Not long ago I went to see a play called Apples In Winter. Before the show, I was wondering what year the play was set in, so I reflexively reached into my pocket before remembering that my phone didn't have a web browser. I didn't look up the answer to my question. I didn't notice any notifications, and I didn't end up getting distracted by something else on my phone either. It was liberating.
All of this happened because I put my smartphone in a drawer and used a couple of “dumb” phones for a while instead as an experiment. I tried two devices—the Nokia 2780, a flip phone complete with T9 predictive typing and an FM radio, and the Light Phone II, a purpose-built digital detox device with an E Ink screen and no web browser.
There’s no end of articles claiming that smartphone usage is related to mental health issues, and I know from personal experience that simply having a phone in my pocket can leave me feeling less connected to the world around me. I wanted to see if using a simpler device would leave me feeling grounded. I didn’t set up any elaborate rules, I just swapped out my SIM card and tried to pay attention.
To be clear, I don't think my phone, even when it's a smartphone, causes all my problems. It's easy, when writing an article like this, to come across as a Luddite, or at the very least the sort of deep thinker who saw that culty Look Up video from 2014 and found it compelling. That's not me. I wasn't expecting any magic; I was just curious. I'm the sort of person who constantly questions my relationship with technology. So is my friend, Katie Redderson-Lear, who joined me in trying out these phones. We took turns. I used The Light Phone II for two weeks while she used the Nokia, after which we traded.
I'd love to tell you this experiment changed my life—that's probably the version of this story that would get the most clicks. The truth, annoyingly, is more complicated. I noticed some habits I'd rather not have, sure, but I also noticed something that might be obvious: Modern phones are pretty freaking useful, and life is comparatively worse without them.
Phones Are Portable Anxiety Machines
Most Americans think they spend too much time on their phones, according to a 2022 Gallup poll. And the numbers are very high among young people—81% of people between the ages of 18 to 29 report spending “too much” time on their phones, up from 58% in 2015.
I know I share this concern. It's really easy for me to pick up my phone to do something specific and end up doing something else entirely, before I even realize it's happening.
I talked with Dr. Larry Rosen, a Professor Emeritus at California State University and author of The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, about this conundrum. "The issue becomes what grabs your attention," Dr. Rosen told me in a phone interview that I conducted using the Nokia 2780. "Even if you open your phone to do something specific and it's still open, these icons jump out at you. What it's doing is directing your brain to say, 'Oh I have to look at this.'"
Having your attention diverted by a device isn't a coincidence. Tech giants spend a lot of money to make sure it happens.
"These companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just on creating the app icons," said Rosen. "They bring in focus groups. They hire psychologists. [They] do everything they can to make their icon stand out to you."
That's just the icons on your home screen. The apps themselves are designed to keep as much of your time as possible, and we all know from experience that they're effective at it. And then there's the social pressure.
"We have trained those around us, we have set expectations that say if you try to connect with me I will get back to you as soon as I possibly can," said Rosen. "We've set up this expectation, and it is an expectation that we cannot possibly fulfill on a long-term basis without having psychological ramifications."
So phones make us anxious that we're missing out on something and that we're letting people down. That, Rosen told me, has all sorts of mental health ramifications.
The Joy of Missing Out
The Light Phone II was designed to address exactly these concerns, which is why I wanted to try it for this experiment. I knew a little bit about the device before trying it out, but by far the first thing I noticed is how small it is. All the women I showed it to commented that it would actually fit in their pockets, which I gather is a big deal.
The Light Phone doesn't need a lot of screen space because it can't do much beyond texting and phone calls. There are no apps and no app store, but you can add a few purpose-built "tools" including maps, a calendar, podcasts, and music. There is no support whatsoever for social networks, news, or anything you can mindlessly scroll. The idea is for the phone to be a tool for specific purposes, and that's it.
The second thing I noticed was the display, which uses black-and-white E Ink. It's easy to read these kinds of displays in bright sunlight, though it also means you can't really look at photos or videos. To make up for the lack of color, any texts you get with media attached are forwarded to your email address. The keyboard is tiny and hard to type on, but the audio quality is remarkable. I ended up calling more people than before, and so did Katie, who was a little shocked to have voice calls back in her social life.
