9 Comments

It was as big as a Costco and weighed as much as the trappings of modern motherhood.” This line! The terrific photo from your youth! I very much enjoyed this post.

Thanks for sharing your experiment. It’s a pretty cool thing to have tried.

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Ha thanks! I mean, that's a heavy load! ;)

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Lindsey, big big congrats to you for telling the teacher you aren't doing the reading log. I love that you got braver through this experiment. I really loved this post.

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I channeled my Inner Ginger when I sent that email!

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I'm going to delete some apps!

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Do it!

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I'm intrigued by the iPhone-less 104 days experiment. I'm not too available on my phone and actively struggle/dislike group chats (especially "legacy" ones that, for example, have gone on for 6 years). Excellent point about how 'availability' has become a moral issue. In my case, I've found this expectation to be for women, but not for men - and mostly around school. This school year I've started archiving What's App chats without reading them and deleting iMessage chats without reading them. People have started. . . calling me when they really need me. I haven't quite let go of the guilt/weird feeling yet.

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Haha I love the term "legacy chats." I hear you! 100% it is different for mothers vs. fathers. I don't have an ax to grind—it just IS.

I'm still thinking through why the flip phone made me feel so much less guilty about ignoring/missing things than the iPhone does. It's like on the iPhone, the messages are so clear and bright (literally) that I *have to* pay attention to them. On the flip phone everything was dark and pixelated and hard to click on and hard to read, so stuff just appeared less urgent. Weird.

When you ignore things, just think of me cheering you on. I was a terrible friend for 104 days, but the friends were there when I got back. ;)

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Just this morning, in another Substack, I learned about the Light Phone: have you heard of this? It's like a mashup of a paperwhite ereader, ipod, and flip phone. I'm curious about it! Watching you go iPhone-less and talking with a therapist friend about the number of clients she has who have anxiety over smart phones has made me really consider my own iphone dependence.

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