Why Didn't You Just Get a Flip Phone?

Things that happened when I traded in my smart phone

I did not expect to be so moved by this phone, but something happened the first time I sat down in front of my mirror to put on makeup and did not have my iPhone within arms reach. I would usually put on a podcast¹ and listen to a conversation about optimization, or what people have had it with, or how to run my author business. Full disclosure, my iphone is next door in my sister’s house if I need to use it. The plan is that I will be allowed to use it for publication day and recording audio, but my main communication device is now only capable of texts, calls, and alarms. I feel this surprising uprising of elation. It’s expansive, like deep exhales coming out of my chest.

I’ve included this snaggled pinky nail in lieu of a typo

I’m free.

I go to the mall with my sister and daughter. My sister, Trish used to work at Sephora and has developed a tradition of buying the moms a bar of fancy soap from one of their luxury skin care brands for Christmas.

I’m standing at an end-cap and smelling things when my daughter, Karli looks me up and down and tells me I look “cunty.” I ask her to repeat herself just to be sure I heard right. I know from past experience that these words that sound like insults to my wizened old ears are in fact magical charms that she’s passing up to me.

“It means you look really cool.”

I look down at my outfit to confirm that it is in fact cunty and also ask the sales guy if he uses the word cunty to tell someone he likes their look. He says that he does but would never use it in public or towards his mom. Well, his mom is probably not as cunty as me, so that’s her loss.

After making my purchases, I wait for Trish to finish buying bath salts and connecting with her old coworkers. I just stand there and stare at people. It’s a new thing to not pull out my phone like a pacifier.

Trish has to stop at Vons and get Oatmilk on the way home from the mall, so I wait in the car with Karli. I once again don’t pull my phone out. My sore arm is getting the rest it needs.

I’m excited to show my phone to everyone at work, but almost no one is excited for me. I take it for granted that everyone reads Like a Normal Person and knows how I’ve been struggling with phone addiction. I take it for granted that everyone struggles with phone addiction themselves. 

While I’m on break I get a text from Brittany that says, “It just dawned on me that you spent $300 on that calculator.”

I try to answer her with voice-to-text because texting on this phone is almost impossible. Everyone around me is talking and ruining it. The phone picks up everything they say and turns it into text, so I give up and send a message that says, “I don’t have.”

What I want to tell her is that I don’t even have a calculator on this phone. I bought a bigger purse yesterday. There are a lot of things that I feel like I’m going to have to carry around now that I don’t have my iPhone. I want to get a planner, the paper kind that I can write my work schedule in, along with important dates and tidbits of information, a book, a flashlight, a calculator, for christ’s sake, a camera—a good one or maybe I’ll switch back to using 35 mm. I keep thinking I need to buy an iPad so I can still have apps, and then I have to slap myself in the brain because I’m missing the point when I think these thoughts.

I check my phone in the bathroom at work. I get my first text from the family thread and there are no problems. It doesn’t come through in five different threads the way I imagined it would. I can’t check my email.

I’m free.

On day 2 without my iPhone, I pull out my clunky old laptop to check my email. I discover that a nazi visited my Substack overnight and made a comment with a link to a url with a racist epitaph. I get a little panicked that being disconnected means not being able to monitor this stuff so I can remove it ASAP.

As the morning progresses, I discover yesterday’s elation has disappeared and been replaced by dread. I’ve lost a limb. Hell. I’ve lost a universe. I’m cut off from everything. I’ve banished myself from going to the place where everyone is hanging out. My phone is mostly silent. It’s as though I don’t exist. I’m getting ready to go to my aunt’s house for Christmas Eve Eve Eve and despite the promise of family and love and Carrie’s hot tub, I am overwhelmed with despair. I was originally going to ride alone, but the thought of just me and the tiny Dumb Phone is unbearable. It would be like sitting next to a televised golf tournament. I tell Trish and Karli I’ve changed my mind and am willing to stop in Little Tokyo with them. I wanted to avoid shopping and holiday travel traffic, but now it’s more important that I stay close to people. This is a time of deep loss.

I keep getting these urges to pick up my phone and look at it. I keep wanting to open up my camera. I’ve had this feeling of digital image waste. These bags I’m carrying from device to device. They aren’t with me but somewhere in space: something for my kid to put in her cloud when I die. I have thousands of pictures of my cats, of myself, of an interesting conversation I’ve turned into a screenshot. This is my second day of not adding to the pile. It’s strange to not be taking pictures.

We sit in the middle of the Little Tokyo mall and eat our steamed buns and watch the crowds of shoppers. There are a lot more large shoes here than there are in Ventura. Tiny people are walking on two inches of sole with the rest of the shoe being this bulbous monstrosity. A man walks past in a shoe that looks like a cloven hoove, like he is Satan, like this man is half beast risen from hell and forgot to change into his human feet. I feel like a country bumpkin in Little Tokyo. The devil doesn’t shop in our beachy little podunk town.

I’m sitting in the back seat of my own car after our shopping excursion is over. I have two library books, two journals, and a pen. I have to carry more diversions and tools now. The sun is behind us as we head down the 210 toward Carrie’s house. It’s shining in just the way that I know would make a great backlit selfie. I don’t fight an urge to open up my phone camera because I don’t even have a phone camera anymore. I ride the compulsion and feel it’s strength. The selfie groove is well worn in my brain. I just have to exist here behind this face, not knowing what it looks like, no visual capture of the moment.

Karli starts talking about what a piece of shit Elvis was for marrying a teenager. He had a taste for virgins. We are in the part of the drive where the landscape becomes desolate. Billboards for Larry H. Parker are interspersed between the homogenous shopping centers. Marshall’s, Home Goods, Costco, Starbucks, repeat.

“It feels like we’ve been in the car for weeks,” Trish says. She’s sitting shotgun and tasked with the job of keeping Karli entertained while she drives my stereo-less Honda. We have hit the inevitable holiday traffic.

“Why did you make me drive in the traffic when you love it?” Karli asks. She’s referring to an earlier proclamation that driving a stick in traffic doesn’t bother me. I have my head down deep in my journal and don’t respond.

“She’s checked out. May as well have a phone in her hand,” Trish answers for me. There is a two-against-one dynamic at play.

“Funny thing is I’m writing down everything you’re saying.” I give them a loud self-satisfied laugh. This whole thing is what I did instead of taking a selfie.

I keep getting this reaction from people about my new little phone that that’s what they should get for their kids. Phones are bad for kids and we wonder what it’s doing to their brains, but what about ourselves? This feels like the most powerful choice I’ve made in regards to my own self-care since I quit drinking. I’m getting back more of this experience that is uniquely mine, that is not being fed to me by an algorithm. I wake up every morning to what is here. I do not take the portal to hell. I sit with my cats and drink coffee with my phantom limb. I’m both at peace and also confused by the fact that there is no longer a camera/TV/library/calculator/flashlight at the end of my arm.

I look at Morticia curled up on my leg like a cinnamon roll and take an invisible picture that no one else but me will ever see.

1. The phone can play podcasts, but I didn’t know how to enable that feature until I had the phone for four days. I thought maybe I had bought the wrong version of the dumb phone and resigned myself to a life without podcasts for those days and into eternity.