Still me, but much worse: what I learned from my time with a brick phone
I pictured myself gliding through life like a manic pixie dream girl. No Instagram, no WhatsApp groups. Alas, a new me did not emerge
It was a friend’s fault, really. As we settled in at our local cafe, he warned he might have to take a call, then placed a small brick on the table which, upon further inspection, was an old-school flip phone.
He looked serene, lighter somehow. A man free from endless notifications, no longer carrying the weight of the whole world in his pocket. Before I could ask if this once-ubiquitous relic was the secret to enlightenment, it rang. He had to go. I stayed, people watching and pondering. Should I get a burner too?
It’s not that I’m an incessant doomscroller. In fact, I still find people more interesting in real life than online. When I am on social media I prefer to post and go. But my work? That’s a different story.
As a freelancer, I do almost everything on my phone. Firing off quick edits on the train, sending invoices en route to the gym, workshopping scenes while standing in queues. Adding all those little pockets of time on top of my dedicated daily hours felt like a productivity hack.
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Until it didn’t. My genius soon felt like a curse. My rampant usage had frozen my hand into a weird claw, my wrist clicked and my cortisol spiked every time the phone shuddered with new email notifications.
Realising the bind I’d put myself in, I knew something had to change. But instead of doing the sensible thing and cutting back, I took inspiration from my friend. I adopted a brick Nokia from a relative who was upgrading her teenager from a child-friendly dumb phone to a smart one.
This was it. The answer I had been seeking.
I pictured myself gliding through life like a manic pixie dream girl in a Joseph Gordon-Levitt film. No Instagram, no WhatsApp groups, just me being fully present with the world. With myself.
I had assumed I’d feel unbearable fomo but I didn’t. I still had my desktop and an old laptop that sounds like an aeroplane if I use it for more than 20 minutes. I could do everything I normally do, just not on my phone. In theory it was simple. Foolproof.
Alas, a new me did not emerge.
For the first few days I suffered from phantom phone syndrome, hearing pings, dings and ghost vibrations. Other times I’d pick up the brick and try to swipe before remembering I’d swapped.
The fantasy was that I’d become relaxed and evolved. The reality was that I was still me — but much worse. I became the idiot holding up shop queues, confidently tapping my useless brick on the card reader before remembering it couldn’t do that. Baristas politely stared at me like I was trying to pay in cheese slices, while the lines behind me grew impatient. Rightfully so.
The new old phone had 3G and an MP3 player so it wasn’t a completely antiquated immersion, but without instant access to DMs, I missed two birthday invites and one potential commission. The most painful oversight was family dinners. I’d turn up to a table heaving with my siblings’ favourite dishes and none of mine because I hadn’t remembered to request them.
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Worst of all, without my carefully curated and trusty apps, my sieve brain and dyscalculia were suddenly on public display. You know what makes maths harder for someone whose brain isn’t wired for it? Doing it under pressure.
And then there was my sense of direction. Already questionable, it became a liability. I got lost constantly. Sometimes in places I knew. I kept missing the discreet little alleyways that usually let me cut through busy streets because I was running on bad gut instincts instead of GPS.
There was one upside. Without my smart phone, it took me three extra days to order flowers for my aunt’s birthday. The task kept falling to the bottom of my to-do list when sitting at my desk and apparently I’d forgotten that flower shops also exist. By the time I went into one, her birthday had technically passed but the experience itself was unexpectedly wholesome. The florist turned my picks into a beautiful bouquet. A work of art I was tempted to keep for myself. A much warranted reminder that not everything needs to be tapped into existence.
The experiment staggered on until the night I ended up in Milngavie instead of Motherwell by mistake, with no trains left to take me home. I hadn’t heard the platform change announcement and was too engrossed in a book to notice the train was heading the wrong way. To make matters worse, my phone literally died in my hand as I tried to call a sibling for rescue.
And that was the end of my analogue-adjacent experiment. I didn’t return to claw hand life, though. I just stopped relying on my phone for work. Revolutionary, I know.
Not long after my misadventure, I met my friend again. I was curious to hear about how he was finding life with his old phone. Maybe I just did it wrong. But when he joined me at the cafe, the antique was gone and in its place was a shiny smartphone. It turns out his flip phone hadn’t been an act of self-actualisation, just a placeholder while the real one was being repaired. Something he’d fished out of his abandoned tech box.
“Yeah, wow, I could never give up my smart phone,” he told me. “It’s just too convenient.”
