So this might sounds crazy to some people but I found my smartphone to be the biggest common element in my destructive behaviors towards my productivity, physical health, mental health, and to an extend even maintaining my friendships. And this post is written to tell others that they should probably feel the same.
A few notices before going into this
- About me: I experience a decent amount of stress, lack of energy, and sensory overload on a daily basis, but to be completely honest, who doesn’t these days?
- This is isn’t a privacy topic but it might have overlapping areas.
- I was already holding a negative opinion against media suggestion algorithms made by big tech companies before I went on this exploration.
Introduction
Crazy question I asked myself: “What will go wrong when I don’t use my phone?” I started analyzing all the different hard dependencies and I came to discover a pretty strong personal motivation that helped continue the whole journey. I was thinking about what is the core problem of the phone, what reason can I come up with that is so compelling to me to go all-in with a smartphone-less lifestyle? The answer slotted in very well with beliefs I already had; it is completely homogeneous with why the internet is such a destructive force today and will continue to get worse.
Centralization = bad
I begun to feel there is just something wrong with concept of today’s smartphone. Excessive amounts of computing power, prices that match a second-hand car, unlimited options for apps and distractions, not to mention the privacy and security risks. If we had to start over with technological development, I wouldn’t wish it into existence for the general consumer. Feel free to disagree.
But there was one big wrong that trumped all others: centralization. You might have heard this one before. Dictatorships bad. Billionaires bad. What let the realization drop for me that this also applied to technology as a whole is actually my journey into Mastodon. With decentralization built-in, admittedly I found myself directionless for a while. The idea of having freedom of association with different instances sounded great but it was very disorienting, making me only consume Youtube and Netflix for a while (though without using their algorithms to suggest what I watch). I was already sitting at home with burnout so I was looking for a purposeful challenge so I continued. And then I realized something: in the current technological composite of our lives, we are being conditioned to not be intentional.
In every part of our life, adding convenience (which used to be hard in my parents time) is now incredibly easy. And this easiness is precisely what amplified the feeling of purposeless and being unfocused during my burnout, making me seek more passive engagement, reinforcing my own conditioning. The convenience is abusive.
And therein lies my reason. Smartphones are the conditioning that causes abusive convenience to occur the most. They are the center point of work and pleasure, always there, always ready to pick up where I left off. Never quite intentional, but all my life conveniently centralized around the phone, and I will get into how to get around this in a second. It’s just you have understand:
Centralized = bad, and smartphones = centralized, so smartphones = bad.
I had to tell you before we get into the next section. The why is what got me through these first 2 weeks, after all.
A smartphone-less lifestyle
The secret is simple: split the tool into independent parts (decentralizing the technology). So what do I mean with this? Well you can see below. This section I decided to do with a table for straight information about the steps I took to make my phone redundant.
| With the smartphone (Android) | Without the smartphone | Description | Details about why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whatsapp Android through Waydroid | On a low/mid-end Laptop with Fedora | Whatsapp unfortunately has a mobile dependency. You cannot only use Whatsapp Web without having the mobile app. This was my best solution. Waydroid works decent though not perfect but I installed it with only 1 command on Fedora. Install Instructions | Waydroid | |
| Signal | Signal Android through Waydroid | On a low/mid-end Laptop with Fedora | Signal unfortunately also has a mobile dependency: you cannot only use desktop app without having the mobile app. Waydroid works decent though not perfect but I installed it with only 1 command on Fedora. Install Instructions | Waydroid |
| Calendar app | Physical calendar | A ~20 centimeters long paper calendar with a per-week view, a section for notes and a to-do list. | The older generations still do it. It’s not as hard as I thought. I appreciate the silent visual reminder of the paper display on my desk, and I can look at it without having to turn it on and seeing all kinds of other notifications and distractions. |
| Status bar & lock screen clock on Android | Watch | An extremely cheap watch that is child-sized. | Watches are extremely accurate nowadays and I just put mine in my pocket because I don’t like the look nor the feeling on my wrist. The battery lasts long and are cheap to get. |
| Banking app | Website of my bank | A web-app on my Fedora laptop | I stopped using NFC on my phone before so I’m already used to carrying a debit card or cash. And logging into my bank website is possible with a Digipas, which is a physical bank authentication device that is common in my country (NL) among older generations. It is an extremely simple and dumb device that converts a 6 digits number you input into an output in order to authenticate you based on a secret token. All countries have some kind of legacy method to log into your bank without Android or iOS, because old people exist. |
| Calling and SMS app | Nokia 3210 4G (2024) | €75 simple device for calling and SMS | 4G capable, fits my existing nano-SIM nicely. It is important for me to have a functional calling device because if I need to be called at any moment, I can put it in my pocket or backpack. Otherwise, I leave it at home. It also allows me to audit the sent telemetry in plain-text via a menu and their privacy policy is decent: HMD Privacy Portal |
| Contact app | Physical address book | A cheap ~10 centimeters big address book with A-Z sorting, fields for name, address, place, email, and 2 phone numbers. | Another thing the older generations still do, although a bit rarer since most dumb calling devices store contacts now. It is really decentralized since adding someone to your contact list can be done without any distractions that are a swipe away. |
| DigiD (Digital ID authentication app in my country) | The website | I 2FA my DigiD login through SMS now, which I used to do through the app | Older generation etc etc…I’m gonna stop listing things now because I’m tired but I probably forgot to list a few things. |
I now no longer use a smartphone for 2 weeks and counting, and will continue this exploration and see where it gets me. You might get an update in a few months to see if I still managed to keep it up and what I felt about it. Currently I still struggle with stress, attention and energy deficits but I felt a significant boost in resilience and feeling independent so far. I’m going on a vacation with friends upcoming summer holiday so there might definitely be some learning experiences there.
