For five years, my flip phone has changed my life for the better. Yes, I get lost a lot
One afternoon five years ago, I walked into a Verizon store and asked a bemused salesman for the dumbest phone in the shop.
My iPhone had recently suffered a fatal dunking while I was clumsily fishing a bass pond, and I was searching for a new device. In truth, the accident had felt serendipitous, as though, on some subconscious level, I’d wantedto drown the 4G demon who lived in my pocket.
Like many Americans, I’d come to feel that my smartphone was poisoning my brain, goading me into freebasing Instagram and Twitter. Worst was Gmail, whose red-lined envelope reminded me of all the work I was neglecting and sucked me into responding to emails at all hours. Like a Horcrux, my phone had captured a fragment of my soul. I needed that piece back.
And so it was that, for little more than $100, I left the store with an LTE Exalt LG flip phone, a svelte little number that nestled easily in my palm and closed with a satisfying snap. And I’ve never looked back. I’m now a flipper. I’m far from the only poor soul to abandon a sleek gadget in favor of more primitive technology. These days, it seems, everyone is getting a flip phone. The New York Times extolled the “Luddite Club”, teenagers who trick out their flippies with stickers, as though they’re skate decks. The BBC has hailed the resurgence of the “brick phone”.“[M] aybe these freaks are becoming mainstream,” wrote Christopher Schaberg, a new flipper himself, inSlate.
Let me be clear: I profoundly admire any person, especially any teen, who can forego their smartphone for even 10 minutes. Still, some flippie hot takes have the whiff of dilettantism: “I went back to a flip phone for a week,” that sort of thing. Meanwhile, at risk of bragging – okay, I’m bragging – I’m still going strong a half-decade after that formative trip to the Verizon store.
Yes, my flippie has changed my life for the better. Yes, I get lost a lot.
Given all the dumbphone thinkpieces out there, you could be forgiven for believing that I’m part of a mass movement – that thousands of us get together to, like, play board games and read books aloud. In truth, hardcore flippers remain about as rare as black-footed ferrets. I know of only two others, both of them fellow writers. We used to meet for coffee and rest our clunky phones on the table like paperweights, the world’s least impressive status symbols. (Although an inert flippie looks undeniably lame, taking a call will forever be cool: why press a boring old button when you can whip your phone open like Jerry MaGuire?)
One of the kindred spirits in my flip club was Kevin Taylor, a 68-year-old journalist who dates himself by referring to his cell as a “mobile phone”. Taylor gave up his Android around the same time as I ditched my iPhone, after he realized how much data he’d have to surrender to tech oligopolies to download a single parking app. “I read all the agreements you make, and it seemed way out of balance,” Taylor told me recently. “That was the moment I looked at my phone in a new light and reassessed.”
Today Taylor owns a Kyocera DuraXV Extreme, a black briquette whose primary selling point, per its manufacturer, is that it’s “virtually indestructible”. Taylor, a homebody who’s always struck me as happiest in his garden, appreciates its stark simplicity: it’s a phone that’s, well, a phone. “I can call people, I can text, I can
record, I can drop it without breaking it – it fits my needs,” Taylor said. He didn’t emotionally identify with it, or rhapsodize about it; in fact, he seemed never to think about it. That, indeed, is the point: While the average American spends an appalling four hours and 25 minutes each day on their cellphone, I often go hours without so much glancing at mine. I think it might currently be wedged in the couch cushions.
Even better, my dumbphone has stripped my life of everything that I don’t need: the time-wasting games, the seductive social media apps, the endless pinging notifications. The absence of these distractions has made me a more present conversationalist, a keener observer of nature, a better husband. “You were just always checking your email, no matter what we were doing or where we were,” my wife, Elise, recalled. “A flip phone allows you to disconnect from work.”
This is not to say that my life has unambiguously improved. I miss so many things: the ability to look up weird insects on iNaturalist, or find decent Thai restaurants in unfamiliar cities, or rattle off quips in a rapid-fire group thread. (The laborious process of pecking out texts via predictive text – remember that? – isn’t exactly conducive to snappy banter.)I pine for Google Maps as though for an exlover. Many times I’ve called Elise from the shoulder of some godforsaken dirt road, already 20 minutes late for an appointment, to rant about what an idiot I am for deliberately handicapping myself. Once I’ve calmed down, she patiently opens her own map app and relays directions, like ground control coaching a shuttle through an asteroid belt.
And the world is only growing more challenging for us stubborn flippers. Apps and QR codes expand their hegemony every year: today I struggle to park cars, enter concerts, glance at menus. Not long ago, on a street corner in Chicago, I tried to hail a cab to the airport. Convoys of Ubers and Lyfts rolled by, as inaccessible to me as a SpaceX flight. Even the nominal taxis drove past my outstretched hand without stopping – summoned, I later learned, by the tractor beam of an app called Curb. Finally I scurried over to a Marriott, found a guy standing out front with a suitcase, and begged him to let me share his cab: an analogue Uber Pool.
For all that, I’m hardly a bastion of monastic abstention. Sports junkie that I am, I use my flippie’s creaky browser to check baseball scores (mostly those of the New York Mets, speaking of torturing myself). A few months ago I dug out Elise’s old cracked iPhone and installed Libby so that I could listen to downloaded audiobooks while walking our dog. And I spend more than my fair share of time on Twitter.com, which is open on my laptop even as I write these words. I check Facebook; I type Instagram.com into a search bar and upload the photos I take with my DSLR camera. My flip phone has made my life less convenient, but not necessarily more pure.
While I shamelessly use social media, however, I can also escape it – and, even more crucially, my email. (My flippie technically supports apps, but they’re so laughably slow and annoying that they’re not tempting in the least.) When 5pm rolls around, I can close my laptop and head out for a dog walk or happy hour without feeling the insistent tug of a device: Is that tweet I fired off at 4:58pm doing numbers? Has my editor returned the next draft of that pesky story?Each day contains moments, even hours, of blessed reprieve.
I don’t expect everyone – or frankly anyone – to follow me into flipperdom; I’m not even sure that I recommend it. And I acknowledge that forgoing a smartphone is a form of privilege unavailable to all the ride-share drivers and TaskRabbiters being ground to dust by the gig economy. But I do think that allowing ourselves respites from our phones is possible for most people.
Phone addiction isn’t a sign of weakness, but a dependency deliberately engineered by tech companies; the only way to dampen your phone’s hold on you is to keep the damn thing out of your pocket. (Or, in my case, plunge it into a pond.) Next time you go to dinner, leave it at home; next time you take a hike, stash it in the glove compartment at the trailhead. Life on the flip side is a technological shift, yes, but it’s also a mental one – a recognition that our digital lives need not encroach upon our real ones. I promise it’ll preserve your mental health and, just maybe, your marriage. As Elise put it: “I like you better with a flip phone.”