In his recent Netflix special, comedian Aziz Ansari revealed that after years of frustration with technology, he’d found peace in a flip phone.
I’ve never been a high screentime person, but my relationship to my smartphone has always felt… off. So, I decided to try my own experiment. The results were dramatic, my relationship to technology transformed for the better.
Ultimately, I didn’t stick with a flip phone but returning to my old ways wasn’t an option either. I now have a smartphone with strict modifications, which I’m calling a dumbphone.
The following is an account of my experience using a flip phone, and how I imported the best of the flip phone life into the smartphone.
I felt a mixture of embarrassment and smugness piloting this experiment… I was doing something completely unheard of in 2022, and I was prepared to look foolish enough to try something new. The first hours and days were… discomforting. I was agitated and distractible, like I was going through withdrawal. Squirrel brained impulses fired reflexively, but they had nowhere to land. Over time I slowly became deconditioned, and the impulses eventually relaxed.
After a week, my anxieties were reduced, but I still felt that I’d be in trouble again with a smartphone in my pocket. I was breaking the habit, but if temptation were within arms reach… I’d think about using it… Because it’s right there. Having a smartphone nearby was like having ice cream in my back pocket.
After two weeks, the effects of the flip phone were substantially positive. It was difficult to say exactly what had changed or why, until I had a basic insight dawn on me: Distracting apps weren’t the problem per se, it was a missing sense that I could get away from it all.
With a flip phone, I was genuinely free.
I hadn’t altered my browsing habits at my computer desk, where I still had access to Twitter and the usual suspects. But I felt vastly improved. Whatever caused me to feel ill, felt cured. The internet once again had a firm, geographical location, the corner of my apartment. I was reminded of a bygone era where “the computer room” was a dedicated household space. A similar effect could be achieved by leaving one’s smartphone at home, depending on how regularly one departed digitally naked. With a flip phone, however, these boundaries were guaranteed.
I love the internet. Funny memes still have a valued time and place for me. However, the invention of mobile technology means “time and place” has become every single place, all of the fucking time. For the vast majority of us, the world wide web is always within reach. Practically speaking, the internet is now an extension of my body. Apps that carry a risk of distraction and live inside my pocket will be woven into the fabric of my lifestyle and therefore my brain.
In the same way that glasses resting on one’s nose transform one’s perception of the reality, so too does my device - And not just when I’m staring at the screen. When conversation flows are disrupted to “look something up”, dialogue is interrupted seconds prior to the hand making contact with the phone. The web’s omnipresence was subconsciously operating on my mind. The distinction between “the world” and “the web” became blurry, melded together. But upon switching to a flip phone, I slowly grew immune to digital distractions except at my computer desk. A whole planet minus those 3 square feet were free again.
A better solution.
So why go back? I felt significantly better using a flip phone. However, I did miss some critical things: My music, GPS maps, and a camera, for example. These felt like unnecessary sacrifices when I could just go back to a smartphone and kill all of the bullshit.
So, at the end of my flip phone experiment, I revamped my smartphone into a principled smartphone, aka dumbphone. I had a sense that the best of both worlds could be achieved with strict rules. Here they are:
The dumbphone:
Every app installed must feel unambiguously healthy.
Because of rule #1, Delete the browser.
First order of business, the browser must go. It’s too easy to use the browser to access literally anything (youtube, reddit) that I would otherwise block. A portal to another universe shouldn’t exist in my pocket. Only apps that I feel clearly, wholly positive about using everywhere are allowed, because that’s the reality of the technology.
So, I stripped my smartphone down to nothing and then re-added only things that felt wholly good. I added my meditation app, since that’s time well spent. I also kept Google maps, as it helps me navigate to where everything meaningful occurs in my life, and is not a source of squirrel brained distractions. Email is also undistracting (for me), so it stayed, as did Spotify which literally brings music to my ears. I also added the Wikipedia app, because it enables me to access the world’s knowledge without the distraction of the browser.
With these rules, I never impulsively check my phone anymore. No heroic courage necessary, just a few simply rules and sticking to them.
After months of applying this ruleset, there’s ONE instance I’ve found this format inconvenient, which is the new COVID friendly restaurant menus that require QR codes (which inevitably link to a browser URL). But even in these case, I *gasp* talk to the waiters, or look over a friend’s shoulder. These brief moments are the totality of my dumbphone inconveniences.
Resist
Today’s phones are insanely slickly designed, but flip phones present physical hurdles like thumbing through clumsy menus. Modern tech has erased all of that friction. Obviously this creates extreme convenience, but without any friction whatsoever, apps that figure out ways to pull users in won’t encounter any natural resistance. A single impulsive thought is all it takes to hijack attention.
Since I am vulnerable to such impulses, I consider it my responsibility to add that friction back into the equation. How we each choose to integrate our smartphones into our lives is going to be a personal balance. Moving forward, I’ve found the best tradeoff to be carrying a dumbphone. It’s been 2 months with this formula and my problems with smartphones feel… solved. For anyone wanting an escape from a lifelong willpower battle with their phone, turning the smartphone dumb by removing the pathways of pull is a great way to get your freedom back.
I find this article super interesting, because I did the same thing in November 2019 - my smartphone broke, and I chose to rock a Nokia Brick that could play snake for a couple of months. I feel like I learned the same things you did. Your sentence "I felt significantly better using a flip phone." really resonated with me, because I had the same feeling. The world was suddenly free again, if I had a spare moment I wouldn't just pull out my phone, and I'd notice more of the world around me. It was nice being unattached from a smartphone and impulses that comes with having the internet at your fingertips.
Ultimately I ended up using a smartphone again for many of the same reasons you did - I wanted to take pictures, listen to music, use GPS and WhatsApp. But it slowly morphed into using my phone more and more and more for unnecessary things, like Instagram or YouTube. Perhaps I need to rock that old flip phone for a while again, before transitioning back to your idea of a dumbphone! Like you said, it's almost inexplicable how much better you feel on a daily basis while rocking a flip phone. You don't notice it until you give it a go.
From your old viewer,
Nahyul