On Luddism.

 I've been thinking a lot lately about the appeal of living a life that's less dependent on my phone. I have my phone set up to go into do not disturb mode for all of Saturday each week, and while I do think it has somewhat curbed my desire to waste hours of my free day scrolling mindlessly, it's still not as effective as I'd like it to be. Yesterday I tried turning my phone off for the day, but I didn't last that long because I ended up wanting to listen to my audiobook. While I had my phone off though, I worked on some hand sewing and facetimed some friends. When I mentioned to them that I'd turned my phone off for the day one was like "But you facetimed us!" Which is true, though I started the call from my laptop (which is actually a much easier way to facetime, in my opinion, because you the screen/camera holds itself up and you're free to do whatever you want with your hands and not worry about your phone tipping over mid-conversation). 

Anyway, it occurred to me after the fact that when I say I want to use my phone less I'm not at all talking about cutting back on actual communication (whether it be facetime, voice calls, or just text messages) with my friends and family. It's the mindless suck of scrolling aimlessly, of opening the same few apps for a dopamine hit of more-new-fresh information every ten minutes. And I definitely do that. I'm pretty sure we all do that. It's truly baffling how fixated we've become, as an entire culture, with checking into our tiny little boxes of virtual reality. And sure, technology makes it way easier to plan face-to-face time with real people. But you have to actually make the effort to use it to that end. 

When I say I want to use my phone less, the desire has nothing to do with the communication functions of telephones. What I actually mean is that I want to spend less time looking at my pocket computer. I remember when I was probably five or six years old my dad told my sister and I that by the time we were in college they'd have computers you could hold in your hand. We thought it was hilarious and crazy sounding and I remember feeling like that sounded like some insanely distant future technology. Which, admittedly, to a five year old college is about twelve years away and that is unimaginably far in the future. But lo and behold, iPhones came out when I was still in high school, so we did in fact have handheld computers when I was in college.

Some days I want to get a flip phone. So much of what I want access to with a smartphone can be accessed through a laptop which, at least for me, is a fundamentally less addictive piece of technology. Can I still get sucked into hours of scrolling online on my laptop? Absolutely yes. But I'm less likely to do it with regularity because it's not riding in my back pocket with me at all times. I get lost in laptop rabbit holes once a week (or two or even three) instead of multiple times per day. But then I think about how the things I do use my iPhone for are really really helpful: I use google maps multiple times every day; I listen to hundreds of audiobooks each year for free on the Libby app; I use my phone to play the sound of crashing waves for 45 minutes while I fall asleep each night and use it as an alarm each morning; I can do all my banking from an app and need only my fingerprint to get into it, which eliminates the need to memorize a zillion different passwords. 

A smartphone is incredibly useful. I just wish I were better at not squandering time using it for things I don't care at all about. I did a decent job staying off my phone this weekend. Instead, I spent a significant amount of time sewing different projects (hand sewed most of a tote bag that I bought supplies for while in Maine over Christmas and finally put a patch onto my torn duvet cover) and even spent three and a half hours today hanging out with my friend while I sewed up a kaftan for her out of a lovely fabric I found recently. It felt really good to start and finish an entire project in an afternoon, and it also felt really lovely to chat with her about life and what's been going on with both of us lately. I also read a significant amount of the library book I have checked out right now and went for a walk in the sunshine both days. It feels good to spend my weekend doing something refreshing, something that adds value to my quality of life. I think it's fine to occasionally waste many hours scrolling through endless feeds but I don't want it to be a defining benchmark of my life. I don't think any of us do. Yet we all too often collectively fritter away our precious time. 

My screen time reports say that I usually spend between 4 and 5 hours a day on my phone. That's...a lot. It's more than I want. I think that casual usage adds up over time so I would be totally fine with two hours a day. But it turns out that you can spend two hours a day checking the time and weather and playing the daily NYT games and answering actually important texts that have to do with work and checking the route for the stop you need to make on the way home from work and all sorts of other little mindless and necessary tasks. All the things that we actually need (ish...does anyone NEED a smartphone?) our phones for. So what am I doing on there for the extra two to three hours each day? Apparently a lot of Google maps, actually, if my screen time report is to be believed. But also a lot of other random garbage.

I passed this sidewalk art on my walk yesterday. 

It's clearly a relic from the early pandemic days, but it feels still relevant in some ways. There are so many people that I can't wait to hug again. My family, my far away friends. It's not a bad sentiment for regular life, but it was such a fervent desire back when it seemed such a remote possibility. I thought about how nobody is doing street art to express how badly they want to hug the general public anymore. How specific to that one global cultural moment that piece of graffiti was. How it feels a little bit like a time capsule that expressed the longing of the entire planet. Then I thought about the cultural things that feel normal and universal right now and someday might feel extremely dated and 2020s specific. I really hope using our phones all the time is one of the things that falls to the wayside. I'm sure some folks will continue to use them constantly forever, but I hope there is a widespread shift from thinking of our phones as an extension of our bodies (I am absolutely speaking of myself here) to thinking of them as a tool for occasional use to make it easier to live our lives in the here and now. Maybe someday.