My Life Without a Smartphone

I haven’t had a smartphone since 2019. Today, I want to tell you about what that’s like.

But first a bit of personal history.

I’m from the 90s. The first phone I remember was a cordless landline with a charging dock. It had rubbery plastic buttons that lit up green when you punched them. I loved playing with those buttons, but I didn’t like using the phone for real. Phone etiquette—“Hello, may I ask who’s calling please?”—intimidated me. And phone calls had a sinister side. Everyone knew that more often than not the caller was a child abductor, calling to trick you into admitting your parents weren’t home so they could break in and take you. That’s how people talked in the 90s.

Around the same time, my dad had a tiny Motorola cell phone with a green-and-black pixelated calculator screen. You could play a snake game on it, steering your black rectangle into black squares until you crashed into yourself. The coolest thing ever.

When I was a teenager, I got my own Motorola cell phone, a sleek little Razr. Everyone knew this was the coolest phone you could have. It called, it texted—mine had this roller coaster game where you got points by adroitly operating the acceleration and the brakes.

My smartphone didn’t come on the scene until the end of high school, call it 2010. All of that to say, I have enjoyed an increasingly rare privilege: my life without a smartphone is most of my life.

But I want to tell you about my life without a smartphone after 2019. To get there, we should talk a little about my life with a smartphone from 2010-2019.

Reluctant as I was to abandon my cool little flip phone, it had become clear to my teenage self that the Razr was no longer cutting-edge. I begged an iPhone from my parents. And, like many teenagers at the time, I got one. This was the phone that would see my through my final months of high-school and into college.

Texting was suddenly on the table. A writer to my core, I’ve always texted grammatically, in full sentences, properly capitalized and punctuated. This meant that I pretty much didn’t text at all on my Razr. Try typing some full sentences with a ten-digit keypad and you’ll see why. The iPhone revolutionized my texting life. For the first time my messages leapt eagerly into the æther.

Having a portable camera was also a game-changer. People take it for granted now, but it felt like a superpower back then.

But a smartphone could do so much more than text and take pictures. I used it to check twitter back when it was just kids posting little koans of 140-character wisdom, before all the old people got on it and started talking politics with clap emojis in between their all-caps. I read blog posts. Blogs were big then. Cut the Rope was my mobile game of choice, but I played all the ones that got trendy: Fruit Ninja, Pocket God, Doodle Jump, Angry Birds (plural), Flappy Bird (singular).

Nonetheless, excluding long phone calls to friends and family back in California, I doubt I spent two hours a day on my iPhone. I had this gargantuan 18-inch gaming laptop that glowed red and weighed as much as a sack of bricks. The iPhone’s tiny screen just couldn’t compete with that powerhouse, and I preferred pursuing my digital addictions with the laptop.

I also had good opportunities for in-person interaction in college, so there wasn’t much of social void for me to fill with doomscrolling. (These were the bright and optimistic days before that coinage.)

But—as odd as it is to say in 2025—I badly wanted my phone to be a bigger part of my life. It was supposed to be my digital multitool, my skwak pad or tricorder. Every few years, I would try to radically reinvent my relationship with phone. But my goal was to use it more. I’d start using a to-do list app and a calendar app and a budget planning app. Everything would go through this one device, and, through this one device, I would have mastery over everything.

I never kept it up. In spite of my aspirations, I wouldn’t update my to-do lists, my calendars, or my budgets. I even hated checking email on my phone. After a few weeks, my smartphone-forward reforms always petered out.

Shortly after graduating college, I decided to give up social media. With fewer opportunities for in-person sociability, long social media sessions had become more tempting. And I noticed that even thirty minutes on twitter would get my brain all in a tangle. I’d always been a big reader, but now I was sitting down with a book utterly unable to concentrate or get into the flow. My attention span had never been worse. It scared me. So the socials had to go.

(But I definitely wouldn’t mind if you used your socials to throw my blog into the path of every literate human being within your reach. On the contrary, if you did that, you’d be a pretty cool person in my book.)

