The yellow Post-It note on the dashboard of my car is unintelligible to anyone else.
It reads: Usual. Roch round. 2nd exit. Go for ages (pass Old-Hat). Left Buck. Not far. Left Canon. End. 17. To me, it makes perfect sense.
These are my directions to where I’m headed – somewhere I’ve not been before. I looked up the route on a desktop computer before I left work, scribbled the directions down and set off.
At the bottom of my work bag, in the footwell of my passenger seat, is a Google Pixel 8a that could absolutely tell me the way, step-by-step, if I wanted it to.
The car radio is playing Classic FM, my favourite station. It’s a piece I recognise, and it appears on the display. Mozart’s Piano Sonata no. 16. I’ve always wondered what that piece was called, and now I know.
I had obtained long-awaited knowledge without the use of an internet-connected device – and if the internet went down suddenly, it wouldn’t affect my journey one bit. It was incredibly freeing and satisfying.
Before I shunned it, I was swept up in smartphone culture – or smartphone addiction, to give it its proper name – as much as anyone.
Often, while on my phone, I didn’t realise my husband was speaking to me. I’d think I’d scrolled Instagram for 10 minutes before bed and, to my horror, I realised it had been an hour or more.
And like millions of other people, I developed the incredibly unhygienic habit of taking my phone with me into the bathroom.
I got my first phone in 2001, aged 10 as my super-cool young auntie worked at Carphone Warehouse. I got a famously indestructible Nokia 3310 and played Snake on it.
My first ringtone was a reasonable facsimile of Destiny’s Child Survivor, which I bought from a page at the back of a magazine, and those of us with phones swapped numbers in the playground, to text each other unintelligible nonsense later.
Fast-forward 20 years to the day our daughter Melody was born, my husband and I took more than 200 photos of her on that single day on our phones. We announced her birth with photos on social media and sent the good news to all our families and friends on WhatsApp.
When Melody was two years old, she stopped playing to hand me my phone: ‘here your phone, Mummy’, she said, looking at me earnestly.
The bottom fell out of my stomach. She saw my phone sitting idly and thought I needed it. Even though I wasn’t looking for it, she brought it to my attention, because my phone wasn’t in my hand.
And that, for me, was that.
Up to a point, I can forgive myself for being surgically attached to my phone. Since I was tiny my dad was chronically ill, physically disabled and often knocking at death’s door with painful and devastating health issues.
Every time the phone rang and I saw it was my mum, I’d panic and grab it in a frenzy. I got calls at school, at university and eventually at work telling me ‘Dad’s in hospital. Dad’s not well. I don’t want you to worry, but…’
For 20 years I kept my phone as close as possible, so I didn’t miss That Call.
In May 2024, the time finally came and dad passed away.
It took several months for me to realise that it can’t happen to him again – there’s no need to stay umbilically attached to my phone in a subconscious, constant panic.
With that realisation, I then began to wonder what else I was doing with my phone out of decades-long habit.
The modern smartphone is least of all a telephone. It is a calculator, camera, calendar, alarm clock, media player, teeny tiny television, gaming device, notepad, photo album, newspaper and a million other things besides.
Of course, I owned all those things anyway, and they did a perfectly fine job before. I was sure they’d continue to do so today.
That’s when I decided to make some real changes.
In the depths of winter, I bought a SAD lamp that doubled as an alarm clock and plonked it next to the bed. The benefits included the removal of my smartphone from my bedroom – no need to use it as an alarm clock and no more night-time scrolling social media.
I also invested in a beautiful paper planner from a small UK-based business and spent time carefully filling it out with birthdays and meetings and holidays.
Screen-free mindfulness just got another win.
I bought my current phone for the quality of the camera, but as this phone ages out, I’d love to invest in a good quality separate camera, too, so I can revert back to a ‘brick’ mobile phone. I like to think of my phone in the meantime as a camera that my mum sometimes calls.
I realised it all was part of a bigger agenda. I’m stuck at a desk in front of a computer all day and app culture keeps people trapped inside their little rectangular box, under the guise of productivity.
Once you realise it is someone’s full-time job at every single app on Earth to design ways to steal your attention, and retain it for as long as possible to stop you doing anything else, you become a lot less partial to them.
I used to find myself grabbing my phone and forgetting immediately why I did so, then checking social media while I waited for the original purpose to come back to me. There’s nothing productive about that.
A survey done by USwitch in 2022 revealed adults average five hours a day on their smartphone, in addition to any screen-related work. This was a two hour daily increase in 2020 – and it means out of our seven-day week, the average person spends one whole day of that simply looking at their phone.
Our phones are distracting us from the real world and also becoming our entire world – real life has become a distraction from that.
But just because I can do the big shop on an app on my phone, doesn’t mean it’s good for me, and it certainly isn’t more fun than listening to my daughter shout the names of all the vegetables she recognises in Aldi to the delight and humour of everyone around us.
I replaced pointless scrolling on the sofa with reading my hoards of books. I’ve read five novels this year already – all of which had been on my ‘To Be Read’ list for 10 years or more.
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I feel calmer, more present and – surprise surprise – more productive when I’m not sucked down the rabbit hole of doomscrolling.
Of course I want to be contactable – I’m a mum, and I want my daughter’s childcare to be able to reach me in a split second if she needed to.
But all I need then is a telephone.
It doesn’t have to be smart, and I don’t want it to be.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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