I am hopelessly addicted to my phone. I am utterly ashamed to admit that last week, I spent a total of 70 hours on my phone. When my screen time gets this high, I find myself scrambling to form an excuse for what could have possibly caused the number to climb so high: watching television, falling asleep with my phone on, listening to music. This time, I found that no excuse I came up with could quell my embarrassment when asked to present this figure. I could feel my brain turning to mush, and no matter how badly I wanted to stop scrolling, I could not bring myself to. I tried everything: putting my phone on “Do Not Disturb,” activating child locks on apps I am especially addicted to, even letting it die periodically for hours at a time. None of it worked. I ultimately discerned that the only way to limit my phone’s chokehold over my life would be to lock it in a box and purchase a flip phone.
As you might expect, I ran into a few immediate problems. The first was that I still had iMessage on my laptop. I was too embarrassed to take out my phone before classes to text people back, so I resorted to my usual iMessage almost instantly. I thought I could limit it to certain hours of the day or only twenty-minute time slots, but I soon became just as addicted to my iMessage as I had been to my phone. I thought continuing to use the app was defeating the purpose of my challenge; I wanted to escape my addiction, not reinvent it. I decided I would have to prevent iMessage from being easily accessible and only text people back for school-related business, as I was too embarrassed to tell people not in my immediate circle that I was using a burner phone for an entire week.
This change happened within a few hours of me starting this challenge. Admittedly, I was more focused in class and when I was doing school work, but I was incredibly bored at first. I was used to thinking of something and then immediately texting my friends about it. It felt strange to realize that this attachment to connection was not a natural feeling and that it had been created over years of virtually instant communication. I would think of something funny or want to complain about class but, for the first time since I was 14, I had to keep most of these thoughts to myself. To tell the truth, it felt awful at first. My head was swimming with everything I had to leave unsaid, and it was quite lonely to go through the day sometimes without speaking to my closest friends. To add insult to injury, my boyfriend is studying abroad, and I felt like my lack of constant messaging communication was making me feel even further away.
The second largest problem I ran into was the lack of music. This might be a small problem for someone else looking to get rid of their phone, but anyone who knows me can tell you that I am constantly listening to music. Whether it be the same song over and over again or Spotify-made mixes of new favorites, I almost always have my airpods in when I am not in class. I was already alone with my own thoughts and now the feeling was exacerbated with the new absence of extraneous sounds blaring in my ears all day long. My days were suddenly a whole lot quieter.
The third, probably most insurmountable problem was the inconvenience of using the new flip phone. The phone was certainly more high-tech than the one I had in middle school (this one was amazingly able to connect to Google Maps and take photos), but it was still far from convenient. It took three times as long to type out a text, was sometimes hard to hear people on the other end of phone calls, and made it difficult to arrange plans as my new number couldn’t be put into group chats. Eventually, and embarrassingly, I resorted to emailing my friends during the day to make plans for the evenings, just because that was easier to spell out long messages when I wasn’t in a place where I could take a phone call.
This self-imposed challenge was not easy, but it was certainly worthwhile. Despite the problems I have complained about, my brain felt like it had been scrubbed clean of a junk buildup that had previously felt insurmountable. It only took a few days for me to enjoy the disconnectedness and quiet that probably used to feel so natural to me before I had my first iPhone. To be totally truthful, towards the end of the week, I felt like a little kid. I would come home and play my records as loud as possible through my speakers and savor the music because I hadn’t heard any all day. I was more present when I hung out with my friends when we were able carry out our clumsily coordinated plans. I disappeared into books for hours each night to put myself to sleep. The convenience of an iPhone is something I don’t think I can give up at this point in my life, but this challenge helped me, a self-identified phone addict, realize the value of quiet for the first time in my adult life.
It may come as a disappointment to my reader, but I will not be permanently quitting my phone. However, I have already deleted any “scrollable” app that I fear could suck me back into this addiction. I plan to keep my iMessage deleted from my laptop’s dock, where it is easily accessible to me. I plan to walk more without loud music clogging my ears. This is not a call for everyone to throw their phone in the ocean, because I certainly am not capable of that yet, but rather an opportunity for those who are struggling with a phone addiction to reconsider their screen time and embrace quietness again.
Caitlin Gallagher is a junior in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She can be reached at cmg323@cornell.edu.
