,” she said. “And yet you don’t know what that empty space will be filled with - that’s the scary part.”
That was it, there was no turning back. If I wanted to invoke transformation in my life I had to be willing to sacrifice something. Otherwise, there’s no space for something new.
So the wind-down continued. Here are my four takeaways from that process.
I was a digital hoarder
Just a lot of useless apps, grocery shopping lists, forgotten saved files and scores of photos, most of which I never did a single thing with.
I imagine my digital footprint (or is it fingerprint?) could take up its own corner of a data center. Sure, that’s an exaggeration, but it’s how I envisioned it as I packed up everything I had stored on my smartphone.
My iPhone had 58 apps, not including pre-loaded ones. There were 35 Notes folders, many of them grocery lists, while others included notes on my career, European holidays, one on parenting tips and another on fasting protocols. My Pocket app had well over 900 articles. I still want to read a good portion of them, but who am I kidding - I probably won’t.
There was always so much content to keep up with and all that content was spread across multiple apps—over time, there had become no rhyme or reason to how I organized things. During my worst days of ceaseless scrolling, I had YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and X on my phone all at once. My attention span was always compromised. Looking back on it, it was incredibly difficult to keep track of everything I had wanted to consume.
And my photo album was an embarrassment—there were 5,326 photos when I shut down the phone. In it there were scores of random pics, including fliers I had found on lampposts and in coffee shops, screenshots from stories I’d read online, seven attempts of the same shot to get a still-mediocre picture of our kids because I am an awful photographer, a stream of photos from a beautiful vacation spot that I never looked at again, and yet even more grocery lists.
I became hyper-aware of my habits
Walking the metaphorical green mile with my smartphone, I was acutely aware of my behavior during my final month with it.
Over the years I had developed an over-reliance on Google Maps, and in the final few weeks with my smartphone I found myself taking that to an even further extreme, looking at walking directions every few minutes—even when I knew I had a general sense of direction. It became one of my worst habits.
I remember watching the Disney+ docu-series “Limitless” with Chris Hemsworth a few years ago and how in one episode he’s forced to navigate through the wilderness without a map or GPS. The nuerologist he was working with stressed that modern technology has diminished our innate navigational skills, which are crucial for maintaining cognitive health as we age.
I could relate. It’s like the use-it-or-lose-it theory, and personally I want to preserve brain function as I age. (My using Google Maps as a crutch is something I must overcome simply because I no longer have navigation on my flip phone. I now have ideas of how to turn it into a fun cognitive challenge. More to come on that later.)
Time and again in the final few weeks using a smartphone, I found myself reaching for it in a pant pocket like I had a nervous tick, more so than any other time I could recall. At home, when no one was looking. In the bathroom. Waiting for a bus and, of course, on a bus. Walking the crowded streets of Florence. In bed at night. In bed in the morning. While washing dirty dishes, one-handed. Seemingly everywhere.
My smartphone came to fill nearly every free moment. And if there wasn’t a free moment I still chose to use it, even at the most inopportune times. For instance, before meditation.
For almost 15 years, I have followed some version of this morning routine: get out of bed before anyone else is awake, grab phone, head to couch, check email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, The Athletic and Apple Music for new releases (if it was Friday). Then put phone away, settle in, grab journal to write and finally transition to prayer and meditation.
But how do you access a quiet place within yourself after dumping a strong double shot of content into your brain?
As I tried to sit silent and detach from my thoughts, there were so many headlines, messages, reminders, work stuff circulating in my head that by the time the timer went off I had barely felt a moment’s peace.
To get meta for a moment, I remember an early morning in Montenegro, when I was cooking breakfast for the kids. All at the same time, I was listening to, ironically, a Cal Newport podcast about smartphone use during ‘non-trivial time,’ as I typed highlights from it into my Notes app, while I scooped up our toddler who had climbed atop the kitchen table, as I then answered a question from my 10-year-old son. The eggs came out perfectly, by the way. But could I have made things easier for myself by pausing the podcast and putting my phone down? Well, of course I could have! But as you’ve probably noticed, that’s just not the way I used to roll.
When I shut down my iPhone for good, there were 57 open windows in my Safari browser (a minor improvement from the days when over 100 open windows was the norm).
According to my iPhone statistics, on an average day I received 68 notifications and picked up my phone 114 times (one outlier day it was 170 times.) Google Maps, WhatsApp and Google Translate were my most used apps. I averaged six hours, nine minutes a day of screen time. I blew through my daily one-hour limit on LinkedIn every day. I don’t even know how that limit was set or why I didn’t bother to disable it.
