Thoughts on being technology free—could that be me?
And why I bought a map and a calendar.
A few days ago we were sitting inside a higgledy-piggledy cafe as a gaggle of old ladies squeezed by us armed with bags full of presents. My boyfriend said he couldn’t remember the last time he had gone Christmas shopping in real life. And apart from a handful of mad dashes to the shop to get a stocking filler or a last-minute gift, I couldn’t either.
Most of my Christmas shopping in my adult life has been done through a phone or laptop, with a quick search on Google or Amazon for “gifts for X” or by tapping a present request link sent through a WhatsApp message and hastily ordered. It takes about 15 minutes at most, and half the time I don’t even wrap the presents, simply sending the parcels straight off to the recipient's house.
Putting aside my consumerist sins for a moment (I'm embarrassed to admit ethical shopping choices usually falter when it comes to gift-giving) although it is incredibly easy to buy gifts this way, and is often the expected way of doing things (my family sends me all their gift requests on Amazon) it's starting to feel… wrong? Convenience is starting to feel wrong!
For me, convenience and smartphones go hand in hand. My entire life revolves around a glowing rectangle and I feel like my arm has been chopped off when I’m without it. As a geriatric Gen Z, I didn’t get a touch screen till I was slightly older than the youths of today–I know a few too many 7-year-olds with an iPhone–but since my first day of independence (Shopping! With a friend! And no parents!) there's been a smartphone glued to my hand. I do not know how to interact with the outside world without a smartphone.
I would like to iterate that sentence. I don’t know how to find my way around my city without my smartphone, I don’t know the bus or train times without my smartphone, and I don’t know any of my friends or family’s numbers by heart. If for some reason I found myself, alone, on the other side of Birmingham, without my iPhone, I would freak the fuck out. I genuinely don’t know how to interact with the outside world without my smartphone.
Recently I saw a quote akin to ‘before we would use the online world as an escape from reality, now we use reality as an escape from the online world’, and that hit me hard. My entire life is increasingly interconnected with the small rectangle in my hand and the larger rectangle on my desk. If my phone died, I would feel incredibly uneasy. But if the internet disappeared? If the electricity went off? I wouldn’t be able to function.
I’m not unique in this, most of us would struggle in these situations. Yet, it’s a reality we might have to deal with. Not only do we face internet outages as temperatures increase, but severe weather can wipe out internet connections for days at a time. It’s not just the internet though, extreme heat can create electricity shortages, leaving us to deal with regular city-wide blackouts.
This makes me cast my mind to the future, imagining a society where we could have allocated electricity times, left to make do in a Victorian-esque world for the rest of the day. To be fair, the idealist side of me can see where this could be a nice thing–time for everybody to switch off and spend time together, away from work and endless notifications. But to be anywhere near comfortable in this situation, I feel many of us are going to have to make changes to the way we live our lives now.
But it’s not just preparation for a potential future that makes me consider my use of smartphones and reliance on electronic devices. It’s the consideration of whether we actually want to live this way, or if it’s just been thrust upon us and told we should be grateful.
Are we happier this way, or is it just our ‘new normal’? How do you feel when you receive a gift you know has been shipped off Amazon the day before your birthday? Would you prefer your friend give you a hand-wrapped present you can tell they thought about, searched for, and personally picked out for you?
How about when you have four WhatsApp conversations at once as your partner or child sits across from you on the sofa, scrolling through their own shiny device, instead, imagine coming home from an invigorating and engaging conversation with a lovely friend to sit down with your family and talk about your respective days?
What if instead of ordering dinner off Deliveroo for an eye-watering price only for it to come and be disappointing, cold, or missing an item, you cook a delicious dinner from scratch, and eat it at the table?
I get it, I’m introverted, I’m tired. It’s easy to send gifts online, type conversation into our smartphones, and eat frozen food in front of the telly. But I can’t stop thinking about whether living this way is actually enjoyable, actually nourishing, or whether it’s just what we’ve done for the last decade or so and can’t imagine how else to live.
These thoughts have all been inspired by
from the formed most recent article “Sowing Anachronism: How to be Weird in Public, and Private”.I’ve danced with ideas of switching off the internet and using a flip phone multiple times over the last 3 years, but have been pulled back to the interconnected world each time, yet Ruth’s article, and the comment section below it, have given me so much inspiration and motivation that I’ve already found some pen pals, bought a calendar and a paper planner, and am pulling my dumb phone out the drawer and planning my 30-day digital detox.
I’m pretty good with things non-tech, I love reading and crafting, but it will be the unconscious habits. I need to learn how to leave the house without earphones blaring Spotify. I need to learn how to keep relationships alive without a barrage of daily WhatsApp messages. I need to learn how to wait in line without opening my iPhone to mindlessly tap on random apps.
Once I convinced my partner to do one 24-hour tech-free day with me, and as a couple who has spent 3 years working from home together, always able to fill spare moments with never-ending conversation, even we struggled to know what to do late in the evening without a bit of Netflix. I think it will take learning how to be a person again.
Because to resist the convenience and temptation of modern technology requires a special kind of dedication. You’re seen as weird, eccentric, or childish to want to step away from the iron claws of the modern world. As Tim Wu writes “The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows.”
Sure, it’s easier to binge a TV show on Netflix in one weekend than it is to wait for the weekly showing. But I can’t help but feel nostalgia for a time when you would watch a TV show and discuss it with your friends or colleagues the day after, trying to predict what might happen next. It sounds almost more enjoyable.
I’m not about to turn around and give up my washing machine and heated shower, but I think I will be assessing whether the convenience delivered to my life is always worth it, remembering that there can be joy found in doing things slow or difficult.
