Unplugging

Or: Realizing that it was a mistake to so quickly adopt new technologies

Version 1.0.0 - July 31, 2024

What went wrong?

One morning in the early spring of 2024, I had a devastating realization on my way home from the gym. Of course, like most gymgoers, I would bring my smartphone and headphones in order to sufficiently tune out from the realities of public space in order to get my workout done. It was this morning, 90% the way through my 20-minute drive home from the gym, that I realized I left my phone on one of the machines.

“Screw it,” I said to myself, “I don’t use the thing much anyway, it will be nice to have it out of my life for a few hours. I’ll just call them when I get home and have them hold on to it for me.” And I kept on driving. But seconds later, the shattering realization that I would need my phone for the 2-factor authentication in order to log on to work that morning had me turning around to make the journey back. “Never again,” I said to myself this time. Investing so much of my life into a single point of failure device was no longer tenable for me.

In thinking about this experience, it unfolded itself into much greater implications than those merely related to my workplace’s 2FA, or whether or not I should be giving half my attention to the phone and the other half to working out, but about what the purpose of having a smart phone on me at all times was in the first place. What does a smart phone do after all? Does it perhaps do too much?

    After having reviewed a list similar to that, it occured to me two things:
  1. I'm using my phone for too many things, and it is a single point of failure with potentially disasterous consequences
  2. I don't actually need many of these things, and they may in fact not be good for me

While my journey towards simplifying my life was already well on the way by this point, I realized that I still had a lot of work to do. And that, in simplifying my life, the automatic minimilist answer of having fewer things was not really going to cut it here. It would be better, in fact, to compartmentalize many of these functions rather than having them all in one place, and to do away with some others entirely.

This stands in contrast to the usual cases of my deciding to stop using any given technology or service. In the case of social media, it was just because it was a waste of time, bad for my mental health, and playing into my attention span to keep me hooked on the algorithms. When I quit calorie counting, it was because of food-logging fatigue and realizing that it was just as effective to make certain general rules pertaining to my diet that I could stay 80% on top of, rather than having to be perfect all the time. The case for the smartphone was a little different. It wasn't so much that having a smartphone was causing me an emotional drain, or making my life harder, but rather because it did the opposite. My life and organization was far too dependent on having the smartphone on me at all times.

Since then, my EDC has gotten a little larger. My main phone now is a flip phone. I can recieve and transmit calls and texts, and take photos with it (additionally it has a wi-fi hotspot, and I've loaded dozens of albums onto it so I can use it as a music player - I have sinced stopped using music streaming). I've also traded my wireless earbuds in for a wired pair. I don't always need to be tuning out from reality. As much as it might be more comfortable to be able to shut out the cruddy music they play over the gym speakers, it seems now an unneccessary commodity. It also makes it way less awkward when you don't have to pull headphones out of your ears to tell some Karen asking you how many sets you have left to go away (but when you're not distracted with a phone, it's much less like to happen anyway). I don't use headphones that much anymore, but it's nice not having to make sure the ones I have are always charged.

In addition, I keep a low-end Samsung smartphone (I gave my nice Google Pixel phone to my mom) on me sometimes. It remains turned off, and I've installed an unlocked firmware on it and disabled any telemetry to Samsung or Google. I can browse the web with it or use messaging apps using the wi-fi hotspot on my flip phone, and use GPS navigation with the Organic Maps app. Besides these connection-dependent functions, basic utilities (many redundant with the flip phone), and the dreaded work 2FA, I don't use it much and it stays home most of the time.

Ask yourself not just what technologies you have that are making your life worse, affecting your mental health, or wasting your time, but ask also which ones you've become too dependent on. Are they just bloat that has snuck its way into your daily life? Do they make you dumber, make your memory, your sense of navigation, your gut instinct worse? What are you outsourcing to your daily technology that you'd be better (smarter, happier, more competent) for just doing yourself? And finally what ways could the organizations providing the utilities that you use be abusing your data and privacy...?