I bricked my phone for two months: here's what I learned

October 18, 2024 Ryan Vaughn

I’m writing you today on the heels of a really cool experiment. I turned my smartphone into a dumbphone, to see A) if I could do it given how plugged in I am at work, and B) if I’d like it.

Well, it’s been over two months now, and here’s what I’d like to report:

I bricked my phone for two months. Here’s what I learned.

For my 30th birthday present, Laura and I went to summer camp for adults. I was most excited about archery and the ropes courses—because who doesn’t love firing a bow and arrow or swinging 25 feet from the ground!?!—but what really struck me about this camp were the rules.

At Camp Grounded, there were no real names (my camp name was “Skittles” for obvious reasons). No talking about “W” (their pet name for work). No ages, no talking about time, and most importantly, no technology. Through these rules, the staff created a 72-hour nest in which we were 100% present.

It was incredible.

Laura and I were still riding that high when we got to SFO, but after breezing through security, almost everyone in the Delta terminal had their heads cocked downward, staring at the little lighted bricks they held in their hands. After just a weekend without technology, coming back to the real world was jarring.

Even before we got home, I committed to leaving my phone in the car any time I went places. Dinners, dates. Any time I went to socialize with people. That lasted a month or two, and then, by degrees, I started picking it back up.

Nine years have gone by since then, and a few months ago my son called me out at dinner. “Dad, you’re always on your phone.”

It’s funny how you can have two kids, quit smoking, scale a company, divorce that company, sell that company, take 18 months off to do inner work, stay at a monastery, introduce and then let go of psychedelic work, start another company, and even quit drinking caffeine, how you can change seemingly everything, and the one thing that stays the same is your addiction to your phone.

This shit is insidious. Like folks working at Phillip Morris in the ‘90s, people are paid an awful lot of money to make sure you stay hooked.

So I decided—again—it was time to get off the sauce.

Options

There are a surprising number of cool “dumbphones” designed to solve exactly this problem. Phones with access to maps, messages, notes, calendar, and that’s pretty much it. My favorite one was the Wisephone, which looked and felt like an iPhone crossed with a Kindle. I preordered one, but then a friend sent me a Reddit post outlining a specific, detailed process by which you can dumb-down your iPhone. It saved me $500 and let me keep my banking apps, Uber, and my Kindle app, utilities I would have had to sacrifice with the Wisephone.

So I bricked my iPhone.

I deleted all the fun stuff. Safari? Gone. Social media? Gone. The Athletic, Fantasy Football, and my DirectTV app? Gone, gone, gone. The process of getting rid of the apps was actually pretty cathartic. The hardest one… email…gone. That one took some doing.

I was able to embiggen the apps that I wanted to keep in the process and add a mindfulness quote to each day at the top, courtesy of WakingUp (yet another awesome utility that would have been kaput with a Wisephone). Everything else was gone, and short of redownloading everything (even the App Store is hidden deep within and has no icon anymore), my phone was exceedingly dumb.

Here’s a picture of my new homescreen. Aahhhh…

(yes, I still do get text notifications)

What happened?

I was nervous, at first, that I was going to regret it. And for the first couple days, I did. I had plenty of moments in which I picked up my phone to check something, only to realize I couldn’t (these moments were mostly awesome, because I got the little dopamine hit from having done a “good thing” by getting rid of the apps, but sometimes not having immediate access to something was a PITA). But honestly, it’s been over a month now, and the only real downside has been when my kids ask me to look stuff up.

If you have little kids (Kas is now 8, and Leo is 6), I presume yours also ask you to look up the value of their Pokemon cards constantly, or check out which Lego set they want for their birthday for the 13th time. This still happens, post smartphone, only now since I actually can’t help them, they have to ask their mom.

So yeah, there’s one downside. But it’s a downside for Laura (sorry babe).

Other than that, within a week or two, I fully adapted to my phone no longer being a window to the infinite. Instead it became a tool. Like a Swiss Army knife. Accordingly, my phone time has gone down from about five hours per day (yuck) to about 90 min/day. And the vast majority of that 90 minutes comes down to three apps: Kindle, Messages, and DuoLingo (learning Spanish).

I still keep up with sports, check my email, and look up stuff on the internet. I just use different devices for those things. And while that initially seemed problematic, it’s actually been profoundly positive.

