Today, everyone has a smartphone, and it’s a phenomenal tool that is within our arm’s reach 24/7. It helps us all to stay connected and enables us to do amazing things in our day-to-day lives. We can capture moments, listen to songs, watch movies, shop online, book tickets, and access a goldmine of information on the go, all at our fingertips. But there’s a flip side to this coin: these small gadgets are seriously addictive.
It’s a double-edged sword. Most people habitually overuse smartphones and are impulsively hooked to the apps and content that they consume. Being a believer of spirituality, I deeply understand all we have in this world between birth and death is nothing but valuable time.
An average user spends about 4-6 hours daily on a smartphone while being completely unaware of this fact. It’s almost impossible to break this habit until you make the smartphone completely invisible from your environment. Let me share a quick personal story.
A Wake-Up Call
One day, I was doomscrolling while lying in my bed, and I lost track of my time. I suddenly realized that I couldn’t put my phone down even though I knew that I had important tasks to accomplish. Silly memes, insensitive trolls, trending news, and political updates were all being consumed mindlessly while switching across multiple social media apps.
This was alarming.
I dismissed all the apps and opened settings to check my screen time. I was absolutely dumbfounded after seeing the numbers: 6 hours daily average.
Then opened the calculator to do some simple math:
6 hours × 365 = 2,190 hours
2,190 ÷ 24 = roughly 90 days
That’s 3 months, annually.
I was hooked; this was a wake-up call. Imagine becoming old, looking back at the life you lived from a deathbed, and realizing 1/4 of it was spent watching other people’s lives and consuming unnecessary content while rotting in bed. All this time that you could’ve used for living a better and meaningful life, but now it’s too late to change. Now take a moment to think how it’d make you feel. Heavily regretful? I felt the same.
Lost time is never found again.
― Benjamin Franklin
Rescued by Atomic Habits
I had a copy of Atomic Habits by James Clear sitting on my bookshelf. I took it out and started skimming the table of contents, headings, diagrams, and the summaries mentioned at the end of each chapter. The book is well articulated, and the author has done a commendable job giving simple and practical techniques that are results-driven, easy to implement, and effective for overcoming bad habits.
In that book, the first law for creating a good habit was to make it obvious, and the inversion of the first law was to make the bad habit invisible.
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
― James Clear
Pivotal Decision
I made a decision to make my smartphone invisible from the environment, and I did it by switching to a dumbphone. Yes, I switched from iPhone to Nokia in this 21st century to live a completely focused and distraction-free life. Because in this fast-paced world of technology and media, attention is our ultimate currency.
A lot of questions popped into my mind while making this decision.
How would I:
- Run my online tech business? → From desktop.
- Make online payments? → Use cash.
- Reply to messages? → Log in to accounts on the web.
- Run my social media? → Post and engage from desktop.
- Urgent or emergency cases? → People will call, not text.
The answers were simple. This might not be a fair solution for everyone, but it will surely be beneficial for someone like me who lives in solitude and has a zero social life.
You're always one decision away from a totally different life.
― Mel Robbins
The Dumbphone Effect
The first few days felt very unusual and empty. No notifications to check, no social media scrolling, no messages, only calls receivable through my dumbphone. But I got used to it within a week, noticed significant positive changes, and started living a decluttered, brand-new life.
Doomscrolling got replaced by book reading. No late-night or early-morning phone usage. This drastically improved my sleep quality and hence my overall energy throughout the day. I earned a peaceful mind by filtering unnecessary content, which refined my ability to focus for longer periods of time.
The constant urge to check and use my smartphone was gone, and I successfully reclaimed not just time but also my mental peace.
The “I don’t have time” excuses were debunked. Later I joined a gym, enrolled in an art course, and developed a habit of reading and journaling daily. Also started cycling and trekking on weekends. I wouldn’t solely blame my smartphone for not doing all these activities earlier, but it definitely was a major hurdle.
I'm not the user of a phone. I don't think it’s a necessary device.
― Pavel Durov
Final Thoughts
Switching to a dumbphone from a smartphone changed my life. I can confidently say this from my own personal experience.
Now when I go out, it saddens me to see people glued to the screens. Limitless potential being wasted and fruitful human interactions going extinct. No wonder the younger generation is suffering from conditions like anxiety and depression, for which calculated and relentless action is the only cure.
Like I said in the beginning, smartphones are phenomenal tools, but whether they become a curse or boon for us is finally determined by how sensibly we use them.