I’m a digital native — can I survive without my smartphone?

‘Black mirror” is Charlie Brooker’s superbly eerie term for the smartphone — the slim hypnotic box of glass, metal and plastic that now commands our attention for much of the waking day. I have long been its victim: a chronic scroller, an addict of ephemeral internet scandals, a connoisseur of comic videos of animals, helplessly adrenalised by the most trivial push notification. My whole adult life might be characterised as a losing battle against the irresistible vortex of the small screen. For ten years, every time I have tried to read a book or have dinner with my girlfriend or talk properly to a friend, I have found my fingers twitching for my phone, my hand drifting towards my pocket, my attention wandering (“I wonder… if that email has arrived… what the comments are like under that column… whether my life is being destroyed on X/Twitter”).

In a bad week I could quite easily spend four hours a day on my phone. Less than three hours of screen time requires a conscious effort. It is either reassuring or depressing to know my struggle is unexceptional. The average person spends 3 hours 46 minutes a day on their phone; Generation Z spend more than seven hours a day in front of a screen. A third of teenagers say they use social media “almost constantly”.

I have made endless futile efforts to weaken my iPhone’s malign power over me. I have shoved it behind wardrobes and under beds. I have shut it in cupboards. I have kicked it under the sofa and tried to forget its location. I have locked it up like an evil talisman in a “smartphone prison” — a sort of miniature safe with a timer. Innumerable productivity apps have promised to shut me out of X and the internet for specified periods, only for me to hack through their defences, fingers feverishly jabbing “15 more minutes” every 15 minutes.

We must never forget how strange and how sudden this problem is. The advent of the iPhone in 2007 represents the most dramatic and widespread revolution in recreation in human history. I don’t think you have to be a Luddite to find the “phone zombies” lurching down every street a little dystopian. In her book Unwired, Gaia Bernstein describes attending a children’s birthday party conducted in unnatural silence — all the kids present were absorbed by their phones. In a restaurant in Italy last year I spotted a man sitting opposite his girlfriend, ignoring both her and his dinner. He was scrolling through pictures of previous meals on his phone.

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A diversity of human leisure experiences — reading, playing, sewing, concert-going, eating out — is steadily being reduced to the only real hobby a lot of people have nowadays: going on their phones. Our existences are narrowing to a few inches of iPhone glass. The cultural theorist Mark Fisher describes a state he calls “depressive hedonia… an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure”. As we refresh and scroll we are not really happy; rather driven on bleakly by the restless, unsatisfiable compulsion for the next drop of dopamine released by a WhatsApp notification or an unusually entertaining video of a dog. Powerful arguments have been made that iPhones have not only shattered our ability to pay attention but also triggered an epidemic of depression and anxiety in teenagers.

I had come to hate my phone. It’s boring and wearying to have your attention on a lead, jerked back compulsively to a screen every few minutes. And I was haunted by the thought that four hours in a day adds up to many thousands of hours over a decade. I did not want to drain my whole life into the void of the black mirror. And so, ten years after getting my first phone (a Samsung Galaxy S III Mini, which from the vantage point of 2024 looks about as technologically advanced as a neolithic hand axe), I resolved to ditch my smartphone.

I contemplate various mildly souped-up “dumb phones” such as the Nokia 6300, which is an old-style phone but with WhatsApp and Google Maps. In the end this seems like cheating. I resolve to go properly back to the Nineties. And so the phone I have now is a highly ineffective piece of equipment called the Nokia 105. Mine for £13 from Argos. A real “drug-dealer phone” as everyone tells me. It does not have WhatsApp, TikTok, X, Instagram, Uber, Snapchat. There is no camera, FaceTime, Gmail, Google Calendar, Spotify or (my greatest digital vice) Tetris. You can call, you can text and you can play Snake (which, in my first smartphone-free days, I do quite a lot).

Its only really impressive feature is its indestructibility. My iPhone was cratered and cobwebbed with chips and cracks. When I drop the Nokia 105, it just bounces cheerfully down the pavement. There’s nothing there to damage.

Exiling myself to the technological environment of the Nineties comes with two principal anxieties. The first is the unnerving realisation that I was a teenager the last time I travelled anywhere without Google Maps. The second is the loss of Spotify. What about The Rest Is History? Commuting to work without Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook seems as daunting as the first time I had to walk to school without holding my mother’s hand. All I have for entertainment now is the Nokia’s built-in radio, which gives every impression of having been manufactured in the Forties. I have gone from the most sophisticated audio environment in history — in which I could summon any comedian, historian or expert I liked to amuse me for the duration of my commute — to this: “The time is chhhccchhh twenty minutes past eight and you’re listening to chhhchch Radio chhchhh 4.” It’s so archaic I half expect Churchill to come on air and tell me to fight them on the beaches.

For advice I turn to the writer Eliane Glaser, who has never had a smartphone (“They just feel evil”). She recommends various “rackety workarounds”. “I draw lots of maps. I ask people directions, look at signs on street corners, use the A-Z in the car,” she says. I follow her example. It is faintly humiliating to have to draw a map to get yourself to the big Tesco — my girlfriend is richly amused — but I haven’t exercised my sense of direction for years and I don’t want to take any chances. Despite my abysmal cartological skills (my road maps all look like a tangle of fat, misshapen snakes either fighting or making love), I make it to the big Tesco.

Nick, 30, is another smartphone refusenik who offers me his counsel. A former software developer, he got rid of his iPhone six years ago after going on a night out and noticing everyone in the bar was on their phone. “People just weren’t interacting with each other. It seemed like the social interaction that humans thrive on was disappearing around me.” And so, with commendable resolve, he went out that very evening and bought an old Nokia from a late-night shop in Dalston, east London. He had to hide his phone from clients as “it was part of my job description to be up to date with software” and a primitive Nokia does not scream “up to date with software”. His main problem has been with his 26-30 Railcard, which is digital only. He had “lots of back and forths with the railcard company and even spoke to a lawyer about it”. Even though he travelled with a receipt as proof of purchase, he has been fined several times — a martyr to the analogue cause. I find myself rather inspired.

