Going Smartish

Three weeks ago, I gave my Google Pixel 6 to someone else. Their phone broke and they needed a new one. I offered mine up as a replacement. I finally had an excuse to try living without a smartphone for a while. I'm now walking around with a Nokia Flip 2780. It's not the same "dumb" phone I remember from my days of the Motorola RAZR, instead, it's smart-ish.

It features quite a basic app store in its Linux-based KaiOS. There is a basic—basic—app store that has a few hundred apps. I was surprised to find that the phone came preinstalled with a simple version of Google Maps, a basic web browser, and some email connectivity. These apps work, but they are clunky, slow, and nowhere near the user-experience offered on Android or iOS. That's a good thing. This phone sits idly in my pocket primarily as a phone or message receiver. I don't want to do anything else with it precisely because it is so bad at other things. Now, I am reclaiming my time lost to satisfying every little impulse for information.

We'll see how this goes over the next several months. I find myself feeling slightly embarrassed that I'm using a flip phone. Call it lingering classism or whatever... Someone who did not know my phone situation asked me if I had email on my phone. I sheepishly replied, "No, not at the moment." I don't know why I didn't go into the details, but I simply did not.

Over the next few months and weeks I'll report how this experiment is going. I'll add some more essays up about the reasons that I decided to do this. Some of the books that inspired this decision were Johann Hari's Stolen Focus, Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, Oliver Burkeman's 4000 Weeks, Gloria Mark's Attention Span, Albert Borgmann's Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, and Martin Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. I will dig into some of the details from these books and other essays that spurred this decision.

I'll end with this, be deliberate about what you do, whatever it is. That seems to be the key to living a good life.