I Bought a Flip Phone

and I'm not going back.

I blame Barbara Kingsolver. And the blasted Scilla siberica against which I am waging war in my front yard.

Between the two, I caved to an idea that has been whispering in the back of my mind for a couple of years now: Why don't you try a flip phone?

Photo by Alp Duran on Unsplash

Let me start by saying I'm not a Luddite or even (that) cantankerous. I got my first tablet computer in 2004 because I realized that between my Organic Chemistry notes and textbooks, I could only fit one or the other in my backpack, and with a Motion Computing tablet, all of my notes—for all of my classes—would never weigh more than four pounds or be thicker than one inch. I got an early iPod because it could hold my entire music collection in my back pocket. I got my first Blackberry in college so I could sync my Outlook calendar (with a cable!) and see it without having to start up a computer. 

I've had some sort of smartphone for at least 15 years now, and I have found myself pining for the simplicity of the flip phones of yore. Is it pure nostalgia? Perhaps, but the idea wouldn't leave me alone. Every so often, I find myself browsing various sellers of dumbphones while systematically disqualifying every device they sell as not meeting my needs.

So, where does Barbara Kingsolver fit into this musing on technology?

My favorite way to read is to stumble onto an author, fall madly in love, and go back to the beginning of their canon and read through until I catch up with either where they are or where they stopped when they died. My latest literary true love is Barbara Kingsolver. I started with Unsheltered, moved on to Flight Behavior, and then finally made it to the top of my library's ebook hold list for Demon Copperhead.

Fellow literary nerds might realize these are Kingsolver's most recent works, but they were the ones easiest for me to get my grubby mitts on. Once I exhausted the ebook options at my local library, I started in earnest my stroll through her complete works, starting with her 1988 debut, The Bean Trees.

There is plenty to love in this beautiful book, but one thing I found striking in 2024 is that when the main characters sit in their living room after a long day, they talk to one another. Like in olden days¹.

Think about that: When was the last time you just sat and talked to someone without a glowing rectangle getting whipped out? Without one or more parties falling captive to that blue-tinged light?

I, certainly, am not immune to its attractions.

Kingsolver's early works got me, ironically, onto Reddit, lurking on the dumbphone forums but not taking any action beyond that. 

So much for the siren call of human connection.

Weeks later, in the thick of early spring, scads of lovely purple-blue flowers were popping up in my yard. But pretty is as pretty does, and these pretties choke out the spring ephemerals in their path, so they must go.

Ripping out weeds is easiest when they are flowering. There is no ambiguity about what they are, and they signal their location in no uncertain terms. These particular weeds only flower for a short window in early spring, so there is some urgency to take action lest they have another year to spread themselves yet more widely.

Day after day, I vowed to rip out at least a small patch of scilla, ideally by the roots, but at the very least remove the flowers and leaves to prevent them from setting seed and to starve the bulbs buried deep in the soil.

Day after day, I "didn't have time." I would scramble to get through my list of must-dos and find myself harried and exhausted, the sun setting on any hope of work in the garden.

After some number of days ending in this same disappointment, I happened to glance at the Screen Time graph on my iPhone. I hadn't found the time to do something important to me and urgent, but I had managed to fit in four hours staring at my phone. Doing what? I could not begin to recall.

This was especially troubling because I had already removed the "problematic" apps from my phone. My only "social media" app is WhatsApp, which I use for group texts with people I care about. The only game loaded on it is Blendoku. I don't have email on it. And until Apple blocked this capability, I even disabled Safari. 

That update was, I think, my downfall.

Most people crave novelty, but I seem to be on the thinner end of the bell curve on that particular trait. And reading (often celebrated as a virtue) is one of my particular vices. I have, through trial and plenty of error, established boundaries, heuristics, and rules with myself to keep this particular trait to a manageable level.

As often happens, I quietly stew on an idea for ages, and then something happens to throw me over the edge into action. So it happened here. Within 90 minutes of that revelation, I had ordered a dumbphone, with my only commitment being to try it in good faith and a problem-solving spirit for one month.

Within 48 hours of popping my SIM card into the wee anachronistic thing, I knew one thing: I'm not going back.

