I ditched my smartphone two and a half months ago.

That’s only sort of true. What really happened two and a half months ago is that I bought a dumbphone, cancelled Google Fi service, and switched my number to the Tracphone system. I still have my wifi-capable smartphone, and I’ve been gradually reducing its capabilities by removing apps and buying dedicated devices to replace its functions. I now own such things as a GPS and a calculator.

Here is what’s currently most salient about “breaking up with my smartphone”: This action is not one thing. It’s two.

First, ditching my smartphone was immediately practical. When I switched to a dumbphone, I no longer had a supercomputer connected to the entire internet in my pocket at all times.

This was of course uncomfortable, similar to the way that switching from four cups of coffee to none is uncomfortable. But also, it dramatically reduced attentional interference right away, at least when my laptop wasn’t right next to me. I’m not pinged constantly. I’m not under the continuous pressure to switch information foraging patches that comes with knowing an entire internet is always right here. When I’m walking around and thinking about stuff, I’m looking at things and thinking my thoughts, and I’m not curating my experiences for expected upvotes.

That shift in attentional resources is the obvious concrete impact I was after, but it’s not actually the largest impact.

Second, switching to a dumbphone destabilized my lifestyle. This is where most of the value has come from, and it’s driving changes in my life that extend well beyond my phone.

I live in a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) country. In WEIRD countries in the 2020s, the default lifestyle integrates many assumptions about how you use high-tech devices. It assumes that you can call an Uber on a whim, that you can open a link to confirm your identity, that even if you don’t read and respond to an email immediately, you’ll at least see a notification that you got it within a couple hours. It assumes that you have many kinds of digital information and tools at your fingertips at all times, and that you will respond quickly to dozens or hundreds of prompts throughout the day.

Let’s call this “being plugged in”. If you unplug (or try to), the social systems in which your life is embedded will no longer function fluidly for you. You will experience hiccups, awkwardness, frustration.

These frequent moments of friction are the greatest benefit I’ve so far noticed as a result of ditching my smartphone. Every one of them is an opportunity to learn something about how the WEIRD system works, how I am entangled with it, and how I feel about that.

(In general, how I am entangled is “intimately”, and how I feel about that is “increasingly uncomfortable the more I learn”.)

I am learning how single-mindedly the plugged-in lifestyle pursues convenience, efficiency, and physical comfort. The primary downside of nearly every low-tech alternative to a high-tech action is that it’s (relatively) inconvenient (such as studying a paper map before leaving the house, rather than pulling up Google Maps on the way), inefficient (such as writing and mailing a hand-written letter, rather than responding to a post on social media), or physically uncomfortable (such as chopping wood rather than turning on the electric heating).

I am also learning the value of physical objects that my body can touch and smell; the emotional coherence that emerges when engaging almost exclusively with non-virtual things. I am learning the value of constant rhythms, and of plans that are not endlessly subject to moment-by-moment updates. I am learning that as I approach the pace with which nearly all of my human ancestors lived their lives, I am rarely overstimulated or overwhelmed; and I am much more frequently curious, creative, motivated, emotionally comfortable, physically active, and connected.

Before I began this shift, I had no idea how much I had sacrificed for the sake of convenience, efficiency, and physical comfort. I still value all three of those things, but it’s immensely illuminating to choose the tradeoffs in a way that’s informed by direct experience with each option.

The most painful and confusing tradeoff of this sort has come from my interactions with plugged-in friends. I started preparing my relationships for this shift nearly a year ago, when I sent dozens of friends and acquaintances a survey to learn which communication media they prefer, tolerate, or will not use. There are a lot of friendships, some of them very dear to me, that I think I just cannot maintain while leading an unplugged lifestyle.

To conduct relationships in a low-tech way, they must be local, slow, or both. On Monday, I’m meeting in person with a friend from the nearest town to discuss lesson plans for the swing dance course we’ll be teaching together. I’ve been noting down ideas as they occur to me in a physical notebook to bring to the meeting. It’s not a series of texts throughout the day, or a Zoom meeting squeezed in after lunch, or a plane trip halfway across the country for a visit that disrupts ordinary rhythms. If I could start over and form _only_ relationships that are either local or slow, it would be a great relief to me at this point. And indeed, the few local relationships I’ve begun to form, out here in the boonies, are a great comfort for me.

But of course, friendships are not replaceable, and I’m no more happy to conclude that my best friends are “too fast for me” than I imagine an ex-mormon is to conclude their best friends are “too religious”. Also, in some respects the friends I’ve collected from all over the world are _better_ for me than anyone I could possibly find in a hundred mile radius of my patch of forest. There’s no getting around either of those facts. It really sucks!

I’ve been doing a lot of uncomfortable in-between stuff with my far-flung, plugged-in friends. Unblocking social media occasionally, with many notification controls in place, for example. Allowing SMS notifications to open up whole conversations at random times throughout the day. Not disabling Google Chat when my Gmail inbox is open.

Even my relationship with my plugged-in spouse is strained at times by my luddite tendencies, and we share a house!

I don’t know how to resolve this. Maybe there’s no resolution to be found—maybe this is just what it’s like to live with deliberate embodiment in a human world that’s accelerated far beyond what’s good for me.

I also don’t know what I’ll end up doing with my phone in particular. It might be that I transfer my number back to my smartphone after getting really clear on what capabilities I do and do not want my phone to have (though this possibility seems pretty unlikely to me at the moment). It may be that I get rid of my smartphone entirely. It may even be that I ultimately ditch my dumbphone as well, install a landline (or not???), and smash my router.

What I do know is that the discomfort of unplugging is itself a gift. Every awkward workaround, every interaction strained by my pace, every moment I feel the tug between the life I’m floundering toward and the one contemporary society expects me to lead—these are precious opportunities for experimentation. For now, at least, I’m trying to live inside the questions.