The cost of the infinite glass

My old CTO told me that the best engineers are language agnostic. The hacks learn a single language, PHP or Ruby or Swift, and then try to build everything with that language. But the real 10x programmers know how computers work, and how languages work in the abstract, so that they can figure out the optimal language for the project and build accordingly. A modern version of the adage, often attributed to Abraham Maslow: “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

A month removed from using a smartphone, it seems to me that smartphones do a lot of good things. But one bad thing they do is they turn us into hack programmers. Only instead of that only applying to building apps, they turn us into nail-hunting zombies for our entire lives.

Want to check sports? Grab your phone. Need to look up an email? Grab your phone. Call a cab? Grab your phone. Bored? Grab your phone. Lonely? Tired? Sad? Excited? Grab your phone. There’s a solution to all those emotions and more in that little fucker.

About a week into my experiment, I started noticing these moments in which I’d grab my phone before I even knew what I wanted to do next. At first, I was disoriented without that crutch. I’d finish something, and since I didn’t have anything else to do for a while, I’d automatically think, “I should check my email/fantasy team/Slack/whatever,” and then realize that, to do any of that, I’d need to hike my ass into my office or into the kitchen to get my iPad. I’d introduced a layer of choosing the right language, I realized, and the friction, more often than not, felt like too much trouble (empathy for the 10x programmers).

So I just sat there, toes in the metaphorical (or literal) grass.

And I looked around.

They call the period of time between stimulus and response the “sacred pause.” And a big outcome of meditation is to lengthen that pause, enabling you to stop reacting to shit in your environment and start consciously responding.

What years of meditation does for your brain, so does giving your smartphone up for a month.

Real Renunciation

People always look shocked when I tell them I don’t use caffeine. Same with alcohol, pot, or anything else.

“Holy shit,” they say. “I could never do that. You must have incredible willpower to do such a good thing.”

There’s this idea, it seems, that the only reason someone would stop drinking is because it’s the right thing to do. But ask any alcoholic if doing “the right thing” has ever helped them get sober one iota. Not at all. People don’t get sober from a moralistic perspective. And if they do, they don’t stay sober, or their sobriety is so fragile as to be dangerous. Just one crack in the facade of being a right, moral, upstanding sober person, and it all comes crumbling down.

No, people don’t abstain from things like alcohol, caffeine, and indeed, smartphones because it’s the right thing to do. It’s not. People abstain because it helps them in some way. The key is becoming sensitive enough to the entire field of an experience to really feel the impact.

At this point it feels better to me to be sober than to drink. It feels better to not drink multiple cups of anxiety every day with breakfast. And it feels better to have moments of conscious choice interspersed throughout my life, when I’m not sure what I want to do, so I’m forced to check in with the beauty of each individual moment and what would make it even more perfect, rather than automatically defaulting to the sparkly, bing-y, buzzy, everything pill.

I don’t care at all if it’s the right thing to do or not. It feels better to be more present to my life, and my renunciation of these things is entirely self-serving. And that’s the only type of renunciation that’s ever worked for me.

Bottom line

I’ve had a dumb iPhone for more than two months. The experience has been easier than I expected. I have no plans to go back.

All those apps I thought I needed…it turns out I don’t need them so much. Email has been the hardest to give up, followed by Safari. Beyond that, I really don’t miss anything else. I have simply adapted to using different technology depending on what I’m trying to accomplish, and I really value that friction for the reasons I described earlier.

I am also glad I bricked my iPhone rather than switching to a Wisephone or similar, because I get to keep utilities like Uber, bank apps, etc, which I’d prefer to have. But I recognize that for some, it may be necessary to switch phones to get off the sauce, and if that was me I’d gladly switch phones and deal with having to carry a wallet.

But the biggest eye opener from the experiment was learning just how much I use my phone to avoid various emotions. Boredom is the obvious one, but also annoyance, anger, sadness, hunger, and even, believe it or not, joy. It’s not worth it to me anymore to sacrifice the emotional soundtrack of my life to pacify myself with political news or sports scores.

So, smartphones have now joined alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, caffeine, and pretty much every other way I’ve tried to modify the volume on my emotions throughout my life. And I feel more present, more alive, and more grateful for it.

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