At the end of this month, I'm attempting to go smart phoneless.
Living in Utah alone for two years while most of the country was shut down lent itself to an extreme uptick in my phone use. Anyone who knew me ten years ago with a flip phone and maybe some occasional Facebook logins on my desktop knows that I would be horrified to see the Twitter obsessed, phone-aholic that I had become.
This summer I deleted Twitter off my phone and cut its use probably in half, but I want to take another step. I've actually noticed I miss the flip phone days.
We have acquired a faux urgency to connect, post and see things that don't matter. The last few months of my life have been far more peaceful without my phone buzzing every few seconds with Telegram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube notifications. But knocking it down to mostly text and phone calls has made me realize that I don't need 99 percent of my smart phone's capabilities.
Beyond the hassle, I started to think about the amount the phone tracks everything I do. Everywhere I go. Everything I search. Every post I like.
I was riding in my brother’s work truck the other day, and his truck knew where we were going to go to dinner, because his phone had tracked him to the same restaurant every Tuesday night while he'd been working up north.
It got me to thinking. Do I really want Apple and Google to know more about me than my brother, my dad or my best friend does? Am I really using the smartphone, or is the smartphone using me?
I also have realized that it's distracted my driving, not just by wanting to check the latest update but by making me needlessly dependent on GPS. It's often that I will get a pin drop to a destination and follow the blue dot on the screen, forgetting how to get back from where I came.
It will be a small adjustment, but I think in order to maintain our autonomy, we need to be willing to make small adjustments to the luxuries that cost us our privacy.
The Reed Coverdale of 2013 would be horrified by the Reed of 2023, and I can't imagine what the Reed of 2033 would be okay with if the slow boil continues.