A stack of old flip phones. File picture
By Mark Lukach
I FELT empty and frustrated at how much time I spent on my iPhone. So I spent the last five years steadily stripping my phone down to the basics. Social media was the first to go, then e-mail, then news apps, and then even internet browsers. Each step was more liberating than the first, and the incessant itch to check my phone shrank smaller and smaller. And yet, it didn’t disappear entirely. I was still checking the weather at least 15 times a day, since it was one of the few things left on the phone. Even when there’s almost nothing on it, the smartphone is hard to ignore.
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I long pondered switching to a flip phone, but I always found an excuse to stay. Ultimately it was two of my students, 15- and 18-year-old sisters, who pushed me over the edge. Word spread around school that they had bought flip phones. I didn’t need to hear any more, especially considering that I teach a class on purpose and community where we specifically look at how our phones can get in the way of both. If they were brave enough to take the plunge, I could, too.
I spent $9 on a flip phone, plus $120 for a year of unlimited talk and text on a new number. For the last five months, I haven’t carried an iPhone with me, just my flip phone.
Predictably, it’s inconvenient to have a flip phone, which is kind of the point. Most of the inconveniences turn out to be quite lovely. Texting is terribly slow, so instead you call people and have a delightful stream of five-minute phone conversations throughout the day. You get restaurant recommendations from conversations with your neighbours, rather than through Yelp. You don’t scroll while in line at the grocery store, and instead talk to the person helping you check out. (You’d probably talk to the other people in line, too, but 9 times out of 10, they are on their phones.) You study maps at home before driving somewhere new, and then see what happens. You even get a bit lost, and it’s great.
This is the charming, romantic side of owning a flip phone: more conversations, more eye contact, more connection. And it is my primary joy in making the switch. My favourite example of this happened at my son’s school. To sign your kid out each day, you scan a QR code. Without my iPhone, I worked it out with the administrator that I could stop by the school office and they would manually sign him out for me. Each school day, I now have a friendly chat with two school employees whom I had never met before.
The separation between work and life is much more noticeable. I don’t overthink work e-mails all day, since I no longer carry my work e-mail in my pocket. And I’m so much more IRL, finally free of the smog of internet conversation. I am slow to get breaking news, and the enraging commentary surrounding it, and I’m definitely way less anxious because of it.
Best of all is my new relationship with silence. With a smartphone, I almost never experienced it. I always used the smartphone to listen to a podcast or music, or I might be watching something in the background or just scrolling. Without a smartphone always within reach, I am instead in my own head more, and my thoughts now have the time and space to roam freely. My internal life feels so much richer and robust. I am living more like my creative, curious, phone-free children.
This all sounds wonderful because it is wonderful. And now it’s confession time: I haven’t completely ripped off the Band-Aid. I still have my iPhone.
As it turns out, our addiction to smartphones is not just on an individual level. Intentionally or not, we have built structures that depend upon smartphone access, making it an essential feature of modern life. While most of the flip phone inconveniences are charming, some of them are so frustrating that they make you want to pull your hair out. We have app-ified society so thoroughly that we often end up in a cul-de-sac of logistics, and the only path forward is on a smartphone app.
For example: At my nearby grocery store, there are sales you can get with your frequent-buyer card, and then there are even better sales, mind-blowingly good sales, but to get those, you need to scan the product’s bar code into the store’s app. No smartphone = no app = no big savings. Annoying.
I don’t want to bring a smartphone to the grocery store, or my kids’ soccer practice, or anywhere for that matter. But it feels like I can’t leave it behind, because apps make the world go round.
The most extreme example of this came from a minor car collision. A car bumped into me in a parking lot, leaving a dent and a scratch. I swapped contact information with the other driver (my flip phone number, of course), and the next day, their insurance agent texted me a link to download their company app so I could post pictures of the damage. No such option with my flip phone.
I tried workarounds. I took photos with an actual camera, uploaded them to my computer, and typed the lengthy URL that the agent kept texting me into my web browser. Absurd, and also ineffective. When I finally did speak to the agent after calling for a week straight, she was in shock that I was using a flip phone. She had no other solution for how I could get paid for the damage without uploading photos through the app. After two Kafkaesque weeks of bureaucratic runaround, I conceded and used my smartphone to finish the claim.
I will continue to use a flip phone as my primary phone so I don’t have to carry an iPhone with me. And I will continue to evangelise for it. I hope many others get flip phones. We will all be better for it. If nothing else, it’ll be nice to have more people to talk to in the grocery line.
* Mark Lukach is a teacher and freelance writer. He is the author of the international bestselling memoir “My Lovely Wife in The Psych Ward”.
– THE WASHINGTON POST