The iPhone Returns: Part One

After 100 days with a flip phone, I'm reconsidering what matters.

Lately, when I text friends, most of them respond something like this:

Wait, a blue bubble?!? A full sentence?? Are you back???

To which I respond (always with the little dancing lady because I missed emojis):

I’m back baby 💃🏻

To which they respond:

Thank GOD

An early interaction.

I am, indeed, “back.” In early September, after 100 days using a flip phone, I breathed in deeply, closed my eyes, and unplugged my dormant iPhone (which was definitely, definitely fully charged).

Actually, I had exclusively used my flimsy green flip phone for a total of 104 days. Back in May, when I conceived of and began my iPhone-free “experiment,” I thought I might count down the days to the technological Promised Land like I once counted down to Christmas morning.

Me at age 9, but with a volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

But when the time came to return to the land of connectivity, I hesitated (for four days). I would walk by the door of my little at-home office, see the iPhone sitting there on the floor, and walk away. I alternated between feelings of dread and meh. A little bit of outright resistance. A lot of apathy. Because really, what did I need that thing for anyway? And wasn’t it just going to make me feel stressed? In my imagination, that little 3-inch by 5-inch rectangle had become gargantuan. It was big as a Costco and weighed as much as the trappings of modern motherhood.¹

But I also knew the phone would operate differently in my life after my experiment. In his book Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport defines the concept:

Digital Minimalism is a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

Whew. It’s that “happily missing out” that gets me every time. But replace “online time” with “on-the-phone time,” and that’s it. That’s the philosophy I at least want to aspire to. It seems at once radical and almost embarrassingly obvious, doesn’t it?

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The experiment helped, to say the least. Within the first month, I had a pretty clear idea of how I wanted to use my iPhone, should I ever return to it:

1. phone calls

2. quicker texting

3. directions

4. scheduling our family activities in a way that could be synced

5. podcasts + music

And I knew exactly what I did not want to use my phone for:

1. a web browser

2. email

3. social media

4. weather

5. grocery delivery

6. Amazon purchases

7. fitness tracking

8. reading the New York Times

Nothing scrollable. Nothing endless or infinite. Nowhere to spend money or compare myself or get buried under other people’s demands.

Just… tools.

(Well, tools and podcasts.)

So. Finally, on a Sunday afternoon while my kids watched the first Harry Potter movie, I sat down next to them with my iPhone. The first order of business was to clean up my home page. Well color me shocked: This took over an hour.

I knew I had a bunch of junk apps, but I never would have guessed how many. I deleted more than 100 apps (probably closer to 150, but I didn’t count and I’m not good at math) and turned off all notifications. I mean ALL—my texts don’t buzz, no red bubbles shame me with their presence, and my phone doesn’t even ring (or buzz or beep or sing or shimmy). Did you catch that? My phone doesn’t ring.

BEFORE (merely the first home page of many)

AFTER

The first few days with my iPhone, I retained my minimalist flip phone habits. But I was blown away by how the old habits seemed built into the iPhone itself—like there’s only one way of using the iPhone, and that’s compulsively. For months, I had forgotten my flip phone at home all. the. time. It just wasn’t interesting enough to remember. It was less interesting than the keys to my car. Less interesting than my health insurance card. Less interesting than my sunglasses, which I never leave behind.

But last week, I left the house to meet my husband for lunch, and I forgot my iPhone. I knew I’d only be gone for an hour, but I had that old feeling of panic, like I was missing out on something. Like something hugely urgent was going to happen while I was separated from my iPhone.

The difference is, this time I knew it was a lie. I had a clear point of comparison. I knew I had left my phone at home a thousand times in the last few months and nothing tragic had ever befallen my children, my parents… or the whole earth.

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Yesterday, the school nurse called around lunchtime. She left a message saying my daughter had been pegged in the nose with a ball during four-square at recess and was in her office, in tears. I didn’t know the nurse had left a voicemail until I was on the way to pick up my kids from school (I’m telling you, the phone literally doesn’t ring), so naturally I felt terrible. But when my daughter got in the car, I flapped my hands and fretted and said, “HOW IS YOUR NOSE?!?!”

And she looked confused and then said, “Oh. It doesn’t hurt anymore. I forgot about it.”

Huh. How ‘bout that.

I understand The Internet well enough to know that somebody somewhere would be (will be?) quick to call that negligence on my part. There’s this idea now that availability is a moral issue; to be available is good and responsible and admirable. To be unavailable is selfish and shortsighted and even reckless.

