I assumed my month of avoiding all non-essential technology would come to an end, and I would have a list of the things I missed or the opportunities that passed me by.
That list does not exist.
Instead, I have a handwritten record of every day of the past month. I know it took just four days to shed the urge to check my phone first thing in the morning, two weeks before the desire to retreat into my phone eased, and three weeks before I stopped missing the company of podcasts.
I know one of the best moments came on day 22. Arriving home late and exhausted, I ignored the habitual pull to lie down on the sofa in front of a background screen of Netflix and a foreground screen of my phone and avoid thinking for a few hours. Instead, I kicked off my shoes and went to sit beside my partner. He was still working, but stopped when he saw how down I was. He listened to me talk about my day and pressed my hand as it got harder for me to speak.
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When there was nothing left to relay, he left the room. I stared out the window. I’ve become very used to doing this. A moment later, he came back with a guitar and asked me to play.
I’d had just one lesson with my auntie, who generously offered to coax my stiff fingers into music-makers.
With three chords and a single song to my name, I began. In a town where I was born lived a man, who sailed the seas… My partner joined in. Our voices covered the many cracks in my chords across two verses and tens of yellow submarines. We’d never sung together like that. I’d never been able to create a scene of live music and live voices before.
I rested the guitar down. He went back to work. I went to make toast. The sadness of my day lingered, but it was softer, coated in a joy of my own making.
Maybe I could have learnt to play guitar from YouTube, but I never did. I watched videos of people playing, the same way I watched videos of people running, cooking and gardening. But all of the hours of me watching rarely led to me doing. I gave my personal resources of time, attention and motivation to my phone. I handed them over to large organisations to profit from.
Over the past four weeks, I’ve read nine books, learned five guitar chords, written every day, and learned how to use my sister’s sewing machine. It’s not that I have more time, but I am in command of where it goes. I’ve used the internet when I needed to, but I haven’t lost a single hour to it.
In the US, a coalition of academics, artists and thinkers has come together to form the Friends of Attention, a radical resistance to what they are calling “human fracking”, the commodification, capture and extraction of our minds and senses by technology.
Something in their manifesto, on why we give up our freedom of attention, caught my eye: “We do it to meet needs that have not always existed, but seem always to have existed; we do it for convenience, and because it is just so useful; we do it to gain or give access, to give or be given work; for knowledge and the illusion of knowledge; for community and the illusion of community.”
Technology has come up with solutions to problems that never existed; its leaders have designed systems to make our lives easier, more convenient, frictionless. It has removed us from each other, isolated us from random encounters and new experiences. Removing myself from its grasp has shown me something of the cost.
Unable to order anything online, I bought what I needed in person. John in the Singer Centre on Talbot Street in Dublin advised me on a new presser foot for the sewing machine, before spending 20 minutes troubleshooting my many sewing issues and proudly showing me a delicately embroidered image of Phil Lynott that one of his customers had made for him as a thank you.
For new swimming goggles, I went on the recommendation of a friend to Base2Race in Tallaght, where Mary let me try on different options until I found a pair that sucked my eye sockets tightly enough that she could tell they wouldn’t leak.
I have no desire to go back on social media, to pick up on the podcasts that I follow, or even to permit myself to Google anything I want
In a taxi on the way back from a work event, I got chatting to the driver Daniel. We moved past the weather, and he told me about his recent leg amputation. Passing through Crumlin, he pointed out the spot where he’d been in a motorcycle crash 50 years before, the beginning of his leg’s trouble. As I got out of the car, I wished him luck getting back on the golf course. I now know how important it is to him to play again, and I really hope he gets there.
These moments may seem so minor they’re barely worth mentioning. But I believe they are. None of them would have happened if I ordered these items online or kept my eyes down on a screen as Daniel and I crawled through morning traffic.
I feel more rooted in Dublin, my home city, than I have in a long time. I have more acquaintances, more stories in my head, and more experiences of kindness. Life has more texture, silky and coarse.
My phone, and all the technology it encompasses, promised an easier life, but that easiness was traded for a shallower and more fragile existence.
As Rebecca Solnit wrote in a recent essay for the Guardian, the feeling of being at home, outside of what you rent or own, is “what underpins democracy: ease with difference, familiarity with the lay of the land, a sense of connection and belonging, knowing where you are and who is out there, relationships – however casual – to people beyond your immediate circle”.