When I press Glaser for the biggest inconveniences she’s encountered she mentions that she once nearly missed Cabaret. “The woman almost didn’t let me into the building because I didn’t have the QR code.” Nearly missing Cabaret hardly sounds like the end of the world. Both Nick and Glaser emphasise that it will be easier than I think. Nick points out that most software engineers designing systems for things like cinema or theatre tickets build in workarounds for people whose phones are dead or lost or otherwise non-functional. This reassures me.

And indeed I find living without a smartphone really isn’t bad. I don’t get lost (and rarely even need the dubious assistance of my hand-drawn maps). Walking to work without Spotify is not as daunting as it had seemed. One evening when I’m at a friend’s house and need access to my work email, I just take out my laptop, which is a slight inconvenience but one to which I can reconcile myself. I have one dicey experience at dinner with some other journalists when my card is repeatedly declined because I have forgotten my PIN after years of using Apple Pay. And… that’s about it.

Keenly aware that I have promised to write a feature filled with hilarious Luddite mishaps, the smoothness of my progress alarms me. I try to contrive various problematic situations: going for long walks in unfamiliar areas of London, taking a mainline train, going to the cinema. No issues. I am a paragon of analogue competence. At one point, I’m delighted to discover that the Nokia is failing to send texts and instead supplying me with the error message “system busy” — which seems somewhat comic as it has literally nothing else to do. No phone in the world has a less intense schedule than the Nokia 105. But I make a couple of phone calls to check and it turns out the Nokia — true to its humble appearance — was apologising unnecessarily and the messages had been sent after all. Damn.

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The unavoidable thought is that my belief that it would be impossible to live without a smartphone was somewhat like an alcoholic’s justification for not giving up drink, ie I won’t survive without it. But it’s not true. When I turn on my smartphone after a couple of weeks to see what I’ve missed, I am momentarily panicked by the screaming chorus of updates: WhatsApp messages, news alerts, X notifications, challenges on chess.com. Scrolling through the blaring mess, I see that none of these “notifications” was really notifying me of anything at all. All my good friends know to call or text if they need anything. The air of urgency my iPhone emits now strikes me as entirely bogus. None of its important-seeming messages matter at all. I turn it back off.

And so the boring truth: not having a smartphone is basically wonderful. For the first few days I have a sense of giddy freedom and relief. I’ve escaped my phone’s endless wheedling demands for my attention and I am free to do whatever I like. It feels a bit like bunking off school. If I want to watch a film I can really watch a film without suddenly realising I’ve missed half of it checking X.

Yes, I’m afraid all my “revelations” about the joys of analogue life are as cheesy and obvious as you’d expect. I do read a lot more — more than I have since I was about 18. It is indeed wholesome to wake up and reach not for your phone, but for a book. I think a lot more. When I go for a walk I don’t blast my mind into quiescence with podcasts or music.

Instead, I find that without meaning to I am using the time to dream up column ideas or resolve problems with the book I’m trying to write. I am more efficient at work. Writing without a smartphone is about 60 per cent easier. It is horrible to be a cliché, but I notice my surroundings more. I am moved by clouds and buildings and trees and all the things that I would previously have ignored in an anaesthetic blur of podcasts and tweets.

I realise that I risk coming over as some insufferably shining-eyed wellness apostle. But the lifestyle I’m lauding isn’t some Gwyneth Paltrow-style Goop fad, merely the one shared by the entirety of the human race until about ten years ago.

Lest all the stuff about reading more and noticing trees sounds unpersuasively woowoo and insubstantial, Johann Hari, the author of a book about smartphones, Stolen Focus, makes the serious case against them down the phone from America. “Sustained focus and attention are at the heart of every human achievement,” Hari tells me. Great books are not written and scientific discoveries are not made by people who are unable to pay attention. You would not want your favourite football team, he points out, to walk onto the pitch staring at their phones. Is it really possible that we are able to do our best work when we are continually distracted by our phones?

It’s important to remember that smartphones and apps are not what their manufacturers would have us believe: merely useful tools. They are devices that have been designed, in Hari’s words, “to hack and invade our attention”. This is the principle on which all the profits in the “attention economy” are made. The longer Facebook or X or TikTok can keep you on their apps, the more data they can gather and the more ads they can put in front of you.

The careers and salaries of some of the world’s most brilliant software engineers and behavioural scientists are judged on whether they can successfully keep you looking at your screen for a few seconds longer. As Tristan Harris, a former Google employee, put it in a testimony to Congress, “You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.” The ten-year battle I had been fighting against the power of the black mirror was an unwinnable one. I took the only course of action available to me.

The disturbing thought is that there may not be much more time left to do what I’ve done. Nick points out that he’s noticed analogue life is “getting more complicated”. Watching the football at St James’ Park in Newcastle now requires a digital ticket. Businesses, institutions and governments are trying to shift their customers onto digital platforms for efficiency and cost saving. “There will come a time,” Nick says, perhaps “in five, ten years, when the analogue systems we’re just about hanging on to at the minute will disappear altogether.” For instance, we may come increasingly to rely on smartphones to lock our cars and houses. At some more distant point, our passports may be digital only. Having an addictive, time-wasting, attention-shattering device will be a precondition of being a citizen.

I can’t help but find this a rather eerie thought. If you’ve ever considered getting rid of your smartphone, it’s worth remembering that this may be your last opportunity to have an analogue life. I think it’s an opportunity worth seizing.