Buying a flip phone did, indeed, involve making significant tradeoffs. But, for me, those tradeoffs are worth the payoff.

Again, I am not a Luddite; I quite enjoy technology. I do, however, believe that the technology I use should support my life, not the other way around. This is true when buying a new gardening implement, paintbrush, or electronic device.

How I Use My Devices

A flip phone from the year 2024 is different in some ways from the ones of yore—it has Google Maps, and you can hotspot your laptop to it in a pinch, for starters—but it still comes with many of the same annoyances and limitations that we faced back when phones had buttons. 

Typing is a chore (though honestly not terrible; I first learned to text message on a number pad, and that skill revived itself quickly). The technology is not bugless out of the box (I had to adjust some network settings based on a Reddit post to enable MMS messages because sending cat pictures to the spousal unit is a non-negotiable use case). And after a decade-plus of Apple making moving into a new phone a seamless process, typing names and phone numbers into my Contacts list is, frankly, tedious.

It doesn't run most apps or support WhatsApp, and it turns out I don't actually care.

I have kept—and continue to use—my iPhone for those conversations, my budgeting software, PlantNet, playing Wordle/Connections/Tiles every morning, and many, many other things.

But with the SIM card removed, and therefore phone calls and text messages routed to the flip phone, and a wifi connection required to fetch or send data, there is absolutely nothing urgent about it.

Nothing that happens on that device is central to my life.

My first observation during this transition was how much bandwidth seemed to free up in my mind almost instantaneously. I chalk this up to not being exposed to smartphone notifications. (Again, as with the apps, I had also severely restricted what notifications were allowed—and I still found huge relief by getting further away from them.)

The thing about something that is ubiquitously useful is that there is always a valid reason to pick it up. Once you pick it up, you will, most likely, see a notification on your lock screen or banner. That notification shows which app is pestering you, who might want your attention, and a line or two of some message.

This is more than enough information to force a context switch, whether you want to or not. We can't just not read a small blurb of words that comes into our field of vision, especially when we've been trained that there is some non-zero probability that they are urgent and important words. (Behold the power of intermittent reinforcement.)

So you pick up your smartphone to check your account or send a quick text, and you see half a dozen notifications for unrelated things. Congratulations, your working memory is now full of these new demands on your attention. You cycle through task after task, some nontrivial amount of time passes, and you set your phone down. You take a moment to try to recall why you picked your phone up in the first place, realize you still haven't done that, and perhaps finally do what you first set out to do half an hour ago.

Or so was my general experience.

Having fewer reasons—none of which have any true urgency—to pick up my iPhone largely circumvented that cycle. My Screen Time graph decreased from an average of 3-4 hours per day to 45 to 90 minutes, depending on how chatty my friends and I are, how stumped I am on the Wordle, and whether I'm using my phone for recipes when cooking or reconciling our budget.

I'm sure other glowing rectangles have taken up some of that time, but more of it seems to be trickling in better directions. The blasted scilla is yanked, and instead of twiddling through a routine on my pocket rectangle, I went out and weeded dandelions² for 20 minutes while waiting for a firmware upgrade to finish. I interact more with the spousal unit since we're both less likely to trip and fall into endless scrolling (peer pressure: sometimes it's good!). Even the fact that sending a text message has more friction means that, instead of typing back and forth and back and forth, I'm more likely just to hit the call button and have an actual conversation.

I don't constantly feel so damn pressed for time, and I have the mental space and attentional bandwidth to observe more of my world and think more of my thoughts. As a writer, all of this is good.

Does this mean you should get a flip phone? No clue. Couldn't tell you. But perhaps I have planted a small seed somewhere deep in your mind. As with all seeds, some will germinate, others will not. Some will become compost, but some will become mighty trees. Only time will tell us which.

1. Sure, part of this is because the ex-husband took the TV, and they are too skint to replace it, but the point stands.

2. For anyone concerned about the fate of my pollinators, we have spring beauty, common violets, Virginia bluebells, trillium, spicebush, and serviceberry in bloom right now. My landscaping aims to keep our fellow critters fat and happy.