One surprise benefit of not having a browser is that spam texts become hilarious because there isn't an option to click on the links they send.
Flipping Off
I enjoyed the flip phone a lot less than The Light Phone II. The Nokia 2780, powered by KaiOS, is somewhere between a smartphone and the intentionally minimalistic Light Phone. Instead of not offering apps, a camera, or a browser, it offers worse versions of those things. That did, on balance, lead to using my phone less, but more out of annoyance than intention.
And then there was the typing.
T9 predictive typing was cutting edge at the turn of the century. It allows you to type using only the number buttons on the dial pad. Every number on a dial pad has three or four letters on it, like the number 2 has ABC. Before T9, you'd have to press each button multiple times to type a letter (press 2 twice for B, for example). With T9 you press each number button only once and your phone “predicts” what you mean to type. It was an improvement at the time, granted, but imperfect.
Katie had used T9 in the past, so she had an idea of how often it's wrong and how painful it can be to use. The experience was worse for me because my first cell phone was a smartphone, so didn't have any expectations, much less experience. As a result, I basically stopped responding to texts. The call quality, on the other hand, was spectacular, so sometimes I'd ignore my millennial heritage and call people to reply to their messages.
The Wonder Killer
Back to the play I mentioned at the beginning of this story. My wife Kathy and I were wondering which year the play was set in. Looking up that information online may have scratched an itch, but it also would have left me looking at my phone instead of my wife. Instead, we tried to figure out the year based on what we could see and hear—the actual kitchen appliances on the stage, the clock projected onto the wall, and the music in the preshow playlist.
My closest friends have a term for pulling out a smartphone during the middle of a conversation: The Wonder Killer. Instead of enjoying the speculation that makes for some of the best conversations, having a smartphone lets you find the objective answer. Conversation over.
My favorite part about using The Light Phone was not having a Wonder Killer on hand. I felt the joy of not knowing and not being able to find out multiple times. I couldn't interrupt a conversation to look up something, which meant I had no choice but to continue socializing, which meant I had more fun with people. At the same time, though, I could still text or call someone if I needed to. It's a nice balance, but not perfect.
What I Missed About My Smartphone
Life without my smartphone wasn't perfect. There are real, tangible benefits I missed out on during this experiment. A lot of my day-to-day messaging happens in Signal, Discord, and Slack, all platforms I can't use on The Light Phone II or the Nokia flip phone. It became a particular problem for my family in Canada, as receiving SMS texts from the US isn't necessarily free for them.
Perhaps my biggest annoyance was that I couldn't text from my computer anymore. Typically I use Google Messages to send and receive texts on my computer, which requires an Android phone nearby with an active SIM card. With my smartphone gone, the app on my PC couldn't work. So not only was texting more annoying on the smaller keyboard of The Light Phone or because of the need to rely on using T9 on the flip phone, but I also couldn't use my mechanical keyboard to type even if I wanted to. I became a lot less social, at least with SMS contacts.
Speaking of being social, seeing people in person is nice but made harder without reliable directions. The Light Phone II can do turn-by-turn directions, but not as well as Google in my opinion. The flip phone does offer Google Maps, but the interface is clumsy.
Mostly, though, Katie and I missed taking photos. With a dumb phone, there are no high-quality pictures taken on a whim, no selfies, no capturing everyday memories. The Light Phone doesn't have a camera and the flip phone has a bad one.
A lot of annoyances came up, as well. Katie's alarm clock requires a smartphone to reprogram it, so she had to reengage her phone just to make sure she woke up on time. I annoyed a bank clerk during a visit because, apparently, adding a credit card to my online account would have been faster if I had a device with access to the account with me.
Security is an issue, too. Most of my logins are secured using app-based multi-factor authentication, which is far more secure than SMS-based authentication. You need a smartphone to use authenticator apps, however, meaning I occasionally ended up digging out my smartphone to log into an account. I also missed being able to use encrypted communication apps, like Signal.