Then I went off to grad school to make new in-person friends and reconnect with my bibliophilia. My phone, increasingly, I used mostly for texting, calling, and directions.

When my brother came to me with a proposal that we enter into a pact to give up our smartphones together and buy these dorky calculator-looking non-smart phones, I had plenty of reasons to be interested.

First, I didn’t get enough use out of my smartphone to justify the expense. If I was doing less, why wasn’t I paying less?

Second, by this time the planned obsolescence of smartphones had become clear to me. In spite of the fact that I didn’t use the phone for anything strenuous, didn’t need a fancy camera or lots of memory, I was on my third iPhone. Battery failure and end of support had forced me to obtain devices I didn’t especially want or need. Could the dorky calculator be a way out of that trap?

Third, I used my phone to text and call and give directions. Everyone else used theirs to watch YouTube videos or look at Instagram photography. If you’re watching YouTube videos, you want as big a screen as possible. But if you just want to text and call, you want as compact a device as possible. The tech companies were coming to realize that ninety-percent of their customers fell into the YouTube-watching category, and the new phones coming out were all going to be as big as my head. I hated that. And here was the dorky calculator, possibly the smallest phone ever made—that was extremely appealing.

Finally, there’s a sort of chic to not having a smartphone, isn’t there? It’s the thing everyone always talks about doing and never does. It feels authentic and bold. I wasn’t immune to these charms.

So I went in with my brother.

The phone we bought together was called the LightPhone II.

(The little indie company that makes the LightPhone lets customers generate a referral link. This one is mine. Presumably it tracks you so it knows to send me that delectable referral bonus if you buy a phone. Please click responsibly.)

This isn’t a product review. Still, it’s worth explaining what I do have so you don’t get the wrong idea when I say I don’t have a smartphone.

The LightPhone II can text with a full touchscreen keyboard, it can store contacts, do basic notes and voice memos, and be a calculator. It has basic timer and alarm functions. You can also call people.

It can kind of do directions—it uses this weird off-brand map service that reportedly doesn’t sell your data, but it’s also slow and limited. I rarely use it, but it has been good to have in a pinch.

It can do podcasts, though it’s awfully clunky when you’re trying to dig into a show’s archive.

It can play music, but you have to actually have the actual audio files. (How am I supposed to use that with my cassette tapes?)

The touchscreen is e-ink—like a Kindle—easy on the eyes and fantastic in sunny spots, but it does have a slight delay whenever you do anything. That doesn’t bother me.

It has no apps, no email, no web browser, and no camera.

But, most importantly of all, the LightPhone II is tiny, and I love it so much.

Unfortunately, the tiny frame conceals a tiny battery, and battery life has been an issue for as long as I’ve had it.

This year, I switched to the LightPhone III, its larger cousin. This one uses a normal backlit touch screen with a special treatment to make it look matte, it has cameras and a flashlight, and way more battery life. It’s so big, though—a tragedy.

So what’s it like living with a phone like that?

Well, it annoys me sometimes.

Not having a web browser to look things up on the go can be so aggravating. Sometimes I’ll go fifteen minutes out of my way to visit a restaurant that turns out to be closed because I couldn’t check their hours on my phone.

Not having access to rideshare apps can also be limiting. I don’t have a car either, so unless I’m with friends, I’m really at the mercy of public transit. I used to have a car, when I lived in Texas and it was unavoidable. Not having rideshare never really gave me trouble back then, but it’s a bigger deal with my current lifestyle. Rideshare is something the LightPhone people are working on.

I’m not the sort of person who needs musical accompaniment for a walk to the store, but I do enjoy multitasking to the dulcet tones of an audio book. (Especially nonfiction bestsellers-list type books that aren’t really worth sitting down with, but which are interesting enough to keep me company while I sweep, mop, and vacuum.) Without a smartphone, I don’t really have a good way to listen when I’m outside my apartment. It’s less of an issue now that I don’t drive, but I do miss it.

