Living without a Cell Phone

Ok, I'll admit it.  At this point I still have a cell phone, but I have not been carrying it.  It's a Google Fi phone, which has the remarkable feature of a "Pause Service" button, and I often pause it.  Why not save money when you can?

I'll never be able to write one of those best-selling books about giving things up, because they all seem to begin with tales of serious, very serious, addiction.  We lived for eight years without owning a car, when our children were small, and I kept a now defunct blog about it, but whenever I looked into carfree living as a serious writing topic, all the published books seemed to be about people in debt up to their noses, driving $40,000 cars to jobs that were two-and-a-half hours away.  We had an old Saab that didn't really work that well, and we didn't really drive that much, so we sold it.  It's more fun to bicycle, period.  When our children made it to middle school, and lucked into a charter school six miles out of town - opposite the direction of our workplace - we bought a car.  I still prefer to live without it.

The cell phone is sort of the same story.  I'm definitely Luddite-leaning.  I never wanted to buy a cell phone.  When they first started hitting the shelf, I thought it would be a trend that couldn't possibly last.  Getting phone calls at home is annoying enough!  Who would want to carry a phone around with them!?  I bought one, or rather I got a free one from the grocery store with a month by month plan, one day because pay phones were disappearing.  I had a flat tire on my bicycle and wanted to let my wife know that I'd be walking the bike home.  I walked over to the pay phone only to find an odd scene of carnage - wires literally sticking out of the wall.  So, I wandered over to the next pay phone and found the same scene repeated.  It took me a half hour of walking around before I found a phone.  That was around 2006 or so.  All those scenes of pay phone violence have healed over, the walls as smooth as if the phones were never there.  The disappearance of pay phones feels like an irremediable loss of public infrastructure, but I can harbor no feeling that protesting the situation will do any good at all.

I have found that the problem with a cell phone - for emergencies - is that it has to be paid for, even if you are not using it.  The same cannot be said for a pay phone.  Even the pay-as-you-go phones, such as the one I began with, had to have the plan renewed every three months or so, for reasons that I have never discovered.  I can go months without needing to call someone.

I think what made the smart phone attractive was the fact you could do other things with it.  While you're paying for it anyway, if you're not going to be making phone calls, why not play a game, balance your budget, time your meditations, take pictures of your food?  You might as well.  Why not?

But it does not sit easily with me.  I'm only vaguely concerned with my privacy, but occasionally, all the data mining feels creepy.  I didn't need to do any of those things in my twenties, why do I suddenly need to do them in my forties, (and alas, now also my fifties)?  I find myself scrolling through my Google News Feed while I'm cooking dinner.  Would I be doing something better if I were not doing that?  No, admittedly not.  Would I be boiling water with more skill and attention?  More attention, maybe, but boiling water has nothing to do with me after I turn the burner on.

Still, it seems that something has been lost.  And perhaps that doesn't irk me as much as the feeling that my attention is being manipulated does.  So I pause the service on my phone, turn it off, and stick it into a drawer.  Sometimes I take it out to play podcasts, (usually Dan Harris's "10% Happier"), and sometimes I sync up my financial app as a way of backing it up, though I'm trying to get back to my USB connected floppy drive.  But mostly, it sits in a drawer.

At this point, I really cannot say if I am better off for (mostly) living without a cell phone.  I certainly don't feel worse off, and I feel better about myself and how I relate to the time I have during the day.  My children email me or call on the landline if they need anything.  My daughter, who is away at college, writes an occasional letter.  I believe I like this life, and I am living the way I want to, following my own random way, rather than the algorithms of my cell phone apps'.