Finally, I missed having access to my to-do list and calendar at all times. There's no TickTick client for the Nokia phone or The Light Phone II, so if I wanted to remember a task that I needed to do, I wrote it down on a piece of paper and added it to my to-do list later from my computer. It wasn’t optimal, and I’m sure I forgot things because of it.
All of these hassles meant I kept my smartphone nearby when I was at home for listening to podcasts and things of that nature. It was just easier.
No Surprise: More Free Time
It wasn't all bad. I spent a lot less time mindlessly scrolling on my phone. I mostly noticed the difference when I was out and about. At home, it's easy to reach for my laptop or tablet, but I didn't have anything to scroll when I was out of the house. Katie said she reached for a game controller instead, but eventually lost interest and decided to be more intentional with her time. Eventually, she used more of her free time to sketch and read, which she felt good about.
I also found myself being more intentional with my time. In particular, I noticed that I didn't end up accidentally scrolling through Reddit after picking up my phone to do a specific thing, which left me more time to read and go for walks. My lack of scrolling also meant I had better conversations with my wife in the evening.
Put simply, there were things about my smartphone that I missed and things that were better without smartphones. Upsides and downsides.
When It Comes to Phones, We're Still In the 1950s
Nick Allen, a professor of psychology and the director of the Center for Digital Mental Health at the University of Oregon, is currently conducting an experiment that will examine such habits and how they influence mental health. The study, a partnership with Google, is actively recruiting Android users.
"We're looking at patterns of how people use their Android smartphones and how it impacts their well-being and mental health," he told me, adding that it will be one of the first such studies to use actual data from phones instead of survey results. The idea is to study how certain patterns of usage affect sleep, exercise, social engagements, and various other aspects of well-being. The problem, according to Allen, is we still don't have a lot of data on how our devices are affecting us, something he explained using a metaphor.
"Safety features in cars today are radically different than what they were 70 years ago," he said. They improved over time thanks to research. "The personalized computing device that people will use in 20 years will be much more informed by research on how to minimize the risks and dangers."
I liked this analogy, so I asked what decade of car design he'd compare contemporary smartphones with. "I think we're probably in the 1950s," said Allen. "The front seat has seat belts but the back seats might not, so all the kids are rolling around. We've got these devices and are starting to recognize that we should be building safety features into them."
Cars, of course, didn't just change because of innovation. The rate of motor vehicle deaths was almost double then what it is today, which made the need for change clear to some. Allen mentioned that academic research was supplemented by advocacy by people like Ralph Nader, which in turn eventually led to safety features becoming mandatory. It remains to be seen whether the mental health risks of smartphone usage will be mitigated by similar activism and regulation.
How I'm Changing My Phone Habits Now
It's hard to write this sort of article without sounding like a Luddite. It's even harder if the headline for said article promises a return to the flip phone era—an imaginary, simpler time before Instagram when people actually talked to each other and there were no social problems whatsoever. I wasn't expecting that. I was just hoping to explore my relationship with my phone.
And I learned a lot. I wanted to take the best part of using The Light Phone II—the clarity of purpose—back to my Android device. In particular, I learned that the icons on my home screen are a huge potential time sink because I can't help but reflexively tap them, as Dr. Rosen mentioned.
After this experiment, I installed a text-based launcher called OLauncher on my Android phone that gets rid of app icons. OLauncher lets me have a few apps on my home screen, but they're all described in text instead of with a graphic. I made sure nothing habit-forming was there, only single-purpose tools like my calendar, to-do list, and Google Maps. If I want to use any other app, I have to search for it. OLauncher introduces just enough friction between me and scrolling that I find myself doing it less.
I've experimented with a few other changes, like setting my phone to grayscale, but the main thing I learned is to actively think about what I'm using my phone for. At one point, Katie told me she was tired of the social media and news algorithms washing over her brain. "I want to be a human doing human things, and I want to remember that more often," she said. I feel the same way.
Switching to a dumb phone didn't magically solve every problem in my life, but it was an opportunity to think about how the device is affecting me. That's what I'll be taking forward from this experiment.