(I think it’s also important to note how modern conveniences have made lives harder for many women. Time-saving appliances for housewives often meant they were expected to fill their time with more, ‘easy’, tasks. Or when these time-saving devices initially allowed women to enter the workforce whilst still completing their ‘house duties’, women are now often just expected to do everything, all the goddamn time.)
Slowing down goes hand in hand with a step away from the ultra-conveniences of life. Our bodies are built to follow the natural rhythms of the year, slowing down as it gets to winter time, and getting busy again when we move into the spring and summer. Yet, as Joanna Macy wrote in Active Hope “Life has become a race in a way that is historically unprecedented”. Speed is great sometimes–like I said, we all love our washing machines–but this chronic hurrying takes a toll on our bodies. Short bursts of pressure are good for us, but constant stress is ruining us.
When discussing actions we take for our planet, Joanna goes on to write “Thinking only in terms of abbreviated time periods also seriously limits our sense of what can be achieved through us. To grow a project fruitful enough to be inspiring takes time. It is easy to ask “What’s the point” if we’re not seeing results after six months or a year. Imagine what would happen if we applied the same thinking after planting a tender young date palm or olive tree? These trees can take decades to become fully productive, but once they do they remain so for more than a century. When we move beyond thoughts of individual achievement and consider what our actions, if combined with the actions of others, can bring about, we open to a more gripping story.” If we all stopped consuming–content, products, everything–at the speed of light, we would be creating a much more habitable planet for all of us.
Another article shared on my feed by Ruth was
’s ‘Living On the Fringe’, on how most of us don’t want to have to think deeply or work up a sweat to figure things out–I mean, of course, we’re exhausted!– and instead he poses the question ‘What is truly beneficial for me?’ something I’ve already found myself repeating when making choices in my day-to-day life.Joel writes “When much of our lives is the result of others’ choosing, how much of it ends up being not what we truly desire, but what we’ve been told to desire? So much of our life is handed to us preassembled, and with the words USE AS INSTRUCTED printed on the tag. [...] These days we can choose self-driving cars and GPS navigation, premade meals delivered to our doorsteps, instant coffee, robot vacuum cleaners, and artificial brains that will do our homework for us. Why try hard when there’s a convenient way to do just about everything?”
It’s true! We have so much convenience, but it takes away from our innate human-ness. We miss so much satisfaction by having everything we want at the tap of a button. We struggle to find satisfaction–to find agency–in our lives because we are so disconnected from everything that we do. Joel goes on to write “When have I gone too far? What kind of world am I building for myself, for my children, and their children?” Something we should all consider. We can’t be surprised by iPad kids when they’re being raised by iPhone-addicted parents.
My biggest takeaway from all of this is that we don’t have to do things just because wider society expects us to, or because it is easier to. Yeah, you’re gonna piss off the waiter at the restaurant if you have a flip phone and can’t use their menu QR codes. Sure, you’ll have to wait an hour in an online phone queue sometimes because you don’t want to use their company WhatsApp chat. You probably will have to have about 100 conversations with your friends and family on why you’ve given up your car, homeschool your children, moved to the countryside, or do whatever it is you feel is right for your life. As Ruth writes “We can start from a bottom-up direction and instigate seeds of change by unsettling the assumptions about omnipresent technology use.”
However, I do think it’s easier to be in this mindset when you–as Joel described–feel a repulsion with the trends and the patterns of our peers. One of my big blockers is that I love pop culture, I love internet culture, I love youth culture, I love girl culture! I already feel so disconnected from the people around me I don’t want to give up this sliver of fun and connection with people my age. So I’m still trying to figure out how I can have both, but perhaps you’ll see me at the Olivia Rodrigo concert with a dumb phone and a paper planner poking out my back pocket in 2024.
P.S. If you enjoy my writing, you can buy me a coffee to fuel my work.
This is my last post of 2023! I am taking 2 weeks off and the next time you’ll hear from me is in the new year. I made my first post on Substack on January 6th 2023, and it’s incredible to see where it has taken me. Thank you all for reading and allowing me to make this writing thing my reality. If you would like to support my work in 2024, you can pledge a future subscription. 💕
Great post, Isabelle!
The thing about doing things the old fashioned and therefore weird way is that there's so much pleasure to be had in much of it, even though it's more work and/or takes more time. I took up letter-writing in a serious way in 2022, and I enjoy every part of it--I love pens and paper and writing by hand, I love stamps, and I love love love getting mail! I'm older than you, and I remember the day when it wasn't unusual to get (and write) several letters a week. I know a lot of people who miss those days, though many of them would probably say they don't have time to write letters anymore.
One of the things I find myself resenting is how useful old stuff--maps, for instance--have been made nearly obsolete by new technology--GPS and Google Maps and the like. As someone with a poor sense of direction, I appreciate being able to type an address into my phone and have a pleasant voice guide me to my destination. But because so many of us rely on our phones for directions, there are few paper maps to be had anymore. So what happens when your phone runs out of batteries or you'd like to figure out the route yourself? Or when the internet is out? Our devices are making us dependent on them in dangerous ways, IMHO.
I'm so glad to have had some contribution to your continuing journey on this wild road of "unmachining," Isabelle. (And also honoured to be mentioned alongside Ruth Gaskovski.) It is encouraging to see so many writing on this subject -- and more than just writing, but actually living, making decisions that are hard but worthwhile to build lives of beauty, deliberately choosing to believe in a better future that can come through the sweaty work we do today. I wish you the very best on this path we walk together!