I think I was 14 or 15 when my parents got a cell phone. We only had one and it was a gift to my parents from a friend. It had limited minutes and was only used when absolutely needed. I don't think texting was a thing yet or at least it wasn't a thing in our house. It was a flip phone and I remember being so shocked when I found out we had gotten a cell phone. It seemed like such an extravagance. My parents were very frugal people and every bill was carefully considered. When my parents moved from Virginia to Indiana when I was 15, it became our only phone. It was still mostly used like a home phone and we all shared the one cell phone. Calls had to be made after 7 in the evening so the minutes were free and it was used pretty sparingly. Eventually my parents got two cell phones and we began relying on them more and more. When I got engaged at 17 1/2, my fiancé bought me a phone on his phone plan. This was back in the days where people could talk for free to other people with the same phone company so it was nice instead of paying my parents for all the minutes we used on their phone plan. : ) I didn't give the number out except to my parents and I only used it to communicate with my fiancé. I was at home most of the time or working. I worked at the local library which was only 2 blocks from my house and I walked back and forth.
Once I got married and we moved out west, our phone company didn't work there so we had to get a new plan. This was before the days of unlimited talk and text and phone plans were still pretty expensive. We got one cell phone to share and I remember it was around $70/mo. I don't remember how many minutes or texts we had though. We had that for awhile but finances got really tight (this was before we knew how to budget) and our cell phone was an expense we could cut. We went without any phone for a few months. When we were able to add an expense, we got a home phone with free long distance for $20/mo. So much cheaper than our cell phone had been! It was a great learning time for us. We learned to plan in advance with people and we learned to communicate with each other more about meeting up at places. It was actually really nice. I didn't mind it near as much as I thought I would. There was a sense of peace with not being able to get ahold of people at any moment in time. It felt a bit invigorating to be living in a college town amongst everyone who had cell phones and be "off-grid" and not tied to them. Even though smartphones were not mainstream yet with most of our friends, it was still crazy how much everyone used their cell phones.
We kept a home phone for the next few years. It just became a normal way of life and we got to where we didn't even think about it. A few months before we moved to Montana, we got two prepaid flip phones. I think it cost us $75/mo for unlimited talk and text at that point. When we moved to Montana, our phones didn't work here. We went without a phone again until we could pay to have a home phone installed. I remember walking to the neighbor's once a week and paying to use their phone to call my mom. Since my phone calls were quick check-ins just to hear her voice, I wrote her letters every day and mailed them once a week. We got a home phone fairly soon after moving but it was some months later before we got cell phones again. At that point we were making a lot more money and were "up and coming" in the world and technology was one of those things that we hadn't really had before, mostly due to financial reasons. When we bought cell phones again in 2012, we got smartphones. We did them on payments through Verizon and really thought we were coming up in the world! Looking back, our cell phone bill was astronomical but at the time we could pay the bill so we didn't think too much of it.
2013 is when I deleted my Facebook account and when I got the first inklings that maybe all this technology and connectedness was not the best for us. I've never had games on my phone or been an online gamer. We've never had a tv, Netflix, or Alexa. We aren't a very "techy" home, and yet these devices have woven themselves into the very fabric of our lives where we are dependent on them at best, addicted at worst. Technology was something I hadn't given much thought to. It was just progress. It made "life easier" supposedly and no one else thought there was anything wrong. It seemed the natural progression of coming up in the world or keeping up with the times. Yet, when I deleted my Facebook account I was met with what I knew was withdrawal symptoms. I couldn't find anyone who was talking about this or who had gotten off of social media at the time (they either hadn't ever had one or still had one) and I didn't know that you could actually be addicted to Facebook, a smartphone, etc. The closest thing I had heard about was video game addiction but I'd never been a gamer so I thought that wasn't applicable. I searched and searched and didn't find much.
