On Flip Phones and Finitude

A lifestyle change

Copyright: ©John - stock.adobe.com

When I was a kid, probably five or six, I would often lay in bed under my sheet with the colorful football helmets and basketball hoops and wonder what happens after we die. 

I didn’t have the words for any of this, so there was no internal monologue. In its place was a potent feeling of gravity and significance as I grappled with the idea of eternity. I kept seeing myself in the afterlife, sitting in some far corner of the universe watching the people on Earth go about their lives until the end of time. Night after night, I would come back to the feeling that accompanied that image—something like boredom, but more profound, more melancholy, somehow both viscerally felt and physically empty—trying to understand it. I never got any further than that.

What stuck with me, though, was the idea that this is important. Meaning: life is unfathomably short, and as far as my human mind can conceive, we get one shot at it. This left an imprint on my psyche in the form of an urgent vitality—a fundamental fear of wasting my life. It’s why the hungover Sundays and mind-numbing Mondays of my twenties are so painful to remember, why the bold decisions and instinctual risks I’ve taken in my thirties feel so enlivening. It’s also why I finally got rid of my smartphone.

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For years, I’ve wondered why it is that this smartphone stuff gets me so riled up. There is an abundance of worthy social causes on the menu, so many wars and inequities and injustices to choose from, and the thing that keeps me up at night is that kids spend too much time on TikTok. It’s a strange place to plant a flag.

The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that it comes back to those nights under the football helmet sheet. This explains why I feel so sick when I see the scenes of a device-addled world. Like the time I dropped a 70-pound dumbbell on my face and none of the people in the gym noticed me spitting up blood because they were all on their phones. Or the teenager I saw a couple months ago sitting with his family at Five Guys with headphones in, watching TikTok on two different devices at once. Or any one of the thousands of parents staring at their screens while their kids spend an eternity clamoring and straining for an ounce of attention before realizing they can’t compete with a little hunk of glass. What these scenes represent, to me, are lives being wasted. And to illustrate why that is, I’ll tell you about dogs.

Yesterday I was telling someone about how much of a mindfuck the twilight of my dog’s life has been. I told her about the experience of sitting on the bed with Duke and watching his labored breathing, unable to do anything but rub his ears and back. She recalled going through the same thing with her Great Dane, Maribel. What struck this person, though, was realizing that she looks back on that period with a deep fondness. She remembers that time with Maribel in a ‘glow.’ When I asked her how such an excruciating experience could be a fond memory, she told me that the circumstances made it so that the time she spent with Maribel had a profound “quality of attention.”

Quality of attention. The phrase sent a shockwave through my veins. I knew exactly what she meant. When I was sitting on the bed with Duke, watching him and rubbing his back, the quality of attention was nothing short of spiritual. It was glowing. Alive. These moments of vitality, when we feel electrifyingly connected to the world, are a direct product of the quality of our attention. The touch of someone we love; the breakthrough of epiphany when we solve a problem; the heart-pounding, endorphin-laced triumph of physical exertion—these moments are made meaningful by virtue of the attention we pay them. 

Smartphones and their vacuous dopamine streams, on the other hand, inhale our attention and its quality like screen-shaped black holes. And they take our lives along with them.

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For years, it was these scenes of others wasting their lives that I mostly concerned myself with. Sure, I made some efforts to limit my own screen time. I slept with my phone in the other room. Set my display to grayscale. Got a matte screen protector. Left it at home sometimes. But when I would finally come up for air after having lost two hours of a Friday night to a vortex of scrolling, or when I found myself still reaching for the phone the second I woke up every morning, it didn’t occur to me that these half measures were failing to prevent me from wasting my own life.

It would make for a great story if there was some poignant moment or grand epiphany that pushed me over the edge. What actually happened is that I read about someone else who had gotten rid of their smartphone and thought, ‘Huh, I guess there’s nothing stopping me from doing that.’ I suppose it was just the right bit of information at the right time—the drop that spilled a glass which had been filling up for years. I realized that I could keep bitching about this whole state of affairs with our devices while continuing to use one, or I could just, you know, get rid of it. So I did. Like a chaotic relationship that finally fizzles out with a whimper, my iPhone disappeared from my life in a decidedly unceremonious, anticlimactic fashion.

I’ve now spent two weeks with the Sunbeam F1 Pro Aspen, a flip phone made by a Mennonite company in Missouri. It calls, texts, shows the weather, does “navigation”, and has a 5 MP camera.¹ My screen time on the F1 Pro is probably something like twelve minutes a day. Looking at the weather forecast for much longer, I’ve learned, isn’t all that enticing.

Even with my conviction about how harmful smartphones are, I was still reluctant to believe people who had gotten rid of them and claimed to have gained their lives back. It seemed too simplistic. I had no trouble believing that it made a difference, of course, but any time folks describe something as a panacea, I’m leery.

But I think I get it now.

Rather than make a bunch of bold claims after two weeks, I’ll simply report what has happened during that time: I have stopped biting my nails. I’ve finished two books. I’ve meditated more than I have in the past six months. In two or three instances, when texting someone a long response with my flip phone seemed like too much of a pain in the ass, I have instead made phone calls that turned into wonderful conversations. I’ve spent hours sitting on the floor with Duke. I’ve gone on interstate drives with nothing but my thoughts. I’ve become better friends with myself. 

It’s important to note that none of this was planned. Most of it is the result of feeling bored or uncomfortable. Without the seductive salve of a smartphone to serve as a pacifier for my impatient mind, I’ve had no choice but to sit with whatever comes up and see where it takes me. The quality of my attention could do nothing other than improve, because I got rid of the thing that spent 24 hours a day clamoring for it. Good things naturally followed. This, I suspect, is why people make grand proclamations about getting their lives back—because they’ve subtracted something that interfered with their ability to properly live them.

My sheets no longer have football helmets and basketball hoops on them, but I find myself again laying in bed at night grappling with life and its finitude like I did when I was six. Without an iPhone close by whispering sweet nothings, I feel a bit like a kid again, my mind having no choice but to spend time with itself, free to meander before settling its full attention on whatever feels alive. 

That, to me, is far from a wasted life.

1. The iPhone camera is 48 MP.