To which I say: Meh.

To which I say: I think you’re wrong.

To which I say: Paddle your own canoe?

To which I say: My kids are awesome. Their noses are all fine.

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It is very hard not to revert to my pre-experiment habits, but I’ve been intentional. And I have been doing other things more intentionally, too.

First you should know: I am, deeeeeeep in my soul, a Rule Follower. I mean, I can follow rules SO HARD, and I breathe guilt like air. Which makes it difficult for me to advocate for myself and my kids, even when I truly believe I have a better idea or better way. So it was no small thing when I emailed my kid’s first-grade teacher and said, “I am an English teacher [ish]. My kids read more books than any kids I know. However, we will not be doing the reading log this year.”

And it was no small thing when I emailed my other kid’s piano teacher yesterday and said, “I am so thankful for piano lessons! But last year, tracking practice minutes on the app caused a lot of tears. You’ll just have to trust that she’s practicing, because we will not be tracking minutes this year.”

I wrote these emails only after lots of thinking and angsting and philosophizing and time managing, but the teachers couldn’t have known that. (My first challenge was being okay with the teachers not knowing whether I was being intentional or just lazy. I didn’t just want to be an A+ student in school; I want to be an A+ parent. No, A++! And I want to be Not-A-Weirdo!) But I know in my bones that our family does not benefit from signed reading logs and tracking practice minutes with a dadgum digital, tick-tocking timer every weeknight. So really, why did it take me so long?

Because before I did my flip phone thing, I defaulted to thinking there was no other way. I couldn’t conceive of alternatives. Once I got off the grid (not all the way—hello Substack), I was reminded that the alternatives for tech use (and living, really) were endless. Our family could do different things. I could say no. I could use my parenting imagination (which is, by the way, my primary parenting skill, and which has been vastly underutilized since we entered the rigid elementary school years). I could admit my limits. I could feel a little bit embarrassed.²

Cal Newport says, “Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves.”

Of course the problems with this are obvious:

Isn’t sitting around “thinking about values” [eye roll] a luxury that busy people can’t afford?

(Isn’t TikTok?)

Who has the time to differentiate?

(People who, like I did, spend four hours a day on their phones.)

And most crucially: How can I even know what I value when advertisers (and influencers)³ are constantly telling me what I should?

(I can’t.)

But the flip phone era gave me lots of Think Time. [May I never run four silent, breathy miles without Spotify ever again, please Lord, amen.]

You know what I don’t value? Power struggles with my seven-year-old over piano assignments. Signing up to take snacks to baseball practices when the kids are there for literally one hour. Being yelled at by my phone⁴ because I didn’t stand on my feet enough times in one day.⁵

But what I do value: Communicating with my parents. Arranging car pools via the miracle of group texting. Not getting lost on the way to tennis camp and making volunteer tennis instructors wait 45 minutes for me to show up. Giving my husband zero excuses to say he didn’t know there was a ballet practice at 5pm because it is right there IN ORANGE WHICH COLOR DESIGNATES THE FAM-I-LY CAL-EN-DAR.

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It’s weird to admit, but one of the biggest gifts from the flip phone era was confidence. I feel less like a cog in a capitalist ecosystem run by unethical tech overlords and more like a human person with at least some degree of clarity about my values.

Seems to me, clarity about values usually translates to meaningful action.

Or at least, it’s a prerequisite.

After about a week, I added the camera and photos app back to my home screen. It was a risk. I was once extremely addicted to taking photos of my kids, and maybe I’ll get that way again. I can now scroll old photos when I’m bored in a waiting room, which really isn’t a good habit for someone as prone to nostalgia as I am. I watch all the little videos my phone compiles in order to manipulate my gooey maternal feelings. The photos app is a waste of my time and probably a waste of my emotional energy.

This thing I’m doing? It may not last. It’s not a perfect system.

But, for now, it’s a better one.

1. It weighs 6 ounces.

2. I can still remember where I was standing the first time I got a call on my flip phone and pulled it out in a public place (a breakfast cafe). I remember my whole body going hot with embarrassment when I lifted the flip phone to my ear. I wanted to explain to everyone (“I mean, I have an iPhone, I’m just not using it, lol”). Now that seems so weird and impossible, but it happened!

3. Same same.

4. I realize that it probably says a lot about me that I interpret gentle “encouragements” from my phone as yelling.

5. I’m a Sitter! Let me sit!