Yesterday was a mixed bag. It was my first full, morning-to-night day with my dumb phone. I don’t know why, but most of the day at work, I had a steady anxiety coursing through me. Perhaps removing my phone is akin to yanking the baby blanket from your hands.
I woke up to my alarm around 7:00 a.m. and just… got out of bed? I usually schedule in 15 minutes of wake-up phone time for the second I wake up, but yesterday morning there was nothing to do other than see if someone messaged me (spoiler alert: no one texted me).
After my standard coffee-shower-morning routine, I hopped into the car for my 40-minute commute to work.
First roadblock—I had no music to listen to or podcast on this phone, so I was forced to listen to… morning talk radio *DUN-DUN-DUNNNN*. Free Beer and Hot Wings will always have my back.
Talk radio is an odd thing. As opposed to podcasts and audiobooks, morning talk radio is absolutely and positively useless. And I kind of mean this in a good way. I have no narratives to follow or try to keep up on. I don’t have to rewind to hear something I missed. I can quite literally “tune out” entirely and just choose to listen whenever I want, and I don’t feel it begging for my attention.
It’s almost the same as listening to ocean or rain noises—except occasionally someone will make a fart joke and everyone laughs.
I spent a lot of time just in my own thoughts on the drive in.
It wasn’t a normal schedule day at work as I had a 9:00am-10:00am meeting and then a 12:00pm – 4:00pm workshop so not much time for my phone anyway.
I called my mother on the drive home and we talked for some time. I filled her in on my experiment here, and she lamented her own struggles with the smartphone and social media.
Mom says she really cares about the people on Facebook and that it helps her “stay connected” with her kids, but she doesn’t like the ads. She says, “You didn’t get rid of Snapchat, did you?”
Snapchat is where me and my seven siblings keep a group chat. We’ve maintained this for 5+ years, and it is the sole reason I still have Snapchat. Snapchat content has a quality I would closely associate with being made by a group of 4th-grade boys. It is the depths of hell, as far as I’m concerned. BUT I stay there because my siblings and father chat and send memes, and pictures of my niece etc., and I feel like I’m maintaining the “connection.”
I quite literally had a revelation on the phone with my mom.
That connection is BULLSHIT.
I’ve been convinced that this is “maintaining” relationships—that with these apps, we are making stronger bonds.
No way.
I considered this: If I weren’t being conned into thinking I was participating in healthy and real connection with my siblings every day, what would I do?
If I went a month without hearing from one of my sisters, I’d probably say, “Damn, I have just not made the effort recently—I need to call them.”
And I would! I would be prompted to do something!
But with consistent and constant meaningless conversation and meme-passing, Snapchat feels like a coworker group chat. I feel the satiation of participating in the relationship without having actually DONE anything.
I’m being lied to about maintaining “connection” through online media.
I arrived home to my wife, and we ate dinner together and went on a walk. We spent the evening in our bedroom. I filed through the photos I had just taken on my photo walk, and she drank tea in bed while we watched Anchorman and laughed.
I had a thought at one point: I hadn’t seen the news at all yesterday. I sat in complete and utter unawareness.
I cuddled my wife at bedtime—and for the first time in the entirety of our relationship, I didn’t turn away for phone time. I didn’t have “somewhere else” to be. I just fell asleep.
-Wyatt H.
Wyatts Hobby Photos 