Breaking free from my smartphone

SO, it seems that the latest accessory is not the latest smartphone but an oldfashioned Nokia.

Ryan Tubridy has one and has ditched his smartphone for the month of February. And David McWilliams dumped what he refers to as his “incessantly needy smartphone” on January 1. Both men were unhappy about the control their smartphones seemed to have over their lives.

And for the first time I am seriously wondering about my own relationship with my phone.

This comes after my having, in the recent past, had to ditch my relationship with alcohol.

Menopause (well, I presume it’s menopause) has changed my body so that it now deals with alcohol in a completely dysfunctional way.

I can have one drink (or on a good day, maybe two) but I go straight from sober to feeling queasy without stopping at that nice woozy place where the hard edges of life are softened and you feel a bit floaty. I am still coming to terms with the grief of the breakdown of that relationship which had always been positive.

We had shared so much, me and wine. Has my relationship with the other great love of my life, my phone, also become dysfunctional?

I am a 56-year-old woman, surely I am experienced and intelligent enough to be able to be the master of this device, ruling it rather than allowing it to rule me?

OK, so I often wake in the night and sneak a peek into Twitter or Instagram, but I comfort myself with the fact I am just checking what my daughter and granddaughter are up to in Australia where the day is half over.

But I do have my phone with me all the time. I take it out and put it on the table when having coffee or lunch with someone so although it’s on silent I can see alerts. Yes, I know. That’s not cool.

Back to the lads. Tubridy’s jaundiced views on social media (and some would say life itself in the 21st century) are well known.

He left Twitter some years ago, although more recently has taken to Instagram which he feels is an altogether more benign world, being as it’s all about the photo. But for the month of February he is offline as he proudly brandishes his brand new old Nokia and proclaims life to be all the better for it.

I hate going backwards, so having a retro phone holds no attraction for me at all. But then I read what McWilliams had to say about why he is also ditching his smartphone and it made me think.

He urges us all to try it, telling us our days will seem longer, books will be more appealing, we’ll be far less distracted, more patient and less irritable. Sounds like paradise, right?

Without my smartphone I couldn’t see my granddaughter as regularly as I do. Powering up the laptop is not as convenient as grabbing a quick ‘goo-goo, ga-ga’ chat with her, the number one reason I love my phone. That aside, what else could I not live without?

Twitter – yep, I could do without it. It’s not as fun a place as it was and with the #repeal campaign getting underway it’s going to be a hotbed of bad temper in the coming months methinks.

Instagram – see earlier comment about my granddaughter.

Facebook – although it keeps me in touch with friends and family I otherwise would never be in contact with (and I like and value that), it is becoming increasingly annoying because it’s not chronological and the creepy stalker-like advertising related to my recent Google searches. So yep, I could also ditch Facebook. Although I would have to rescue all my photos first and that would be a big job.

Surprisingly two apps I would hate to lose are the weather app, very handy if you want to see if it’s raining without getting off the sofa or out of bed (I know, I know) and the Flight Radar app.

I love Flight Radar. When the sky is blue and streaked with vapour trails, I can check who’s flying by, where they’ve come from and where they are going to. On a windy night I can amuse myself feeling sorry for all the bodies on the aircraft doing circles over the Irish Sea while waiting to land at Dublin airport. But most of all I can track flights from Australia (see earlier remarks re my granddaughter).

I could not negotiate my way around foreign cities or indeed some parts of Dublin without my maps app.

And with my precarious finances, I need to access banking apps regularly to reduce the risk of being mortified at having my card declined with a queue of shoppers behind me at the tills in Dunnes.

So no, I don’t think I could ditch my smartphone completely, but I do want to read more books and be more creative. Hell, I even want to write a book. Social media is a huge distraction to all these endeavours.

Maybe it’s time to delete those apps, limiting myself to checking Twitter or Facebook when I am on my laptop.

I will have to conquer my highly-developed FOMO (fear of missing out) but I am sure if there is a huge breaking news story someone will tell me about it pretty quickly.

Just like Freddie et al, I want to break free. Maybe it’s time.

A ‘goo-goo, ga-ga’ chat with my baby granddaughter is the number one reason I love my smartphone