Like a gas, noxious or otherwise, lack of phone expands to fit the space available. My partner and I both chose the lazy holiday Monday to complete this assignment, and although I probably needed my phone less than if we’d picked a busy day, I missed it more. There were more nooks of time for my awareness of phonelessness to slip into.
That awareness, in fact, was pretty much unyielding. We talked so much about and around our phones! For 24 hours, Phone was the unseen character: Phone was Godot, Dulcinea, Maris Crane. We examined and appraised the phoneless experience at least as much as we lived it.
It was hard to separate out the mental and physical effects of being phoneless from the effects of knowing it was new; having anticipated ahead of time how it might feel; and actively wanting to be very attuned to what felt different. Weirdly, I felt I recognized this from other times a new sensory experience had involved a deliberate choice: “Am I laughing because I’m drunk, or am I laughing because I think drunk people laugh?”
To prepare for the assignment, I gave my family and a few friends — those most likely to be concerned if they got in touch and didn’t hear back — a heads-up that I’d be off the grid. Although I didn’t communicate with any of them during the phoneless day, I did end up feeling a little closer to them, because the feeling that I ought to send them this alert was itself a nice reminder that there are people in my life who care about my safety. But I think this was a one-time, temporary-only benefit; all those same people would be very annoyed if I chose to make phonelessness a permanent state. (I have enough friends who have dated stubborn Luddites to know this is true.)
Although there’s obviously and indisputably an element of compulsion that underlies how we interact with our phones, I think we need to be very careful about our willingness to draw a parallel with addiction. For one thing, it minimizes the very real, or at least metaphorizes the very literal, danger of physical addictions — no matter how much time you spend scrolling Facebook, that action is never going to kill you. And for another, I think the pervasiveness of phone compulsion as it’s often commonly understood begs an explanation at the population level, not the individual one. Maybe epidemiology has more answers to offer.
That said, I also didn’t feel that my impulses to check my phone felt like an addict’s cravings on any more than a fleeting, surface level. I hope I’m not kidding myself about this, but the discomfort truly didn’t feel like it came from being denied tiny dopamine hits. Rather, a better comparison might be that it felt like I was walking around all day with the fingers of one hand Superglued together. Throughout the day, confronted with all sorts of minor inconveniences, I was painfully aware that there existed a tool that could erase them — and I couldn’t use it.
In the end, I think what surprised me most was how wrong I was about some of the assumptions I’ve always made about how my phone both smoothes and disrupts my life. My estimation of my phone’s effect on my attention span has been more dire than perhaps it needed to be. When I was a child and teenager, before smartphones, I could easily pass three or four hours reading without thinking anything of it. These days, I find it almost impossible to spend even a half-hour concentrating on text without reflexively checking my phone, and I’ve made an additional habit of bemoaning this state of affairs whenever the topic of The Phonedom Menace comes up at a party or whatever. But on Monday, I settled into some reading — and not even fun reading, economics reading — and had no problem at all focusing for several hours. Somehow knowing that looking at my phone wasn’t a possibility also eliminated the impulse, which was an extremely pleasant surprise.
Reading wasn’t the only thing that turned out better than I’d imagined it would. At one point, my partner couldn’t remember a fleeting bit of trivia — “Who sings that song,” he asked, “that goes, like, ‘Ooohhhh, yeah’?”* I couldn’t answer the question but could contribute a little additional information: “It’s about how the moon is beautiful but the sun is even more beautiful,” I offered.
As a committed pedant, I’d always imagined that a moment like this, without a phone, would feel infuriating. But instead, we just smiled, shrugged and moved on.
* The song, a masterpiece, is by Yello.
