I Got a Dumb Phone.

8 Things I Learned by Switching Back to a Regular Cell Phone

AGM M9 “Rugged Basic Cell Phone”, available on Amazon.

The older I get, the worse my short-term memory, and the easier it is for me to stray off whatever path I set out on. We probably all experience this with our phones: you intend to do just one, innocent task, such as check a message from your mom or set an alarm for the next morning. But the next thing you know, 15 minutes has passed and you’re shopping for portable power stations on Facebook Marketplace. (The particulars here may be different depending on the reader).

As my girls are getting older, they’re observing their parents constantly on their phones. Of course, as responsible adults, we can justify the screen time: we’re doing our banking, staying on top of the news, making plans with friends. While perhaps a middle ager is more likely to use a phone responsibly than an adolescent, to the phoneless observer, it all looks the same: person absorbed with their magic rectangle, and otherwise not paying attention to the real life around it.

My wife and I have so far not given in to the pressure to let our kids have smartphones. Currently we are sticking with one rule: no smartphones until they’re 16. And we’re not alone in our cautiousness. But it’s getting harder to convince them that we’re any better, as our phones hover at our sides all day, every where we go. It’s also unthinkable to them to accept our only concession: they can have a dumb phone without data if they want. So I decided to lead the charge.

I purchased the cheapest dumb phone I could find on Amazon — about $70 CAD. It arrived this week. It does exactly two things: talk and text. There are no apps, no games, and no keyboard. Here is my experience, and some things I’ve learned, in the first couple of days:

Using a Dumb Phone Again

1. It’s really dumb. You can’t do anything but talk and text on it (okay, it has a certifiably terrible camera and a mildly useful flashlight, but those don’t count).

2. You can’t easily import contacts from your iPhone to a dumb phone. I had to manually enter in all the phone numbers that were important to me. Keep in mind that this is all done with an old-school alphanumeric keypad.

3. I don’t know anyone’s phone number besides my own, except my wife’s.

4. Texting sucks. Texting with predictive text takes some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it’s actually kind of quick. Doing proper sentence case though? Forget about it.

5. It’s quiet. Not the ringtones, but the activity. With zero apps on the phone and very few people who actually text me using Messages, I had a very slow phone day. One person texted me all day, and it was in response to my outgoing text to my friends that I was no longer reachable by WhatsApp.

6. I started reading a book. I think this is directly related to not having a phone to keep me preoccupied in the in-betweens.

7. So many things rely on me having an iPhone. Our wi-fi connected speakers. Some of our lights around the home. Passkeys and two-factor authentication. Social media for work purposes. Figuring out how to fix my daughter’s bike. Falling asleep to podcasts, as is my habit.

8. I have to carry a wallet with me again. I got so used to having tap on my phone and tucking my driver’s license in my phone’s clear case, that I almost forgot where I left it.

By the end of the first day, though, I felt a sort of tranquility. I was cooking dinner, listening to jazz, and while I was waiting for things to cook, I read a book.

Then, later, I brought my phone in to do something. I can’t even remember what, but within minutes I was doing an “innocent task” but feeling agitated because people were trying to talk to me while I was clearly doing an important task. My wife made a comment about not even being able to last one day. I replied that it’s going to be a bumpy start.

After just a couple of days now, I am both eager to keep weaning myself off of my smartphone and uncertain it’s going to work out. Smartphones have entangled themselves into our lives in such a complex way that it’s hard to imagine being totally free from them, unless I want to pull away from mainstream society. As a recovering Evangelical, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is the mark of the beast mentioned in the book of Revelation: “… no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast”.

I think one of the most striking realizations so far is just how many notifications we get. Even if you’re like me and disable most notifications in your Settings, we still get a lot of them, and it’s unnatural. My friends and family know I’m the worst at responding to their messages right away; it’s usually because they’re just one of many, and they all look the same on my phone. And they usually come while I’m doing something else. Now, with this recent experiment, I’m realizing this doesn’t make me a bad person — I might be the most sane of everyone I know.

Tech companies want us to think we need their apps and devices — and we’ve gone along with them to the point where we kind of do — but at what cost? In some ways, they make our lives better. Individual apps and features can be highly useful. But because they all come at once through our phones, our attention is being sucked away from the real world and into the device in our hand. And it always looks the same: person absorbed with their magic rectangle.