Breaking my Year of Smart Phone Celibacy

Gain the world and lose yourself.

Historically, my use of social media has mostly been an attempt to get the attention of a man and make him have a crush on me. Aside from using it to lure readers to my blog in 2010, this year marks the first time I logged in with the intention to bring a spotlight to my creative work. My current Facebook page was originally a fake that a friend and I made in 2009 when the guy I was seeing jumped into a new relationship and then blocked me from being able to see his profile.

The local dive bar didn’t have its own page so we stole its identity and immediately started friending anyone in the bar scene who might not want to share their lives with us. From then on, I had this page where I could spy on any people I didn’t know, including the guy and his new girlfriend who I spied on even after they broke up and he got back together with me.

Sometimes, even now that the dude and the bars are so far removed from my life, I have urges to check in and see what she’s up to and how she’s aging. I’m bummed that her profile is private, and she blocked mine from viewing hers after I used the page to confess that it was a fake.

My Instagram tagline currently says, “Here for the wrong reasons” because I restarted it after a long hiatus in the winter of my discontent when I was newly sober, newly single and thought I might use it to pick up men. There was one guy who was interested in me, but it became too much pressure to chat in DMs with a photo of a man and also to look through his photos at headshots of various girls. Who were they? No context. Cute girls or pretty women? I don’t know. I wasn’t even attracted to him. I was just attracted to the idea that he might be attracted to me.

The culmination of all of this was me quitting my smart phone last December. I didn’t do it as a gimmick or experiment. I quit because if there is a kind of person who abuses social media; I am her. When a friend told me that I was posting too many pictures of my cats and that it was going to scare the men away, I made a cat-specific Instagram so I could post away and not feel self-conscious and she could either choose to follow it or not, but I didn’t want to hear about it anymore.

I also have a weight-loss Instagram page where me and a few friends did diet progress check-ins with pictures of our bodies and the scales and what we were eating at various weights. I used that specific account to follow other accounts with weight loss before and after pictures. I knew every time a new photo was posted with the hashtag, beforeandafterweightloss.

I write this and wonder if this is an example of me not being able to be normal with a thing that everyone else is doing fine at, but I know from the experience of writing and getting responses from readers, that whenever I confess an abnormality or something about me that has been feeling like a festering wound. I am not alone. Everyone is probably having a weird time with it, too. At least the people who comment, anyway.

I’ve had guardrails on my Instagram use for the last year because of the dumb phone I’ve been using. When I say that the new phone changed my life, I mean that it gave me the mental space and sense of purpose that guided me to writing and publishing a whole book.

I didn’t intend for my Quitting of the iPhone to be for just a year, but my Light Phone II died for good on the almost anniversary of the day I got it.

And for the last month, my social media use has been completely off the rails. I make this allowance with the idea that I’m using it to get more eyes on the book. Since I have no money for a new Light Phone or marketing, and I sold through almost all the books I had for direct sales, I decide to fire up the old iPhone. This will finally be me using the platforms as one of their winners. I’ll sell, sell, sell for my author-career—not for spying or being obsessive about my body.

All the reasons I quit are still there. They didn’t go away. I know it can be just as addictive and as much of a time-suck as alcohol. It is not completely malevolent, though. It does connect people who might not have ever met without it. It does make you feel less alone, and sometimes can inspire you to go to a place you may have never known existed. It is not bad or good. It just is.

I can moderate.

It becomes my new thing to post funny dumb videos. The proudest one is a short drama I made about my cat and her crush on the cat who lives next door.

I post every day for a month because my marketing gurus say the algorithms prefer a regular poster. They watch your activity and want to make sure your account is engaged with other accounts.

When money starts coming in (not from book sales but from my second job), I start to be able to afford Amazon ads. I learn how to tweak them and research the kind of changes that can be made to convert ad-clicks to sales. I decide I need an author photo where I look less dorky and more attractive.

I consider hiring a professional photographer to take the new photos, but that feels out of budget considering the cost of my ads campaign is 150% of sales. This is no way to run a business.

I would say that the day I choose for the photo shoot is unseasonably hot, but Christmas in L.A. is usually hot. It’s 82 degrees when my sister, daughter and I arrive at the Huntington Library. There’s a sign at the entrance that reads, “No Photo Shoots.”

When I first planned this trip, I thought what a relaxing thing it will be to stroll the garden with Trish and Karli on my one day off and just look at interesting plants, flowers, art, architecture and people. My marketing brain stepped in and said, ‘Also use the day to take a new photo where you aren’t wearing tight pants and a boxy blazer.’

The thing is that trying to take author photos in my favorite garden kind of ruins the experience of my favorite garden.

I have to remind myself to relax about getting the shot. I’m not looking at plants so much as I’m looking at how the light comes through the trees and lands on Trish's and Karli’s faces—not so I can personally admire their beauty, but so that I can use that light as an element in my portrait. I make them stop in spots where I think I’ll look good in a photo. I am the only one over forty who is doing this. The rest of the illegal photo shoots in the garden are between young friends or lovers. Girls in their 20s in feminine garden dresses. Doing that one pose where they turn to the side and lift up one heel. Trish keeps getting a finger in the photo and framing it so that my full body is the subject and it’s not until we are almost out of light that I tell her to step back and zoom in. We get the shot just before sunset.

We go to Little Tokyo afterwards to eat steamed buns and people-watch. It’s too close to what we did last year when I first got the Light Phone and found myself enthralled with my own capability for observing the outside world.

I sit on the bench and look through the shots from the day’s photo shoot. I make Karli choose her favorites. I gather us around the screen. We unanimously decide on this photo:

My hair is a little razzy, and my posture is weird, but we are all amateurs, and this is supposed to be fun.

There is an element to all of the visual media that triggers the storyteller in me and has me composing videos and photos the way I like to compose my letters and stories, but I’m not as good at it. Furthermore, I don’t want to be. I’m at the end of the one month experiment in being all-in on social media and here are the results that can be quantified:

When I started, I had 313 followers on Instagram and now I have 320. My Instagram reel with the most views was played 500 times and is just me sharing ugly photos from my Spartan race. My TikTok had 43 in the beginning and now I have 90 followers. The most popular video is of me trying and failing to do a pull-up. It seems people on social media are mostly into my fitness journey. Same, though. Truly, same.

I don't think this is proof that those platforms don’t work for accumulating readers. I think it just proves that I’m not great at it, and I also don’t have a desire to be a better short video creator. I am only just beginning to learn what works for my “brand” and what doesn’t. Getting any of it to work means I start molding myself to what pleases the crowd. It means that I spend my precious dish-washing daydream time coming up with ways to be popular.

This is what I call losing the plot.

This post isn’t going to conclude with me quitting all the sites. I do think that the way that they have sucked my attention away from the writing and made my newsletter worse is proof enough that I don’t want to continue to use them in the ways the marketing gurus recommend. Some mornings, it feels like it takes an act of God to keep my hand from picking up the phone and scrolling.

What I know for sure is that one year with the dumb phone culminated in the publication of my first book, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I know that moderation of anything that stimulates the dopaminergic response is nearly impossible for me. I am done beating myself up or putting in any kind of moral judgment about what I should or should not be able to control. That is why I’ve ordered the latest (brilliant) device from Dumb Wireless and expect my Barbie phone to arrive in a week.

Does this post read like a paid advertisement?

It’s not.

Also, check out my podcast interview where I talk about Like a Normal Person with Josh Gandee from the No Proof Podcast.

Why Didn't You Just Get a Flip Phone?