Report from 5 days in:
Nobody has decided to join me on this one, but it looks like some folks may be following. As such, here are my initial observations after receiving my flip phone a few days ago.
Before reading this, it's worth bearing in mind that I am someone who has already drastically reduced his smartphone usage/dependency and whittled down my apps to what are basically just utilities: calls, texts, banking, music, and maps. No browsing or social media or other annoyances. Ok, with that being said, here goes:
1. Anxiety. My phone arrived Thursday evening, and I powered it on and ported my number over. All that night, I felt very anxious. I had a hard time sleeping and woke up several times. I was worried about going out into the world without a smartphone. This was a feeling I absolutely did not anticipate given that I had prepared myself for not having one. What if someone texted me a link? What if I couldn't see an emoji? What if I was driving and got lost and needed GPS? What if what if what if what if... Looking back, the fact that I had this experience tells me that I'd become far more dependent on the smartphone than I ever realized. Crazy stuff.
2. FOMO. I almost never use group texting, but someone put me on a group text the first day I went out into the world with my dumbphone. It was weird. I knew it was a group text, but I could only respond to senders in individual threads. Ultimately, it was no big deal, but it made me start worrying I was missing out on the great experience of group texting. Also, emojis: some appear on my phone but others just show up as little boxes. I began to feel anxious about not seeing these things, which is... silly.
3. Furiously searching for alternatives. Given all the FOMO, I started researching dumbphones that also support group texts. They also needed to be LTE phones, and I needed it to be unlocked since there's no way in hell I'm paying for a standard Verizon or AT&T plan or whatever. I found one that costs $100 and also has a browser. This gave me some relief as I realized it might be nice to have the browser, just in case. Then I realized that I was searching for something to save me from my own experiment because I was scared. Once again, I'm more attached to/dependent upon my old smartphone than I realized.
4. Feeling self-conscious. I don't like taking my phone out in public. I'm worried someone will see me with it and comment on it and I'll have to explain myself. I've been sort of hesitant to be seen with it.
5. Little need to take it out. On the other hand, since the phone does less than a smartphone, there's little reason to take it out in public anyway.
6. I keep looking at it. I keep checking the phone expecting it to do something. It doesn't, obviously. So weird.
7. Texting takes a long time. The flip phone has a T9-like system for predictive text, but it still takes longer to type out a message than with a QWERTY keyboard. One thing that the smartphone has done to us is it has created a text-first, call-maybe paradigm. It's normal for people to send long, rambling texts on a smartphone. On a flip phone, this is hard. I was trying to communicate with multiple people for a backpacking meetup that I'm hosting, and it just took forever over text messages; therefore...
8. I started calling people. Yep, when it took forever to text, I just dialed some numbers and spoke to people using my actual voice. Novel, right? I was able to organize my meetup really quickly this way – more quickly than if I'd been texting on a QWERTY keyboard, honestly. I hereby vow to use my phone for calling more often than texting, especially if it looks like I'm getting into some sort of extended SMS convo. I feel like my friends and family will appreciate the call since nobody really does that anymore.
9. Lack of GPS is no biggie. So far, so good. I only needed to look up directions twice, and I just did it before leaving the house... you know, like we used to do way back in 2012.
10. I sent pictures to my family. And I did it at the end of the day. My mom wanted pictures of my family from father's day weekend, and I'd taken some with my pocket point-and-shoot camera. I attached the pictures to an email and sent her a nice little message, all without distracting myself DURING the moments I was capturing so that I could text the pictures to my parents. I think this is a positive change.
Conclusions thus far: I was way more dependent upon my smartphone than I realized. I thought this would be easier. Also, smartphones have totally transformed the way I engage in casual communications without my really realizing it (see text-first observations above). I anticipate actually calling people more often and speaking with them instead of just texting. This should be a good thing. I also anticipate being more mindful about picture-taking and not necessarily needing to memorialize a moment and withdraw from the world to instantly share it with someone. This, too, is good.
I am still self-conscious about my phone and don't like taking it out in public. At some point, somebody at my coworking space is going to say something about it, and I'll have to come up with something to say. Ugh. It's weird that I feel this way since I'm not at all self-conscious about my other un-consumerist oddities. Smartphones, it seems, are indeed the quintessential accessory of the masses.