What these constant notifications and pick-ups translated to in reality was some strange mix of boredom and exhaustion. My eyes were glued to a tiny screen until I could no longer focus or I was seeing spots. I was mentally tapped out and yet I hadn’t gone anywhere or really done anything.
I sought hope and inspiration
Change was abound. In my final few weeks with a smartphone I began to visualize what life would be like without it. The type of behavioral pendulum swing I would trigger. The free time I would no longer be able to fill with my trusted device. So I started to look for reassurance, for strength, or for a sign that I was on the right path.
So naturally I looked to one of my 58 apps for the answer. Feel as I might about smartphone usage, probably one of the biggest healthy contributions to my life has been Apple Podcasts. The people I had listened to had become pseudo-mentors, experts who I would turn to for deep insight and inspiration on what mattered most to me. It’s how I would spend my daily commutes, listening to a podcast episode to and from work. (Now, I’m relegated to listening to podcasts from my laptop while at home.)
This time around I turned to those familiar voices and binge-listened to episodes from some of the well-known people in the ‘Optimization Culture’ or ‘Podcaster Polymaths’ circles. People like Peter Attia, Andrew Huberman, Michael Easter, Ryan Holiday, Shane Parrish and Cal Newport—high-agency folks who wax rational self-improvement, take a science-driven approach and are optimization obsessed.
I have always been intentional about what I listen to, and this time I especially needed to hear from people who could mirror back my experiences. This was me living out some nerdy version of my own “Rocky” training montage scene—except instead of running the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I was just laying on the couch with AirPods in my ears. I listened while cooking dinner. I listened while strolling the winding cobblestoned streets of Kotor and even while hiking. It was a pre-fight mental smack-down to psych myself out for a flip phone lifestyle.
My flip phone life is right out of Michael Easter’s “Comfort Crisis.” I’ve admittedly never read his books but subscribe to his newsletter and am well versed in his work and philosophy, in large part because I’ve been embracing discomfort for the ongoing 15-plus years I’ve been sober. So I listened to as many interviews he’d given on the podcast circuit about how our brains are hardwired to do what’s comfortable. Shane Parrish supplied me with mental models, pithy quotes of inspiration and engaging conversations. But Cal Newport became my new favorite listen. His work on digital minimalism, and focused work, resonates deeply with me. (I’ll explore all of this in a future essay.)
Coincidentally or not, I soon started to see evidence in the world around me that I was on the right path.
There were headlines about how the Anaheim Angels baseball team banned cell phones in their clubhouse in an effort to foster more focus on baseball and communication. Then came the seemingly annual headlines about the cell phone and digital device ban at The Masters golf tournament. (It still makes headlines.) There was the iPhone panic-buying spree at Apple Stores across the U.S., for fear of tariff-driven price jumps. And most recently there was the rollout of the dumbphone of automobiles, the $20k electric truck that lacks power windows, screens or a stereo. Perhaps my kind of ride?
The tension between digital and distraction was squarely in the zeitgeist.
I had to give something up to make space for change
And yet, in the final days, I still had deep fears about retiring my smartphone.
Being told regularly—whether flippantly or seriously from friends and acquaintances—that I was crazy for doing this, that it didn’t have to be this way, as if I was volunteering to go live on Mars or join a Buddhist monastery (which I’d actually love to do for a bit), had chipped away at my self-confidence.
It left me wondering if I was really going overboard. If I was just a weak person for not being able to set and uphold better boundaries with my device. I should take a more moderate approach that would include WhatsApp, at least.
As an American who’s lived abroad for the last three-plus years, WhatsApp had become a lifeline. Without an international phone plan, WhatsApp is not some garbage app on my phone that I never use. WhatsApp is literally how I stay connected to my mother and how my kids don’t forget their uncle’s face.
I came up with a plan to put WhatsApp on my laptop, to check it intentionally instead of at the ping of a notification. It would basically just become another form of email.
Then I told this all to my wife, whose look told me this plan was dead in the water. “Don’t bother doing this if it’s not 100%,” she said.
If my intention was to have less yet better quality connection with those in my life, then I could not leave them an option to text me even if it was through my laptop. If people wanted a relationship with me, they were going to have to adapt. I was no longer available for a yellow hand waving “hi” emoji or the ever-polite smiley face emoji, but I would answer their phone call and have real talk—maybe the only type of communication the modern world isn’t abusing and, ironically, the one most likely to fully satisfy.
I’ll be sharing more stories every Sunday — the highs, the screw-ups, the awkward new routines — as I adjust to life with a flip phone. If you’re wondering what it’s like to live slower, simpler, and maybe even saner, stick around.
Next Sunday, May 18, I’ll share how a month off the grid in Bali unknowingly planted a seed—long before I had any real intention of ditching my smartphone.