Why It's Basically Impossible to Not Have a Smartphone

Plus: 10 Tips for Breaking Free from Smartphone Dependence

“Dumbified” Home Screen on my iPhone using the Dumb Phone app

I’ll start with the conclusion: the dumb phone did not work out for me. In this article, I’ll share about why, and after, I’ll give a few quick tips for anyone hoping to break free from smartphone addition and intrusion.

Switching from a smartphone to a dumb phone — a basic mobile phone with two basic functions: talking and texting — came with an immediate sense of empowerment and freedom. I felt free from the constant gravitational pull of my smartphone and its many addictive apps. I felt hopeful that finally, I would regain all that lost time spent getting sucked into it all. While the smartphone keeps me connected to others and conveniently combines many useful tools, such as a calendar, notes, credit cards, maps, and all the things we all actually find useful, it also presents an effortless pathway into utter time wastage: playing all the New York Times word games while on the toilet, constantly scratching my curiosity itch with Google searches the moment I wonder about something (e.g. “What’s the difference between a rip current and a rip tide?”), shopping for a missing screw for my daughter’s music stand on Amazon, obsessively looking for a good deal on a portable power station on Facebook Marketplace … all in undisciplined, unplanned moments that add up to literal hours each day.

Within a few days of switching, I realized that nobody actually calls me or texts me in the conventional sense. Very few people, aside from scammers, dial me up on my actual phone. And likewise, I dial out to very few people unless I’m in the car. As for texting, getting messages was hit and miss depending on how they were sent — group iMessage chats weren’t coming to me at all. In other words, the way I stay in touch with most people, most of the time, is via apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, and Apple’s device-dependent Messages. Why people even have phone numbers today is kind of a mystery now that I think about it.

For about two weeks, I stuck it out with the dumb phone, leaving my iPhone in the studio and stubbornly carrying around my silent brick-with-buttons—but of my communication had to happen from a computer or my WiFi-connected iPhone. While not exactly useful for many modern-day communication functions, the dumb phone did give me a sense of contactability, sort of like a lifeline, or the rope that free divers use when submerging hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the ocean. It gave me the courage to live my life without the Internet constantly tucked into my hip pocket.

And this is where something changed for me. The dumb phone wasn’t a useful tool in the end, but it was a powerful symbol, a symbol of taking action on a desire I’ve had for years — to escape the powerful gravitational pull of my smartphone, a pull that was not based on its most useful features, but of its most time-stealing ones. Buying the phone and writing about it, doing it in front of my family (my kids thought I was crazy, my wife thought I was becoming geriatric before my time) made me more intentional about how I use devices to stay in touch and perform daily tasks.

Last week, we went camping near Tofino, BC. It’s far: it takes about 8 hours with stops, including an hour-and-a-half ferry ride to get there from where we live. I knew it only made sense to switch back to the iPhone for all the travelling things it helps with, namely Google Maps and our electronic ferry tickets. But as a family we still committed ourselves to a device-free trip. Our girls left their devices at home. I even committed to not falling asleep to podcasts the entire trip — something I’ve depended on for over a decade. Aside from using the camera and my running apps to plan some routes, I didn’t really use my phone at all. Okay, that’s not entirely true: I had some urgent emails come in that I had to attend to for about an hour — which is confirmation that smartphones are too intrusive. But aside from that blip, my phone was really just a handy tool.

I switched back to the dumb phone when we returned but soon gave up on it. It just wasn’t a useful tool for my life and the way people get in touch with me. In defeat, I removed the SIM card and slid it back into my iPhone. I’m not going to lie: I felt a sort of “wholeness” being restored when the “NO SIM CARD” indication changed to my mobile carrier name. Not true wholeness, but more like the relief I imagine an addict feels when they get a much-delayed hit.

Still, this whole project has changed my relationship to my phone. I don’t want it in my life in the same way anymore. As much as I can, I leave the phone in my studio or in one of my landing spots in the house. I’ve successfully weaned myself from falling asleep to podcasts. I don’t take my phone to the toilet with me. I read books in the morning instead of checking the news, or playing Wordle, or whatever else I would mindlessly turn to upon waking up.

Removing colour from iOS makes it far less interesting to me. Fortunately these settings do not carry over to CarPlay, meaning your driving directions will still be in colour.