When my daughter was little, I was given some little Praise Baby and some Curious George dvds. I was never allowed to watch tv growing up and neither was my husband but we weren't sure where we stood on it for our own children. The dvds seemed pretty harmless and she enjoyed them and they gave me some moments to get things done and so I thought they must be fine. Besides, everyone else was sitting their kids in front of a TV for unlimited amounts of time and compared to that, it seemed very conservative to let her watch a couple DVDs on the laptop once in awhile so that I could get things done. We have gone through seasons of having internet at home and not having it depending on finances and also availability. We have lived places where it just wasn't available (yes, there are still places like that!) or what was available was extremely expensive and we just decided to forgo the expense. Along with that, we have had seasons of letting the kids watch DVDs or online movies and not doing it at all. We started noticing something very disturbing to us. When we let our kids watch, they immediately became grouchy and whiny, they couldn't think of a thing to do besides watching another movie, they became more sullen and more likely to fight with each other. The transformation in them was startling! Our children get along really well, have great imaginations and can keep themselves occupied for hours. They are happy and fun to be around, having great animated conversations, and eager to help with whatever needs done. They enjoy learning and doing crafts. But once a movie turns on, they turn into little zombies that are glued to the screen and afterwards they seem lethargic and out of sorts.
These drastic changes were alarming to us. We have done seasons of not watching anything (games and apps were never allowed) or letting them watch one movie on a Saturday morning while my husband and I enjoyed coffee. These seemed drastic compared to most of the families we knew who saw nothing wrong with their kids watching on phones, playing on iPads, and sitting in front of tvs for long amounts of time. We would start to doubt that it was really that bad and it seemed like we already had set more extreme boundaries than most people. We would start letting them watch more again and we would immediately see a change in their behavior and see them go through a sort of withdrawal when we would inevitably put an end to it. We were very selective with what they watched and it still didn't seem to matter. I love being around our children, but they turn into different people when they have been allowed to "zone out" and exist in another world. This is very scary.
I began to wonder what it was doing to me, if it had this kind of effect on my children? Was I turning into a digital zombie, too, and didn't realize it? I don't remember when I first started considering leaving my smartphone behind. It's been a thought I've had on and off for many years. I'd always thrown it out as not being possible, not being practical, not being convenient, not wanting to be the "weird" one, or about any other excuse in the book. I used it, I needed it, I liked it. I have researched smartphones and living without them, smartphone addiction, and social media off and on for years. It's been something very intriguing to me but for a long time there was very little research or conclusive evidence that I could readily find on these topics. However, the little bit that I could find was incredibly disturbing. But what to do with this information? Everyone else seemed to be unbothered by what was happening in this digital age, or if they were, they simply complained about it and kept on using social media or their smartphones.
I was increasingly becoming aware of my own phone usage, connectedness, and dependance. In 2018 I bought a "dumb phone" and decided I needed to take charge of my phone usage and that I didn't want to be modeling this kind of behavior for my children. I didn't want to be distracted, I didn't want to be texting or looking up something on a little handheld device. I wanted to be in control and I felt like I was not. That scared me. I felt like I was missing time with my kids, taking pictures with my phone instead of enjoying the moment, conversing with friends and family across the country instead of those in my own house. My youngest son had just been born and I made the knee-jerk decision to ditch my smartphone and get a dumb phone. I was not prepared at all for the level of withdrawal I experienced. I was fidgety and anxious. I kept looking at my "dumb" phone every few seconds to see if something new had come in and the fact that I couldn't do anything on it but make calls or hammer out time consuming texts was driving me up the wall. Within a couple of days I had put my SIM card back into my smartphone and life carried on the same as it had been. We were in a very hard season in West Virginia, living on minimum wage, and I did not have the emotional and mental capacity to push through the roadblocks and withdrawal. It was a discouraging conclusion to my experiment.
These past few years have been extremely clarifying to us about our priorities and goals. We have continued to fine tune our intentionality with serving God and serving others. We have honed our hospitality skills. We have gotten rid of more distractions and begun to pay more and more attention on where we put our focus. We streamlined our possessions and routines. Once the outward stuff was taken care of, I began examining things internally. Most of you saw me struggle with some of that process in deleting social media at the end of 2020. Deleting social media brought a great clarity and focus to my life. My mind quieted and my thoughts were my own. The great cacophony of noise was stilled. I have not regretted it once.
