This summer, I re-read André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, the reasons for which only my diary will ever be fully privy. Reading the novel, one passage stood out and spoke to the predicament in which I found myself:
“But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mock up, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it.”
Such was the effect on me of these lines that they made their way into my commonplace book. On one level, they are about love and longing, the “whether it is better for a man to speak or die?”1 On another level, however, the passage has implications beyond the confines of love. To me, it is a tender rallying cry to live meaningful and fulfilling lives, to not waste our youth. As such, these words resonated with me beyond the confines of my predicament, and reminded me of separate feelings that I had felt in January of this year. That month, a similar sense of carpe diem was brewing within me, not related to love, but to my smartphone.
For a while, troubling thoughts had been sending out ripples and disturbing the stillness of the pond of my mind. I had become increasingly cognisant, along with society at large, of the detrimental impact of my smartphone on my being. Did I want to spend my life ruled by a smartphone? Did I want to spend my one life, a life that “before you know it” will be “worn out”, gazing aimlessly at a screen? The answer was, obviously, no.
My smartphone was a blighted talisman to me; a lightweight rectangle secure in my pocket, resting on my thigh, and accompanying me at every moment of the day. Historians of the eighteenth century have argued that objects, like tie-on pockets, were extensions of the self, which I see as a helpful way of thinking about the smartphone. The things my smartphone did for and to me were innumerous: texting, social media, reading the news, listening to music, navigating, checking emails, and so on.
These are all useful things and fit into the broad category of connecting me to the world, albeit in a disembodied, digital form. My smartphone connected me to friends, family, strangers, space, art, the public sphere. Connections are not inherently bad. However, such was my relationship with my smartphone that I could not disconnect. I was engulfed by the eternal scroll, the constant checking and re-checking for emails, the ceaseless yearning and scavenging for any crumb of stimulation that might come my way.
I knew what I was doing was bad; I was allowing the nectar of my youth and attention span to be sapped away. To draw on the passage quoted above, I lived as if “we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mock up, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between”. In reality, the days I live I will never be able to relive. The time had come to change my ways. I decided to get a dumbphone.
In truth, the act of buying a dumbphone was a discrete moment of a much more gradual transition away from my smartphone. Perhaps the first nail in the coffin of my smartphone was when I deleted TikTok a few years ago. But really, the most important transitionary period were the months leading up to my getting a dumbphone, a period of decommissioning my smartphone through conscious struggle. Instagram had gone. Email checking was down. My screentime got to about twenty to sixty minutes a day, sometimes less. I could have stopped there and been fine. Yet my desire for greater consciousness in life, combined with a good amount of time spent on r/dumbphones, drove me further still. I took the plunge and bought a Nokia 110.
The first days and weeks were like a rebirth. The magnetism of and cravings for my smartphone faded as it lay turned off in a drawer. I was living in the real world, a world that is quieter and slower. This is a world where I can behold a sunset or look at a perfectly formed, shiny conker lying on a bed of copper-coloured leaves, without reaching into my pocket to view it through a screen.
The benefits I have experienced are numerous and vary in significance. One prominent one is that I no longer scroll myself to sleep. Rather, I will read, or just go to sleep. My attention span has also inevitably improved, and this year I have read more books than I have in any other. My presence in the world is also greater. When I socialise or am in company, I no longer have a little figure on my shoulder whispering into my ear: “Psst! Have you checked if you have any new emails?”
It is worth adding some caveats, however. As I have written, my laptop has replaced some of my smartphone’s distractions with new, laptop-based distractions. Moreover, I have not been able to dispose of my smartphone entirely. Alas, as a runner I need my smartphone to upload my runs from my running watch so that my six followers on Strava can give me kudos. I will also use my smartphone to upload my biannual Instagram post, whilst as a historian who spends some of his time in an archive reading room, the quality of my iPhone’s camera and the ease of uploading photographs to my laptop is unrivalled. Likewise, my laptop’s camera has given up, and so for the infrequent online meetings that I have, my smartphone takes its place. If I am going on an extended trip, especially without my laptop, I will also take my smartphone to have access to the Internet, as was the case on a recent bikepacking trip.
But for the most part, my smartphone sits in a drawer. After a while, the period of revelation was replaced by a new normal, and this is a central point that I would like to make. I was only doing something that seems radical. In reality, I was returning to a state of being I had been in less than a decade ago, a state that not too long ago all of society occupied. Humans can adapt very quickly to new things. In the same way that most people have adapted to getting a smartphone, we can also adapt back to what was once ordinary. Likewise, whilst scrolling in a zombie-like state and not being able to disconnect from the potential of a notification has become the norm, living in a quieter world may also become normal again. For the things that seemingly require a smartphone, I have found that there is almost always a non-smartphone-based solution; Tesco do in fact still produce physical clubcards!
By taking a step out of the smartphone world, it has become apparent how utterly consumed we are by smartphones. I cannot but feel sadness when I see a poor soul consumed by their smartphone; my heart sinks when someone whips out their phone mid-conversation to check banal notifications. On the infrequent occasions when I do have my smartphone with me and get it out, my dear friend and I have acquired the habit of saying in unison: “SCREENAGER!” What can I say? At least we are self-critical.
I will end with a few words from Biruk Watling, an original member of the Luddite Club in Brooklyn. This club, which was itself inspired by a much older heritage, inspired the name of my column. They come from an article2 that I read a short time after I got my dumbphone, a piece that reassured me in my decision to (largely) give up my smartphone:
“I’m alive. You’re alive. It’s beautiful. That’s why we shouldn’t be consuming life through technology.”
We do not, or at least should not, need smartphones to exist. “Our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once,” so may the life we live neither be ruled by nor mediated through a smartphone.
- For context, this is the great dilemma which Elio, the protagonist of Call Me By Your Name, must face in his love-sickness. It is a reference to Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron. ↩︎
- You can access the article through Factiva with your Bodleian account. The article is by Alex Vadukul, titled “Now in College, Luddite Teens Don’t Want Your Likes” and was published on 11th February 2025. ↩︎