Dear Friends, I have completed another smartphone fast! I wrote this article after last year’s fast. I’ll update you on this year’s discoveries at the end.
February
I tell myself I “don’t spend much time online,” and that I’m “not influenced by online advertising.” But tonight, I’m huddled on a damp, dark hill, standing by a wall that smells like pee, hoping that my blind pug is going to go quickly so that I can make my way back to our warm building. I’m one week into my social media (and soon-to-be “smartphone fast.”) I’m already in trouble because I haven’t heard from my younger adult kid in days, despite some texts I’ve sent her: “Instagram!” my mind screams. “The kids always post on Insta! You’ll see what they’ve been up to–good or bad.” I’m just about to check the app when a heart-emoji-laden text comes in. “Mom! I love you. Just thinking of you.” Relief.
A second later, a cop bearing a flashlight is close behind me. Soon police are swarming the hill. I am used to this sort of thing, living a block or two from Gracie Mansion for part of the year but still, it’s jarring––who or what are they looking for? Yodel quickly pees and I’m making my way up and out of the park when I realize a cruiser is headed down the path towards us, its lights off. I jump to the side, worried that the driver won’t see an older woman with a tiny dog. A cop leans out the window, “Ma’am, have you seen a man in a dark jacket running?”
I realize he has described about a third of the people who make their way through the park each night, but somehow I know that’s not the answer he’s looking for. “No,” I answer.
“Have you seen anything unusual?” he asks.
Unusual? This is New York City! Who even says that? “No,” I say
Back at my building, I watch as flashlight beams crisscross their way through the park bushes opposite the building. My finger hovers above my Twitter app, not yet deleted from my screen. I press the app and search for “Carl Schurz Park, NYPD, murder, protest, incident.” Nothing. And one week in, I’ve already ruined my fast.
A word about me
I’m not organizing injured workers at an Amazon warehouse, planning political protests, responding to medical patients, or worried about how young children are doing. In fact, I am a semi-retired person who has plenty of time to respond to things. In other words, I don’t really need a smartphone for Important Reasons. But with my “friends” leaving Twitter (on which I spend way too much time) and finding myself emerging from the dark days of the pandemic, it seemed a good time to evaluate my social media and smartphone use.
So how did I get here?
Just before I begin my attempted smartphone fast, I check my iPhone Screentime as a starting point: a whopping 6 hours, 48 minutes, including an hour and a half on social and 72 pick-ups. I don’t even have notifications on! Along with all the dreaded gray bars of “background” on my Screentime use, I see numerous real uses: maps, messages, newspapers, photos, settings, timers, calendars, YouTube, Chrome (googling random stuff), Seamless, pocket pitch (for singing) Uber, Words with Friends, Audubon bird calls, podcasts. Goodreads! Oh, Goodreads––you should be fun! But instead, the app is a reminder of how much other people read (more than I do), and that I’ll never be able to read everything I want. Something that I think I use as a digital library can make me feel just as bad as Twitter. When did all these apps come into use? I start looking up the dates these companies started. LinkedIn: 2002, Facebook: 2004, Twitter: 2006, Instagram: 2010. I remember with each app thinking “I’m not going to use that.” And then I did.
Week 1: Lent
For the few of you still attending a Catholic or mainline Protestant church, you may be familiar with “giving something up” for Lent. For many of us, Lent is a kind of rehearsal for death, when we’ll presumably be living without certain things (with any luck, these will include social media and smartphones.) For the past five years, I’ve tried to cut back on both my social media and smartphone use during the forty days preceding Easter. But this year, I decide to take things further, and try to use my smartphone as little as possible. I buy a plastic case that locks just in case I’m unable to resist the power of my phone.
The Rules
I am aware that there are folks who are rarely online, and I have a few friends who’ve never been on social media, not to mention one who still has a flip phone. I can’t bring myself to totally give up my online life. I decide on a few things I will still do, and limit myself to doing them on my MacBook. I will check my email on and off throughout the day. I will still check my bank account. I’ll still use email and Word, Excel, and read newspapers. But I’ll cease to check real estate listings (another addiction) since I’m not buying, renting, or selling anything. Likewise, I won’t look at LinkedIn and Idealist, Glassdoor, or any place I might see what former co-workers or workplaces are up to or who’s hiring for jobs I’m not applying to.
On my phone, I offload nearly all my apps to my App Library just in case I need to get to one of them right away (I am aware as well as using Instagram as a wellness check…I check Facebook to see if older people are still…alive). I stop picking up my smartphone first thing in the morning to check NYTimes headlines and wait until later to look at them on my MacBook. I cancel my subscription to the Boston Globe, patting myself on the back for saving $27 a month,
Week 2: Weaknesses
Already, I’m having problems. After the park incident, My sister tags me in a post on FB and I get an email about it. Where is she tagging me? What photo? Twitter floods me with emails: where are you? Don’t you want to know what Bob, Traci, and HFChitChat said?
I note my periodic frustration and boredom are met with the urge to go on Twitter. In fact, I soon notice that it is not just social or apps that are a source of comfort: it is the phone itself. I look to my phone for entertainment and relief, embarrassingly checking any remaining apps, including those I seldom use just for the act of doing something on my phone.
Week 3: Strange Dreams
I awake realizing that I have once again dreamt about an old coworker, one with whom I was never close but for a brief period of time considered…a frenemy. I hadn’t thought about her in a couple of years. In the dream, I lived in an elegant house and was entertaining. Suddenly, I realized she was there, uninvited, with no interest in what I was doing. Instead, she was telling people loudly about a wedding she was planning for her daughter. I had no interest in her daughter but then thought, “how can I get her out of the house?” Your interpretation may vary, but it seemed to me a reflection of social media: we invite acquaintances with loose ties into our space only to have our time and enjoyment taken up by watching them announcing things in which we’ve ceased to have interest, or worse that we envy.