With the deletion of social media, my phone time greatly decreased but over the last few months it has slowly crept up again. It's all "important" things, I tell myself. Researching things, reading interesting blogs, checking our bank account or budgeting app, viewing inspiring and beautiful videos on YouTube, finding projects and ideas on Pinterest, and texting with friends and family. All good things. Any time a thought popped into my head, I looked it up. I checked the weather app to find out the weather, I picked it up to check the time, or checked it to see if I'd missed a text. Too often I would be staring down as my kids were talking or showing me a lego creation. My attention was fractured and I felt like I had tabs running in the background constantly.
Little by little, my phone usage increased almost imperceptibly. It was the first thing I checked in the morning, often checking email by impulse/habit before I even got out of bed. I would check the weather for the day, maybe our banking app or budget. It was the last thing I would check at night before sleep, often staying up later than I should reading some blog or article. It was all enriching stuff, interesting, and educational. I told myself that it lined up with my priorities of learning and growing and keeping in touch with people. I carried it around with me and if I left it in the other room, I was keenly aware of its absence. I checked it just to see if there were any new texts and as soon as a thought popped into my head, I would reach for my phone to find a product, the definition of a word, or what an item cost. I would search for recipes or books or ideas. Instead of my early morning coffee time being a relaxing way to greet the day, I would slowly sip coffee while scrolling through my phone to read an article about something I was interested in. That article would lead to another or I'd think of this, that, or the other to look up. Before I knew it, my time in the morning that should have invigorated me for the day ahead, was gone and I was left with an empty cup to face the demands of the day. I often felt grumpy, unmotivated, or distracted as I started my day.
I had tried things to curb my usage. I didn't have alerts on my phone and I didn't have many apps. I tried keeping it in another room and setting time limits. These all were temporary fixes that didn't last, and in my research I've found that this is quite often the case for others as well. As my own habits were bothering me, I began noticing more and more the effects of addiction and overuse all around me. My husband's dear family who grew up without any tv or technology and used to be a lively, jovial family that played games and talked late into the night, now sit around the living room in silence with each person staring down at their own smartphone. I saw the devastating effects of lives lived digitally, especially last year with everyone quarantined, as people realized how little community they really had in their lives. I watched so many older people struggle with depression and get sucked into the social media vortex to try to keep alive some form of social life. I began seeing these things simultaneously alongside my continued research. I watched short videos and full length movies, I read blogs, articles, and books. All of it pointed to what I already knew in my gut but needed to learn in my mind. The more I learned the more I saw the devastation around me and in my own life. I thought we had been careful with technology and yet, here I was seeing signs of addiction in my own life and the lingering uncomfortableness from my failed 2018 experiment.
The more research I did, the less I believed that smartphones or social media were simply "tools" to be used and how we used them determined whether they were good or bad. This is a common thought prevalent today, "Oh, they are simply tools and we have the power to use them well or for our destruction." people say. And yet when you look at the research and how there is no difference in our brain between using hard drugs or using a smartphone, it makes you look at things in a different light. I wouldn't give my children drugs so why would I give them a smartphone? And if I wouldn't give my children a smartphone, why was I using one? Another common excuse that's often made, and I've made it myself as well, is that yes, we could go without a smartphone - we just don't want to, but we definitely could if we needed to. However, I knew from my short 2018 experiment that the smartphone pull was stronger than I wanted to even admit to myself, and honestly, I was scared to find out if I was controlling it or if it was controlling me. This thought nagged at me in the back of my mind and I knew that I had to find out sooner or later.
So, September 8th a slim little package carrying an unlocked basic Nokia phone arrived at my doorstep and with little fanfare, I slipped the SIM card out of my iPhone and into the back of a phone that can only call and text. My second experiment of dipping my toes in the (mostly) uncharted waters of living without a smartphone had begun. I am happy to report that this has been a much more successful experiment so far and I'm anxious to dive deeper into this subject in the coming weeks.