On a cloudy evening in June, after a leisurely dinner with an old friend, I told her I’d better call an Uber and pulled out my little black brick of a phone. “What is that?” she asked. It’s a Light Phone, I explained. A dumbphone, essentially. And technically, I wasn’t using it to order an Uber — it couldn’t do that — but to call my husband to ask him to order one for me.
Typically, after my husband orders the car, he texts me a screenshot with the license plate and wait time. This time, though, the picture didn’t come through. I sent a throwaway text to see if I could prod the message out. Still nothing. Sheepishly, I called my husband back. It was after 10 p.m. The man just wanted to go to bed.
I traded in my smartphone for a dumbphone (first an old-school Nokia, then a Light Phone III) over a year ago. And from a certain perspective, my experiment has been a success. I spend less time scrolling. My children are no longer in constant competition with X and Gmail for my attention. Life without a distraction machine at my fingertips feels lighter in the way I’d hoped. But with time it’s become hard to ignore the cost of my extended digital detox — not to me, exactly, but to everyone else.
I anticipated that not having a smartphone would make me more reliant on other people — perhaps without Google Maps on hand, I’d have to ask an actual human for directions. And sure, that’s happened. But I think it’s more accurate to say that I’ve become more reliant on other people’s smartphones. Instead of ordering from the bar or printing out movie tickets ahead of time, I inevitably wind up having somebody else scan the QR code menu or pull up the e-tickets. It’s still smartphones all the way down; I’ve just exempted myself from the costs of carrying one around.
Comparing notes with fellow dumbphone users, I’ve learned my experience is pretty common. Alex Dobrenko, a humorist and married father of two who gave an early iteration of the Light Phone a shot, told me that his wife bore the brunt of his Luddite lifestyle. She became something like his secretary, the person people contacted when struggling to reach Mr. Dobrenko and the person Mr. Dobrenko called to email attendees when he was running late for a meeting.
Katie Marquette, an audio producer and writer living on a farm in Maryland, told me that her dumbphone made replying to texts such a slog that she fell out of touch with several friends during the year she used it. And she found it impossible to keep up with the many text-based school and parent group chats where so much holiday party planning and playdate coordination takes place these days.
I can relate. The very traits that make my phone such an effective means of disconnecting also make it an unreliable tool for getting in touch with me. By design, my phone doesn’t do much, so I often forget to check or charge it. Plus, it’s a bit clunky to use, so I’m slow to respond to messages.
Even in real-life social situations, the fact that I don’t have a smartphone means I am often little better than dead weight. Who’s going to take the card payments at the school fund-raiser? Who’s going to double-check the restaurant’s hours? Who’s going to message the Airbnb owner to let her know we’re on our way from the airport? The answer is always: not Steph. To forgo smartphones in a world optimized for them is to become someone in constant need of accommodation, but for totally self-imposed reasons. Like adopting a highly restrictive diet without any of the health issues that might justify the need to organize every dinner out around it.
At Ms. Marquette’s children’s preschool, parents are expected to scan a QR code when they drop off and pick up their kids. Without a smartphone, she had to interrupt a teacher to manually check her children in and out. “It really wasn’t fair to them, frankly,” she said.
Notably, it was not hardhearted employers or faceless corporate overlords whom Mr. Dobrenko and Ms. Marquette worried they were letting down. It was the people looking after their children, fellow parents, neighbors and friends. More than anyone, it was their families.
This is perhaps why, though family considerations were often the impetus for putting the smartphone down, they were also the reason for picking it back up. Forgoing a smartphone may allow you to feel more present with your loved ones in any given moment, but it also hamstrings your ability to actually be there for them during times of need.
There were two moments that forced Mr. Dobrenko to recognize as much. First, his car broke down. When he called AAA, the service texted him a link he needed to open to confirm his location — something his dumbphone could not do. Then, just a few weeks later, his wife, who was pregnant with their second child, went into labor. It was a time when leaning on his wife to pick up the slack on household communication simply wasn’t going to work. He switched the SIM card back at the hospital. “I haven’t gone back since,” he said.
I don’t think any of this means smartphone-free living is untenable. On the contrary, perhaps the only way for us to recreate a society in which we don’t have to be tethered to these brain-rotting devices is for someone to take up the mantle of being a pain in the butt. After all, if no one is willing to opt out — to be the one customer without the ability to scan a QR code, or the one parent at school who can’t be reached via app — then opting out becomes, well, not an option.
Unlike most of those I spoke to for this piece, I have not reversed my decision to ditch my smartphone. Not yet anyway. Throughout my interviews, I oscillated between the belief that my current setup is too selfish to last and the conviction that it is too blissfully liberating to give up.
One night last month, I walked into my kitchen to find my phone sitting on the counter in a puddle of spilled water. I left it in a bowl of rice overnight, and it was working fine by morning. But during the intervening hours, I was forced to consider the possibility that I’d need a new phone. Only then did I realize my days without a smartphone are numbered. I signed up for life as a perpetual inconvenience once. I’m not sure I can do it again.
Stephanie H. Murray is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and writes the newsletter Family Stuff.
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