One year without a smartphone

Essentially, it's been one year since I removed my smartphone. Let's just say I used to consume it a lot. It took so much from me, especially lifetime. And something happened, you can call it a turning point, that pushed me to drop the phone entirely.

I started with blocking apps, apps that block other apps essentially, but that didn't work. It worked for a bit, but then you kind of always figure out a way to go back to your previous state, or to unblock. Deleting social accounts, deleting apps. All of that doesn't work, didn't work with me. You can say I'm someone that is, I would say, not disciplined. I don't actually believe in discipline. Meaning, removing an app, I could easily reinstall it back once I need to.

But that didn't work, until one day I took the phone out. I even put it in a very hard place to get, I turned it off and stuff. When something starts to really block, let's say I need GPS, or let's say I need to call someone and I need my phone to do so, send a WhatsApp message or something. Doing the action that used to require the phone, the effort of it right now is much bigger. This is what people probably don't recognize. Actions have efforts. And when the effort of an action is more than the effort of actually taking back the phone, for me from the basement, then eventually I would just do some quick math and figure out that it's much easier to just get my phone.

And then one day I said, you know what, let me actually click the nuke button. And I did probably one of the bravest decisions I made at the time. I took the phone and really think of it as taking it to a completely different city, into a family's house.

All the screen time that I used to have on my phone moved to the Mac, or moved to the PC, or the other device. Not all of it, but 80% to 85% of it. Which means if I used to open Instagram on my phone, now I open it on my Mac. So for example, everyone I think takes their phone to their bed. You take your phone to your bed and you scroll, you probably watch some Netflix on your phone before sleep. Well, that kind of stuff started to move back to my laptop, which means I would take my laptop to bed with me.

So essentially, removing the smartphone didn't actually fix the problem.

One day, and this is probably turning point number two. One of the biggest changes probably in my life is that I work from home. And I don't know what happened exactly, exactly the reason why, but it was definitely a stroke of luck, because I think my internet went down. I don't know why, I don't know how. Probably one of those machines that do road work or stuff, they just hit one of the internet cables, the fiber cables, and it cut internet in the entire neighborhood. It just didn't want to work, and I need to work, because I work remotely. So I had to go out and go to a coffee shop or something, find a place, or a Starbucks, find a place to work, because I need internet asap.

I was very tired. I came to an apartment where there is no internet, there is no way to connect. And I was like, my mind was, I was feeling really weird. I was feeling super calm, but at the same time as if you stripped me from a ton of stuff. I tried to shadow box for no reason. I tried going from a place to a place in my apartment, just to walk around, because there is literally nothing to do.

Around that time the internet went back again. It went back, and I woke up one day and I found the wifi router is no longer red, it's green. And I was like, do I want to continue on this? Or do I want to keep my internet and continue whatever I was doing? And I made the decision. This is my agency. This is me making the decision. The wifi, when it went down, it was because of an event I have no control over. But here it's me. I took a knife and went to the wifi router, one of the fiber cables that you cannot find anywhere no matter if you search for it, unless you call the guys who put wifi in your home and they replace it. I just took the knife and cut one of the cables, and the wifi went back to red. And I took the wifi router, because I know for sure it won't work no matter what I do, and put it in a box, and just went back to no internet.

And I realized that the smartphone was actually not the problem. Removing the smartphone helped, because if I didn't remove the smartphone I would have switched easily back to data and everything would just go as nothing happened. So removing the smartphone helped, but it wasn't the smartphone that was the problem. It was the internet, but it also wasn't the internet, the problem itself. It was just the thing in the wrong place, which is my home.

I think the takeaway here is that you might think it is the phone. Everyone talks about the phone. But it's probably not the phone.

I think another thing that I would say, and I don't expect anyone to really like this or agree with me, is don't assume you're disciplined. Because yes, you might think it requires discipline, but don't do it thinking you're disciplined. Meaning, always assume you're a kid. If you're a kid and you say, well, I would just turn off the phone and put it outside in the basement, well, a kid would just be like, I would just get it from the basement. The problem with discipline is that it assumes that life is very stable or good, and life is not stable. So when something bad really happens, bad day at work, you get sick, or you're just depressed for some reason, that will not work. You will just go back to your phone. So that's the problem with discipline.

So I think these are the main three things. Do it for the right reason. Do it assuming that you're not really disciplined. And do it progressively.