Going Phoneless
Ditching your smartphone is (mostly) possible, and will make you feel so much better.
I’ve gone Phoneless. I still own an iPhone 14, but I mostly don’t use it. It lives on a charger by my front door and I only use it a few times a week to do things that sadly still require it.
So far the results have been great. I’m more present with the people around me, I read more books, I make less dumb impulse purchases on Amazon, and I’m blissfully unaware of whatever misleading and inconsequential outrage the ad-funded news media wants to distract me with. I think it’s also making it easier for my kids to detach from their screens.
Some people asked me how I did it – thus this post.
Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” makes a pretty good case that smartphones are doing a lot of damage to the mental health of teenagers. I worked in the Facebook Integrity team and know the terrible harm social media does to people, but smartphones cause harm even without social media, by distracting people from the people and world around them.
I want my kids to never have a smartphone, but it’s hard to convince my kids they shouldn’t have one if I’m always using one myself. Everyone knows that kids do what you do, not what you say. And if smartphones are terrible for kids then they probably aren’t great for me either.
But getting rid of your smartphone is hard. A friend of mine tried to swap his smartphone for a flip phone a couple of years ago and had to give up. Twenty years ago it was easy to get by without a smartphone, but today everyone assumes you have one, so it’s much harder.
You used to be able to message people with WhatsApp using a flip phone like a Nokia, but WhatsApp has dropped support for everything except iOS and Android. You used to be able to get around with printed road maps or standalone GPS devices, but both of those have mostly gone away (the only roadmap I could find for my area is from 2008 and only available used). Without a smartphone it’s hard to ride an Uber, check into your AirBnb, pay for parking, or various other tasks that can be unexpectedly needed when on a trip.
So it’s mostly impractical to not own a smartphone, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be in your pocket all the time. It can be in your car, or in your backpack, or the hallway of your house. And if you usually don’t have it with you, you’ll likely break the habit of reaching for it, even when you do have it with you.
The main way I’ve been able to stop using a smartphone is by replacing it with an Apple Watch.
Lots of stuff works fine on the Watch:
Phone calls / texting / calendar / payments / Wallet passes - Works great on the Apple Watch. No phone required.
WhatsApp DMs - The third-party WatchChat app seems to work okay, though it requires a connection to a phone.
Navigation - For short drives, I look at a map before I go to have a rough sense of the route, and then have the navigation on the watch alert me when my turn is coming up. If I get lost, I can look at the map on the watch. For long drives I still like to use CarPlay, but for most trips the Watch is enough.
Looking up personal information - I record everything important in the Notes app which I can easily look up on the Watch.
Some stuff I can use Siri Reminders to defer until later:
Researching stuff - Siri can answer super-basic questions, but for most other things, I ask Siri to set me a reminder to research it later.
Buying things - I ask Siri to remind me to buy it later.
Email - Emailing someone is rarely urgent. I set myself a reminder in Siri.
Group chats - I can see notifications telling me if something urgent is happening, but I mostly ignore them until I’m at my laptop. If something is urgent, I can call a participant.
Shopping list - I have a list in the Reminders app which I add to with Siri.
And some stuff I’ve just changed my behavior:
Dealing with boredom - Rather than reading something random on the web, I talk to people, or pay attention to my surroundings. At home, I read a book in bed rather than my phone.
Work slack - There isn’t an easy way to do Slack from my watch, but I don’t really need to, and it’s nice to be able to detach from work when not working. People know they can call me if something is urgent.
At home, my phone lives on a charger near my door — never in my pocket. If I’m doing a short trip somewhere I’m unlikely to need my phone (e.g. school drop-off or going to the grocery store) I leave my phone behind. If I’m doing a bigger or more unpredictable trip, or might need to use the phone as a mobile hot-spot, then I’ll stick the phone in a backpack, or sometimes in my pocket.
Even though my phone is still sometimes in my pocket, the fact that it’s rarely in my pocket means I’ve mostly broken the habit of reaching for it. I’m used to it not being there, so I act as if it’s not there even when it is.
