Ditching My iPhone for a Flip Phone Made Me See How Useless Smartphones Can Be
Modern feature phones have Google Maps and wi-fi hotspots. Why are we wasting money on smartphones?
Sunday night before last, I was lying in bed and looking at my Screen Time stats as I do every Sunday night. This weekly review is meant to help me keep an eye on my phone use and identify problems before they balloon out of proportion. My stats for that Sunday night were the same as they have been for many Sunday nights in a row: average time 1 hour 50 minutes, average pickup count 85 per day.
Those stats have always frustrated me. There is no reason to spend two hours per day on my phone when there is an entire world full of friends and loved ones and fun to enjoy. And since I’ve deleted all my social media accounts, games, and everything else off my phone, there’s not even anything to do on my phone. Yet every week, that average daily consumption of 2 hours stared annoyingly back at me.
And what was I doing on my phone? Half an hour total on my to-do list, half an hour total on Blinkist, forty-five minutes total on my web browser, an hour total on Discord… I was puttering around, the exact thing I hate the most in myself.