But I took things a step further: I dumbified my iPhone as much as I could. I installed an app called Dumbphone, which does its best to make the iPhone as boring as possible. It lets me choose just 7 essential apps to present on my home screen in plain text, white on a black background. In actuality, Apple has made it impossible to truly strip back their phones to more basic functionality, but just having these basic options (Messages, Calendar, Photos, Phone, Maps and Notes) instead of jewel-like icons has made me more aware of my choices when I open my phone. All my other apps are buried in a less visual way, available through various swipes and gestures, but not in immediately-visible panels of icons. The dp app is fine, but it does cost a subscription fee, which I find preposterous. I paid the one-month fee of $4.99 as a trial. If I really like using it, I could continue on with a more reasonable $12 yearly fee, or buy it outright for $34. (The latter option is tempting but would take me over 3 years to be better value than the yearly option, and who knows if it will even be relevant so far into the future?). Either way, to make my phone even less appealing, I set the entire OS to be greyscale. It’s surprising how much less interesting my phone is to me without pops of colour.

The truth is, I need certain apps to survive as a freelancer—namely Instagram—and there are other apps (such as Facebook for using Marketplace)that I do find immensely useful sometimes, even if most of the time they simply tempt me to waste my time. What I’d really like to have is the ability to partition my phone into at least two clear profiles—Business and Personal—that I can switch between depending on what I should be focusing on at the moment.

While for now I’m much better at managing my smartphone usage and staying away from the biggest time sucks, the fact is that just having it available to me means that I’m always at risk of getting sucked back in. Just having the phone around, being subconsciously aware of its potential, creates an extra background process in my mind. This is perhaps the biggest difference between smartphone and dumb phone life that I have observed. When your phone simply doesn’t do all the smartphone things, that part of your brain that constantly depends on it, or takes its presence for granted, becomes fully yours again. There is a small but prominent piece of my brain that seems to reserve itself for the potentiality of my iPhone. It’s like a background process taking up energy and computing power, just waiting for an opportunity for the Phone to take over or fulfil a whim.

While I was still using my dumbphone, that background process was still there, but any time I had a trigger event, such as having a question I could usually have Googled, or suddenly needing to order more printer paper on Amazon — this process was thwarted. There was no pathway for the whim to become realized. I’ve been wired over the years to simply extend my desires or curiosity out through the little magic rectangle, instantly and without really thinking it through. As long as I have a smartphone nearby, with this potentiality, this little background process in my brain will take extra resources, and even more to resist it.

In conclusion, even though I couldn’t last two weeks without a smartphone, this experiment of switching to a dumb phone has changed my relationship to my phone and has made me more intentional. It has been a success. In the longterm I hope to find a better solution than just rearranging menus on my iPhone. In the meantime, I will be more like a recovering addict who must make the choice every day, in each moment, to do the right thing.

10 Tips for Breaking Free from Smartphone Addiction and Intrusion

1. Don’t carry your phone around the home with you. If it is physically attached (or nearby) to your person, it is mentally attached to your brain. Leave it in a designated landing spot, such as in a kitchen nook or by your keys.

2. Don’t bring your phone to bed with you. This is common wisdom at this point. Learn to fall asleep with your own thoughts.

3. Don’t go on your phone when you first wake up. Own your mornings and your own thoughts. Look outside a window, read a book or magazine, unload the dishwasher, check the mailbox, or journal. There are so many productive, calming things people do when they wake up that do not involve a phone.

4. Reduce the amount of apps on your home screen to just 7 or fewer. I have Messages, Calendar, Photos, Phone, Maps and Notes. Try a minimalist app like Dumb Phone.

5. Make your most tempting apps unavailable. Set Screentime limits if you have it. Remove icons from your homescreens (without deleting the apps). Or if you can swing it, just delete the apps from your phone.

6. Do not use your phone for email. You don’t need to check your emails when you’re away from your desktop or laptop. Email is not meant to be instant messaging. It can wait.

7. Set your phone’s colour filter to black and white. In iOS, go to Settings, swipe down on the app home page to reveal the search, type in “color filters”, and enable “Color Filters”.

8. Disable notifications on as many apps as you possibly can.

9. Carry around a notebook or sketchbook. This is especially useful if you’re a frequent note-taker, but it’s also a good replacement “fidget” for anyone in the m mindless, compulsive habit of phone-checking (we all do it).

10. Extreme tip: Do the Dumb Phone Experiment. Purchase an affordable dumb phone (new or used) and see what happens when you reduce your phone’s functionality to just Talking and Texting. Perhaps you’ll learn more about your phone addiction — and your phone’s true usefulness to you — this way more than by any other means.

Thank you for reading my thoughts on phone-dumbification. I don’t know this isn’t exactly illustration related, but it is definitely freelance artist-adjacent. Of course, I’m curious to know your own experiences trying to reduce your dependence on smart phones. What are some tips you can offer me or others looking to do the same? Please let us know in the comments.

—TF