Last week, Rhik’s attempt to get off his phone made some progress as he met a woman he’s romantically interested in. Will it last?
Monday
I’m dog-sitting with my friend Tom. Let’s chew the fat, I say, the way people did before phones. “About what?” he replies. I hadn’t thought this far ahead.
What was the hundred years war? I eventually manage. How could a war last a hundred years? Tom offers to look it up. I throw up my hands. I was trying to revive the lost art of conversation. “This isn’t a conversation,” he says, already on his phone. “It was a series of Anglo-French conflicts in the Middle Ages. They actually lasted more than a hundred years.”
The decline of conversation is often blamed on Google, and the ability to fact-check anything in seconds. But Tom actually uses DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t collect user data. Results aren’t quite as relevant as Google, he explains, but inconvenience is a small price to pay for privacy. I’m not so sure.
Tuesday
Keeping Dr Bishop’s mantra in mind – “what gets measured, gets managed” – I decide to start my day with a walk in the park. Instead of scrolling in bed wasting the morning, I want to walk 10,000 steps a day. Forty-five minutes in the morning, then 45 to close my working day. I buy an alarm clock, so I can leave my phone charging in another room at night. I give my phone a “bed time” when I plug it in – I can still use it after this time, but I have to go to it.
Wednesday
My offline friend E has, in his words, “reinvented the mixtape”. He hands me a digital radio, which he has pre-loaded with 5,000 curated songs on a memory disc, to be played at random. This is light years away from Spotify where, in the face of unlimited choice, I often blank and play the last album I listened to again. The thing about convenience is, it’s sometimes nice not to choose.
I’m reading more in the daytime. A good book is more nourishing to me than most of the content on my phone. But reading is more work than scrolling, and by the evening, it’s hard to resist the siren call. I stay up late watching TV, so I can remain in the room with the plugged-in phone in it, standing over it like a weirdo.
Thursday
Knowing my phone is out of reach, my senses wake up differently. The objects in my room swim into clarity, and I have a strange feeling of being returned to my life.
But it’s not a fairytale. Many of the objects in my room look tired, unglamorous. I have the heavy sense of being a person in a place, anchored to circumstance. This is the lumpen reality beneath the infinite fantasy of our phones. I don’t love it. My screen time creeps up again.
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Friday
I have lost no work checking my emails twice a day; in fact it’s made me more productive. I don’t want to check in twice a day with texts though. Part of the joy of messaging is repartee, the back-and-forth banter. I can’t conference call my friends to do this. But checking in feels administrative. I still can’t think of a way to be on my phone less, without losing the sparky daily contact with my friends.
Saturday
I’ve been speaking every day on the phone with Almond, my new dating interest. I’m not as funny as on text. I also don’t have to be, which is a revelation.
Sunday
Things are going well. My social media use has dropped to about 90 minutes a day. Morning walking has replaced scrolling. I buy a pedometer, and determine to leave my phone at home.
There is hardly a second of my day in which I’m not stimulated, I’ve realised. On my walk, I listen to podcasts. In the shower, I listen to music. Doing my shopping, I wear noise-cancelling headphones. The artificial silence is created of anti-phase sound waves, pumped into my ear to cancel out the real world.
We haven’t had smartphones very long, yet it’s impossible to remember who we were without them. I find that amnesia disturbing. I suppose this is the way of all paradigm shifts. It’s not just how we do things that changes. It’s how we conceive of things at all. This loops in friendship, relationships, work and leisure, but most far-reaching of all, our sense of ourselves.
As Price promised, this now becomes the question underpinning everything. Who am I without distraction, and what is my life for? I honestly have no idea. And so I devise one final, make or break experiment, that will give me an answer.
Next week: Rhik goes to the woods.
