Six years ago (Jan 11, 2013), I wrote a post for my old blog entitled What It’s Like To Not Own A Smart Phone. I have since deleted that blog, but you can read the old post here.
Some things haven’t changed. I still react to actual phone calls like a sixteenth century priest seeing witchcraft, and I still hate candid photos of myself with the fire of a thousand suns. However, one major thing has changed:
I own a smart phone now. And yeah. I’m pretty addicted to it.
Re-reading that old post, I’ve got to hand it to my 18-year-old self: she was right about a lot of things. Owning a smart phone has increased my phone usage by approximately 10 trillion percent, as I predicted it would. Constant access to the wide world of the internet is very tempting when I’m bored, even if that boredom happens in the company of other people. That’s another thing I was right about: It is harder to be more interesting than the internet.
I have become what I used to despise.
The Screen Time app on my iPhone tells me exactly how much time I spend on my phone and as it turns out, I average about 2.5 hours a day. I can’t say for sure, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that’s too much.
My main guilty pleasure is Tumblr, followed by Twitter. Facebook is pretty boring nowadays, I barely follow anyone on Instagram and I’ve never fully embraced Reddit, but I can waste hours on Tumblr and Twitter if I’m not careful. This is mostly because of memes. Dear God, I am so addicted to memes. Memes, vines, text posts, gif sets - if it’s pithy, funny, or multi-media, I want it injected directly into my veins! I’m pretty sure if you put me in an MRI machine, the pleasure centres of my brain that light up when I look at a picture of Kermit are the same as when a heroin addict does a… shot of heroin? I don’t know how drugs work.
In my defence, my relationship with social media isn’t the capital U Unhealthy one that it is for some people. I don’t feel isolated from real life relationships, I don’t feel pressure to live up to some Instagram ideal and I don’t habitually get into vicious online arguments.
For the most part, the problem with my phone usage is that it’s just sort of… a waste of time. And time is a finite resource in this life. So it’s concerning that I’m spending so much of it on something that’s so seductively easy. It’s difficult to work myself up to doing anything slightly challenging when I know I always have the option of mindless scrolling at my fingertips. If I removed that temptation, I’d probably be bored a lot more, but I might also be more productive, or turn to deeper sources for my entertainment. For example, I read 20 books in 2013, but only 11 in 2018. Coincidence? Probably not.
Having said all this, I don’t plan on going back to my dumb-phone life of 6 years ago. I’m a firm believer in not romanticising the past too much, and if anything, my old blog post is a reminder of that. It was annoying to not quite fit into the contemporary zeitgeist, and it was almost inevitable that I would one day conform to the norm. So my aim isn’t to go cold turkey, but to restrict my phone usage to the absolute essential moments.
Like when I’m at a train station.
Or waiting to meet a friend for coffee.
Or stopped at a red light.
Or at a boring party.
Or watching a TV show that doesn’t require all of my attention.
Or in the 10 seconds it takes for Netflix to load my movie.
I mean, look, the important thing is that I could stop anytime I want.
Really, I could!