Less use of a phone can mean heavier use of a watch and draining it’s little battery. I have a magsafe watch charger on my desk that allows me to easily give the watch a boost if it’s getting low.
There are still some things that are hard without a smartphone, but the more people go phoneless, the more the world will adapt to people not having smartphones, just as it previously adapted to everyone having one.
I’ve only been phoneless for a few weeks, but so far I’m loving it.
I’ve mostly stopped reading things on my phone, which also means I’ve been reading a lot more books. I might know less about the inconsequential outrage that happened in the last day, but I have a much better understanding of the important things that happened in the last decade.
I’m a lot more present with the people around me. I’ve found myself talking a lot more with strangers, and getting to know people I might otherwise have ignored.
When I’m with my kids I’m fully present, and they feel it. Indeed my kids seem to have become notably happier since I stopped using my smartphone.
Since I’ve stopped relying on GPS navigation as much, I’m getting a better sense for my city, while knowing I can fall back on my watch map if I actually get lost.
I make fewer impulse buys on Amazon. The delay between reminding myself and sitting at my computer to order it acts as a filter, so I mostly buy only what I actually need.
I generally just feel better and more present in the world.
The only downside is that there have been a couple of times people got mildly annoyed at me for having not noticed things that were said in group chats, but I think people are gradually adapting to the fact that they need to iMessage or call me to be confident I’ve seen something.
I’ve also given my 8 year old son an Apple Watch (used SE Cellular). This is on paired to my phone, removing the need for him to have one of his own, and indeed I hope he never needs to have one.
His Apple Watch has allowed him to be more independent walking around town without adult supervision, knowing that he can call me if he needs help, can look at maps if he gets lost, and can buy things with Apple Wallet. To be honest, I’m less worried that he will need help as that some misguided person will think a kid on their own is neglected and cause trouble - which seems less likely once people see that he can call me and that I can see exactly where he is.
It’s time to go Phoneless. Ditching your smartphone is (mostly) possible, and you’ll be happy you did it.
The watch idea is interesting. Do you really never miss having a camera with you? And is the battery life good enough that you can wear it while sleeping for sleep quality, resting heart rate, etc tracking?
More generally, there are two categories of things a smartphone does:
1. Stuff that takes your attention away from the physical world you're present in and turns it toward the phone, the virtual world, and/or your own ruminations. This is IMO where ~all of the bad effects come from.
2. Stuff that actually makes your interactions with the physical world you're present in nicer, easier, lower-friction, etc. Very often this means stuff that replaces, and usually improves upon, the functions of gadgets that upper-middle-class people forty years ago bought separately and carried around in purses, backpacks, etc. Or in some cases, gadgets that were too big even for a purse or backpack.
There's a *lot* in category (2), with camera functionality close to the head of the list, and a very long tail of special-purpose apps, most of which aren't (yet) available for watches. And that's what makes me think trying this would be a significant quality-of-life downgrade, at least for me. Any one of those miniaturized-and-combined gadgets is going to be used only on a small percentage of trips out and about, but it's pretty common to want at least one of them. That and I hate voice interfaces, so none of the Siri workarounds you list would be attractive to me.
So the dual question to this is whether it's possible to adjust the set of apps on your phone to basically only be the category (2) stuff. I have tried variants of this and not done a great job, but your post inspires me to try harder at that, because the problem you're addressing here is real.
Hi Rob! Just read this and wanted to say thanks for writing it.
I recently finished Chris Hayes’ The Sirens’ Call, which also makes a strong case for extracting yourself as much as possible from the attention economy. Just like how watching an old movie now feels shocking because everyone’s smoking, I think we’ll someday look back at this era and wonder how we functioned when no one could focus. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to recenter more on the people around us and less on the things that corporations want us to pay attention to. But it takes articles like yours to help start that shift.
One thing that’s made a big difference for me is dropping online news entirely. I still follow the news, but only in print. Even reputable outlets can’t resist clickbait or subtle design tricks to keep you scrolling, and all that vanishes on paper. It’s a "slower" experience, but ironically, I spend much less time on it than before.
Anyway, hope you’re doing well!
-Blair