Flip Phone Allure
in which hotfemoid ends smartphone addiction
After returning from a two-week trip to Beijing, my iPhone began having virtual seizures. Any attempt to use the phone was hijacked by a terrible spirit that mashed the volume buttons and flicked the screen every which way. Once, the phone called someone on its own, and then hung up before I could explain and apologize. I believe that my poor, long-abused, caseless iPhone was unable to support the weight of all the spyware-ridden Chinese apps required for basic necessities of life like paying for goods, calling a taxi, and sending messages.
The rapid decline of my iPhone meant I had to put my money where my mouth was. For months, I had been talking about getting a flip phone to replace my iPhone. And now I either had to replace my iPhone with a newer, better, faster, smoother model, and continue the cat-and-mouse game that is trying to reduce my screentime, or switch to a flip phone.
So I went to BestBuy and purchased the ZTE Cymbal 2 for $80.
LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE WONDERS OF THE ZTE CYMBAL 2: there is no maps app, there is no Spotify, no Instagram, Reddit, etc. It’s screen is less than a quarter of the size of a new iPhone’s and it's camera has one-twelfth the megapixels. Sending a text message is a full-effort task which often takes me a couple minutes; I usually resort to calling people instead. If I want to listen to a song, I plug the phone into a computer, try to pirate the song1, manually enter the metadata, and drag and drop the files. It is a clunky, frustrating device which has drastically improved my quality of life.
The ZTE Cymbal 2 is not a device that one mindlessly picks up. Every action must be done so deliberately, with so little dopamine attained along the way that you'd have more fun looking out the window or reading the copy on the back of a bag of rice.
A regular smartphone is beyond frictionless, it's a silky-smooth black hole. The more time you spend on it, the deeper it pulls you in, the less conscious thought you need in order to keep using it. By being more cumbersome, the flip phone is actually less of a nuisance.
In Ted Gioia’s (admittedly quite Boomerish) blog post “The State of the Culture, 2024”, he makes the argument that the hierarchy of current cultural forces goes (from most massive to least): addiction, distraction, entertainment, art. I think that this is more or less widely accepted, certainty it’s not a groundbreaking idea for anyone.
I think it’s significant that distraction is listed separate from addiction and entertainment though, as we usually don’t treat it as a separate force. While Gioia implicitly makes the case that addiction (by way of doomscrolling) is the force to be the most worried about, I’m more worried about the distraction element, which is more insidious than we usually think. Just knowing that your phone is in the same room as you, even if it’s turned off, even if it’s in a bag, makes you markedly stupider.
I cannot say that switching to a flip phone has suddenly turned me into a person who appreciates boring art2. It has made me less likely to waste time on meaningless things: without a second screen to go on chess.com, I’m a lot less likely to watch five straight episodes of Lost. I’m also less likely to google things which I think has made me less annoying (nobody likes a fact-checker in casual conversation).
The most important part of the switch was to increase the amount of time that I spend doing things I care about, and it feels as though I’ve more or less accomplished that.
If you’re at all convinced by this post that a flip phone would be a helpful switch, you should try it out. After all, it’s not a terribly expensive piece of technology.
Often when people see I’m using a flip phone, they say something along the lines of “I’d totally switch, if not for X” where X is something they would get used to being without after a week or could easily find a workaround for.
Not having a smartphone can be annoying, but it’s always a kind of annoyance you’re conscious of, and so you can work towards making solutions. I don’t think the same can be said for the annoyances of having a smartphone, which are obfuscated by design to keep you on it for as long as possible as often as possible.
pirating music has gotten infinitely more annoying since the recent nuking of internet archive. i’ve had to learn how to torrent stuff (it’s not hard at all, you should learn how too).
I’ll update you guys on my boring art tolerance levels in December when a certain someone tries to make me sit through Fanny and Alexander again.
I’m grateful that my slave labour made iPhone sent me a notification of a new hotfemoid post <3
It's been a long time ...yes G you are heading in the right way. You will ultimately get so much more of what life has for you .
And oh the things you will do!