Getting a second phone set me free

A year ago, I chained my phone to a wall. It changed my life in a few ways: I found an audience (hello, you), I severed my emotional attachment to my phone, and I realized how much a small physical change to my environment could foster an emotional one. It was a particularly headline-friendly experiment: attaching my phone to a wall cut my screentime by 80%. 

As much as my phone-chaining was celebrated, it was also met with much criticism: it wasn’t safe (especially for women going home alone at night); it wasn’t sustainable (two-factor authentication); it disabled other essential technology (maps). These qualms carve out the demand for today’s multi-billion- dollar dumbphone economy. But why would I spend more money on purchasing yet another device, when I can just make my own? And no — I don’t mean deleting apps on my existing phone.

Making the mega-dumb dumbphone

There’s a ton of different “digital wellness solutions” on the market: The Light phone; The Meadow (though its founders will insist it’s a “companion” not a dumbphone); The Brick is having a moment of its own. They each had features I liked, so I ported them to an iPhone 13 mini I had retired a few years back. (To the best of my ability).

Having a Reddit thread about me (without me starting it) might just be the 21st-century version of “making it”.

I was particularly intrigued by…

• Meadow — limited contacts, separate phone number, different device shape

• Light Phone — minimalist UI, E-ink-adjacent display

• Punkt MC03 — “privacy bubble” where third-party apps run in a sandbox

So I tinkered with my iPhone and…

• Disconnected my iCloud + added only a select few to my contacts

• Turned my display black and white

• Increased color contrast and inverted colors (really messes with images)

• Removed most apps from my screen, leaving only my phone and maps

Fashioned a funky phone case I wanted to make the experience of using my device as foreign and as difficult as possible. My “dumbphone” was there to take emergency calls, help me navigate, and enable two-factor authentication. My current phone was re-chained back on my wall.

The point isn’t to completely cut myself off! I just want to re-learn my boundaries.

Re-compartmentalizing my life

American sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of front stage vs. back stage in his foundational text The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) compares social life to theatre. There is a “front stage” where we perform and a “back stage” where we relax and re-group — like a break room in the office or a kitchen, to a restaurant floor. His theory focuses on the code-switching that occurs when you go from one room to another and how this ceasing of “performance” is less an escape from the show than what keeps the show running.

There used to be technological obstacles that cumulated to this wall: landlines, snail mail, pagers. Certain activities would be limited to —and therefore associated with— certain contexts (eg. typewriters in an office or TV in a TV room). But now, everything is available on our devices. We can do basically anything anytime, all while being infinitely accessible. We’re exhausted all the time because we can’t “turn it off.” I’ve long romanticized the notion of having “operating hours” for the internet. Maybe it could build this wall that Goffman speaks of. By having, essentially, a “work phone” (or a “going-outside” phone) and a “scroll” phone, I wanted to slowly reintroduce soft, physical boundaries to my everyday. After I set up my dumbphone, I started fiddling with its settings to …

• Turn myself off from texting on my teeny tiny screen and call my friends more

• Distort images enough to nudge me towards only using it for text-based purposes

• Consider the device as its own entity since it’s not synced to my digital ecosystem

Get used to conserving my battery because it always runs out too quickly

Because my other phone was chained to my wall, I unintentionally started pavlov-ing myself into associating the feeling of sitting on a prickly stool with the disjointed sounds of TikTok. Perhaps my favorite experience from this shift was when I went to a startup tech mixer to report on a story I was working on (not this one). Everyone insisted on giving me their contact information via Apple’s NameDrop function (where you transfer contact info by touching phones). No one knew how to react when I told them I didn’t have LinkedIn. Everyone was trying to contain their distaste for my darling device.

And history repeats itself…

A few months back, I noticed a TikTok trend where people gave tours of their retired devices. It was a rare but beautiful moment where Gen-Z and Gen-Xers bonded over what was considered an “archaic” device. I was reminded of how cell phones used to have whimsical varieties. Luxury fashion brands used to have limited edition drops!

I’ll admit. I am tickled by today’s analog-dumbphone-revival. To see companies that have spent decades learning how to cram as many complicated features as possible into a single device suddenly have to re-learn the basics will never not be entertaining. I’m especially taken by the way an internet trend trickles down to corporations like Walmart to result in a $20 mini-flip-phone toy. I just think that making use of what we already have isn’t as daunting as it seems. All it takes is a little tinkering and a lot of customizing.

Besides, who cares if you jailbreak an old phone! Its warranty is definitely expired!!!