[ Saunas, cinemas and listening to albums: 25 ways to get off your phoneOpens in new window ]
I have no desire to go back on social media, to pick up on the podcasts that I follow, or even to permit myself to Google anything I want any time I want to. Truthfully, I’m afraid I haven’t come far enough not to slip back into every old habit if I give an inch.
There are uses for technology I’m grateful for, like being able to talk to my best friend who lives in New Zealand and all my friends who live overseas. I’m not giving these up.
But I am going to continue down this path for a while longer to see who else I will meet and what else I will learn, now that my time and attention are back within my command. Even when it’s hard, the spontaneous unknown of it all feels far more interesting than anything I’ve ever been fed by an algorithm.
Six tips for breaking free of your phone
Wipe it
Make your phone a boring place to be. Delete all apps that are designed to entertain or keep your eyes there. Log out of your accounts through your internet browser as well. Unsubscribe from all emails from social media and entertainment platforms, and any company that makes its money from you spending time on its site. It can be hard to resist emails alerting you to new messages, and platforms know this. They have spent a lot of money to get your attention, and they will try to lure you back. I found it useful to turn off the “Discover” feature on my Google Chrome app, which recommends articles based on previous interests.
Get equipped
Figure out any triggers you might have for heavy phone use. If you use it for your alarm in the morning, buy an alarm clock. If you use it to check the time, buy a watch. I was in a pattern of using my phone at night when I couldn’t sleep, and in the mornings. I bought a reading light so I could read without waking my partner. I didn’t buy a new “dumb” phone, as I wanted to redefine my relationship with the one I have, but I’ll consider it in future.
Bind it
If you don’t want to pursue full digital abstinence, apps such as Freedom, Opal and StayFocused allow you to put apps and websites on a “block list” and schedule focus sessions. I’ve heard good things about Brick, a palm-sized physical device that locks you out of apps of your choosing until you use your phone to unlock them. Some people swear by turning their phone to grayscale, which drains all the colour from your screen, or using Olauncher, which changes your phone’s interface into a single home page with no app icons, no grid, and no widgets list.
Place it
Willpower alone is not enough to defeat the compulsive urge to distract and tap. Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, has developed a concept of situational agency. This means giving yourself the best chance of success at difficult undertakings by making the pursuit easier. In the case of phone use, it means keeping your phone far away from you, as physical distance creates psychological distance. I didn’t do it all the time, but leaving my phone on a high shelf in the hallway meant it wasn’t in my sightline when I was at home.
Airplane mode
One of the things that keeps us so addicted to our phones is the thought that new messages have arrived since the last time we checked. This is an intermittent reward, and it’s highly addictive. “Behaviour that is rewarded is repeated, but the gaps in the rewards create an even more powerful behavioural loop,” says neuroscientist Brian Pennie. I found it helpful to put my phone on airplane mode so I am in full control of when new messages can be delivered.
Decide what to do with your time
In a 2017 study of 1,600 Americans tasked with giving up all non-essential technology for a month by Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, the people who planned out what they wanted to do were much more likely to succeed than those who didn’t. The evenings and the mornings were when I was spending the most time on my phone, so I decided I would either write a journal or go swimming first thing every morning. In the evenings I could read or practise guitar. Other things came along – I picked up sewing, went to a lot of saunas, met up with friends – but I had key things I enjoyed and wanted to do more of.
Reading list
Understanding why we have become so addicted to our phones and what that is doing to our brains is a powerful motivator for taking action and making a change. I learnt a lot from Dopamine Nation by Dr Anna Lemke, who brings together case studies and neuroscience to explore why our pursuit of pleasure leads to pain. The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, which heavily influenced Australia’s ban on under-16s using social media, makes a damning case against “phone-based childhoods”, linking their use to mental illness. Newport’s Digital Minimalism is a useful guide to readdressing tech habits and paring back distractions. How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life, by Catherine Price, is useful too.
- No Instagram, Netflix or YouTube: Can I survive a four-week digital detox?
- Thirty days without screens: the scale of the challenge quickly becomes clear on day one
- I met an extraordinary man this week. Simon has never owned a mobile phone
- Tech makes cancelling plans with friends frictionless, but there is a real cost
