my spectacular and boring no phone sundays

how i'm slowly working towards a more phone-free life

If you’ve read a few of my previous substacks, it will probably come as no surprise to you that I feel an increasing disenchantment with some of our more prevalent current technologies, and aspects of modern life in general. I’m talking about our obedient attitude towards the algorithm, our reckless handling of AI, and the big one: our ever-increasing addiction to our smartphones. I realize that I sound like a mopey grandma sometimes, and I would never go as far as to say that things were much better in the past, but I also don’t believe that all of these technological developments are necessarily progress. The smartphone addiction in particular has become more and more irksome to me; from experiencing it directly by sitting on a bus with everyone craning their necks to their online worlds, and having movie nights with friends that cannot seem to watch a first screen without a second screen in their hands, to the more widespread consequences of hyperindividualism, loneliness and a decreasing attention span.

There is no other object of use that I can compare the smartphone to. There is quite literally nothing else that almost everyone will always keep so close to their person, whether it’s next to their plates when they’re eating, or next to their pillow so it can be the first thing they grab in the morning. The more I become aware of it (in others and my own phone usage, I am absolutely not pretending to be a saint here), the more I see it everywhere. Colleagues at work that fork down their food while scrolling or watching videos on their phone, the young kids on public transport, friends I’m meeting for coffee that take out their phone in the middle of a conversation without even knowing why. The other day I even saw a boy in the gym on a rowing machine, completely lost in his Instagram Reels. Out of curiosity, I recently held a poll on my Instagram account to ask followers what their daily phone screen time is. Grouping together about 80%, they said it was either 2-4 hours or 4-6 hours per day. I am not surprised, but somehow I am still baffled that we are collectively spending so much time on our phones. (My average is 1-3 hours by the way, in case you were curious. Let this substack please not fool you into thinking that I’ve got it all figured out.)

Is this what we are doing with our precious time on earth? JC, who writes her weekly scrapbook on digital minimalism, posted the following heart-shattering note recently:

“i just realized that, if you use your phone 6 hours a day, that's 180 lost hours a month – an entire week.

that's THREE ENTIRE MONTHS SPENT ON YOUR PHONE every year.

which means you spend ONE OUT OF EVERY FOUR YEARS staring at a screen.

even worse – following this logic, you would lose 20 YEARS of your life just looking at your phone.

it's terrifying.” [link]

It worries me increasingly, this addiction to a little device that is taking up so much time of our lives. It seems like we’re unable to be bored anymore, because as soon as we wake up we require to know what’s going on in our online lives, and we scroll our timelines before or even while falling asleep. We’re in a relationship with our phones, and it’s a toxic one, because we’re hardly in control of what the algorithm feeds us every day. I feel hardly in control of how much time I spend online, to begin with. Because there is really no reason why I should check Instagram, TikTok, Goodreads, the news, my email, or even my texts a hundred times a day. Even ten times a day seems over the top, when you think about it. So why do we grab our phones so often? And as human beings with agency and free will, why don’t we break this time-consuming addiction? Yes, our phones are filled to the brim with addictive algorithms, with FOMO, with the promise there is always something new and shiny and better to read or look at - but beneath all that, it really is just a device (and quite a small one at that too), which we can easily put away.

So, in light of all of this, I was eager to try something to break this spell at the beginning of February: the No Phone Sunday. I mainly wanted to experience and become more aware of my own phone usage, at what moments I would normally reach for my device, and what I use the infernal thing for. Like with any first step in addiction, I do this by removing the temptation as much as I can, keeping my phone in a place I can’t easily reach. Phone calls, and only phone calls are patched through to my fitbit watch so I can respond in case anyone calls with an emergency, but other than that, the phone is locked away from midnight to midnight. Having no phone for one day a week shouldn’t be that radically difficult. Right?

Wrong! Even with only four official no phone days on the clock, I have had a lot of eye-opening experiences; not just about my own phone use, but that of others as well, because there is nothing that’ll make you more aware of someone else’s eyes being glued to their screen than not having ones on your own. But before you think I’m going to be preaching my better-than-you attitude now, I’ve had some serious reality checks in the past weeks. There were Sundays I had to wait around and found myself reaching for a ghost phone in my pocket that wasn’t there (and feeling ridiculous after it), to days where I completely forgot I was doing this challenge and nearly threw my phone across the room with a scream when I realized I’d been scrolling on a Sunday. I’ve forcibly realized how dependent we’ve become on our phone for many things, besides social media: staying in touch with family and friends, reading the news, checking our bank account, listening to music, taking pictures, planning navigation, making a grocery list, checking bus times, or just simply googling something you want to know the answer to right away. No wonder we have the thing in our hands all the time! I sat down one sunny morning with pen and paper and wrote down the alternatives we have to all of these uses for our phones. I could read the news by just watching the 20-minute broadcast on TV. I could listen to music by digging up old CDs or vinyls - ugh, really? - or stream Spotify from another medium than my phone, like my tv. I could use my laptop to check navigation and bus times, and bring my camera to take pictures, but let’s be honest - we’ve rely so much on our phones for these things that doing all of the above feels like being purposefully inconvenient, or taking a step back in practicality.

But here’s the upside to being purposefully inconvenient: everything I did took me a lot less long than it would have if I’d done it on my phone. Because there simply isn’t just the action of checking my bank account for me; it’s paired with opening texts, responding, doing a quick scroll on Instagram, being sucked into an algorithm and losing minutes going into hours of my time. Moreover, it made me be more present and intentional about what I was doing. I could read without stopping every half an hour to check my messages, I could be at the gym without having to check my work-out statistics right away, I could eat my dinner in fifteen minutes and have oceans of time left in my evenings to read, pick a movie to watch, or play a game. And the disconnectivity high is very slowly trickling down to other days of the week. I’ve watched Grand Theft Hamlet and The Worst Person in the World which I both very much enjoyed, I am playing Overcooked again with my husband. I spotted the fruit in my basket that was about to go bad and made a jar of plum jam. And I’m writing, writing, writing so much, whether it’s in my journal, on a notepad, substacks or long emails.

The thing I found the most eye-opening, however, was that on Sundays my face wasn’t constantly down-turned anymore. I am looking at the world around me, how beautiful or uneventful it may be, and I’m looking people in the eye and smiling. The severe decrease in processing information is making me less anxious; I’m relaxed just observing the other passengers on my bus ride, and I notice things. Maybe they’re not life-changing things, but I’ve spotted the mud on your shoes, the new movie that’s showing at the cinema this week, the sip of coffee you’ve taken that’s too hot. I see the beauty of regular people instead of the clickbait on my screen. I’ve begun staring out of windows again, or finding patterns in the wallpaper when I can’t sleep. I draw doodles on paper and take an extra half hour rereading a magazine over breakfast. Life has, at times, become boring again - and it’s the most spectacular thing in the world.

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