Week 4: Digital Hoarding
A couple of weeks in and I am inhabiting a digital desert. I search among the relics of my pre-2015 smartphone life on my MacBook to see what I might find. I’d recently been warned by Google that I have “too much email,” so why not clean it up? Combing through old emails, I soon find I’m an email hoarder. I spend one weekend obsessively deleting emails, some in bulk and some in carefully preserved AOL folders (don’t ask). I re-read emails about buying my dog, my kids’ elementary schools, and vacations I took dating back to 2004. Do I learn anything new about myself that I might not had these facts been written on pieces of paper I’d long since discarded? No! 15,000 emails shrink down to about 3,000. I eliminate a number of “folders” I long ago moved over from AOL, including hundreds of emails about a defunct book club and my husband’s 2006 job search (when I realize all four family members were on the same AOL account). I also discover an embarrassing number of “bookmarks” and get obsessed moving them around and pushing things into different folders. Many go to broken links. But at least I’m online doing…something!
Week 5: I miss music
I realize that much of what I do on my iPhone is listen to music. Since 1982, I’ve always had a Walkman, iPod, or other portable music device with me. When I put my AirPods in, I’m transported back to my parents’ study where I’m listening to Bossa Nova, back to my dorm room listening to Steely Dan, or to a movie version of my life with stirring orchestral arrangements. I try an experiment: a day or two with no Spotify. I realize quickly that an anxious mind has its own soundtrack going most of the day. In succession, I hear Boards of Canada, “Baby Take Me Higher,” Tina Turner belting out “Stay Together,” the theme from the original “Pink Panther,” and the Mamas and the Papas singing “Dancing in the Street,” (my Spotify most-listened to song of 2022.)
Without headphones, I step out onto the street and remember a song from the Sesame Street album of my childhood. “While looking at a crack in the sidewalk, an old tin can at the side of the road…I almost missed a rainbow, I almost missed a sunset, I almost missed a shooting star going by!” With my head held high, and with no AirPods in my ears, I dodge dog poop and rat remains, trying to drink in the beauty of urban architecture, and the facial expressions of my fellow humans. 99.9% of them I find are leaning over their own phone screens oblivious to any interaction I might be seeking. It’s garbage day, or hour, and I find my visual survey of the plastic bags lining the street is met only with the observation that they’re filled with the same recycled crap that I toss out.
In desperation, I listen to music on the MacBook whenever I’m home. I’m a choral singer and I usually listen to upcoming performance pieces on Spotify. No more: I’m on YouTube on my MacBook every day practicing. Before I can listen to “Hosanna Filio David,” I often find that I have to sit through a lengthy Bobbi Brown makeup commercial. By the end of Week 5, I’ve bought an expensive new tinted moisturizer and am considering stocking up on 1-800-Contacts though I already have six months’ worth.
Week 6: Can I go even lower?
I begin to read online about smartphone use. There are 6.92 billion smartphones in the world, or smartphones for 86% of the 8 billion people inhabiting Planet Earth.
The average American picks up their smartphone 96 times a day. What is the lowest number of pickups I could possibly do? The answer comes to me 6 weeks into my fast: 16 times, or about once each hour I’m awake. That particular day, I log an impressive 33 minutes of use as opposed to the 95% of Americans who use their smartphones 45 minutes a day or more.
I try walking around and taking the subway without my phone and it’s absolutely fine. I know where I’m going and if I have an emergency, I imagine someone wherever I’m going will lend me theirs. I feel surprised at just how okay I feel. I’m sleeping well and feeling less anxious. I also finish reading seven books.
The End
It’s almost Easter and nearing the end of my journey, I decide to return to listening to Spotify outdoors beginning with Handel’s “Messiah.” As the rousing chorus of “Lift up your heads” comes up, I note just in time that I am about to step on a chubby dead waterbug whose life has come to a bitter end in front of an elegant doorman building. I hold my head high once again, Handel urging me to forget what I’ve just seen.
By the end of my “fast,” I’m finding that I don’t really miss social or my smartphone at all. After 40 days and nights (wait––did I tell you Sundays don’t count in the 46 days of Lent?), except for music, I become accustomed to the absence of checking and re-checking apps and buttons and email. While there are plenty of worrying and “newsworthy” things going on, I am no longer feeling the need to read about them in real-time.
In some ways, I feel that I’ve escaped the metaverse of my smartphone. But I look around me at my fellow humans immersed not in the moment, but in an immersive internal world of their phone. Who needs Meta? We’re already living in it.
I end my fast and give myself high marks for not having to the locked case. How have I done since? I’m carrying many of my new practices with me, and I’m definitely spending more time reading, But walking down the street listening to a cacophony of construction noise and wailing sirens? No, I’m back with Handel and Mozart, Steely Dan and Joao Gilberto. With AI around the bend (I’ve already asked the bot how better to memorize musical scales), I’ve resolved to spend less time online, less time looking for an endorphin rush, and more time living with an uncomfortable silence.
Happy Spring, Kate
P.S. Updates for my 2024 fast: I never reached my last year’s best number of 33 minutes, but I did have one day when I only had 12 pick-ups. Also noted: I’m on social media far less, but I listen to a lot of podcasts.
P.P.S. Have you ever tried to lessen your smartphone use? How did it go? Let me know below!