In other ways, having such a limited phone is powerfully refreshing.

I explore cities now! There’s a positive side to going fifteen minutes out of your way only to find the restaurant closed. Gradually, fending for yourself with only street signs to guide you, you get to know a city. You stumble onto unsought spots and learn the vibes of different districts. It’s been so much richer than meeting a city with a directions app as go-between.

While my audiobook listening has suffered, not having a portable entertainment machine with me at all times has helped me get into the habit of bringing a book or two wherever I go. I’ve gotten so much more paper reading done when I would otherwise have been scrolling on the smartphone.

It’s so nice to have gotten out of the habit of taking picture of everything. I used to be insufferable. I would go to an art museum and never lay my eyes on canvas or marble without interposing my phone. I would even—ready your pearls for clutching, this deserves it—take pictures of my food! And truly think that this documentarian tendency made me less present in way that made me less happy. But now that’s gone. For years, I didn’t have the option. The old habit perished for lack of an outlet. Now, my new not-so-smart phone can take pictures, but the urge to abuse this power is gone.

Gone too is the feeling of being naked without my phone. Time was when I’d leave my iPhone at home by mistake and I’d feel completely useless and ill-equipped for the day. Now when I forget my phone, it’s at worst an annoyance. I’m just not leaning on it in the same way. A while back, a coworker asked if they could see my cute little phone while we were sitting waiting for a meeting to start. I told them that I’d left it at my desk for the meeting, but I could show them afterwards. They were more amazed that I could be so complacent with my phone out of my sight than impressed that I had a do-nothing phone. But it’s two sides of the same coin. You don’t become dependent on a phone that does so little.

And it is such a good, good thing that emails cannot reach me while I’m out and about. When those pseudo time-sensitive messages used to appear in my push notifications, I would feel the urge to drop everything to placate the email gods. I’d be eating out with a friend or trying to decompress in a park and—even if I didn’t succumb and open my mail up then and there—my mind would drift off to email land and start composing a reply. Now I literally can’t do that. I check my email when I have my laptop out and there’s wi-fi. It feels amazing to claw back some of that sanity.

As someone who never leaned on my smartphone all that much to begin with, it’s amazing how much clearer the air feels without it.

But, lately, I’ve had some depressing encounters.

The laundry machines in my building recently started charging extra for people who have the audacity to use them without downloading the entirely unnecessary app. For obvious reasons, I can’t download the app. So now I get a little charge every week to remind me how unfriendly the world is to people who choose a slower, less digital path.

I’ve had it happen with airlines too, charging me a fee for not using their app. It’s idiotic the way everyone tries to push an app on you—even if you have a smartphone, you don’t want seventeen thousand poorly-built corporate apps on it—but it feels especially bad when they’re charging you for not downloading something you literally can’t download. And look: I’m a pretentious brat who’s going without a smartphone because I have high falutin ideas about the good life—but what about a grandma who never figured out smartphones. What about someone who just can’t responsibly afford one? It’s downright predatory to charge people like that extra.

I had my worst experience when I went to a bar recently. They offered me a QR-code menu. I told them, as I do whenever there’s a QR-code menu, that I don’t have a smartphone, and would really appreciate a paper menu. And the bartender told me that if I didn’t have a smartphone, I couldn’t have a menu. It wasn’t even a situation—I’ve run into this once or twice—where they have an old iPad behind the counter that you order off of if you don’t have a smartphone. It was just nothing. He was outright hostile. It made me so depressed.

In the United States, it’s difficult to survive without a car. If you’re applying for an entry-level or unskilled job, you’re going to see a lot of listings that explicitly require you to own a vehicle. And even when the listing doesn’t come out and say it, in most parts of the country, you just need a car to get to work. Our cities and suburbs and countryside are sprawling and our public transit is anemic.

But cars are expensive. They’re expensive to buy. They’re expensive to fuel. You have to foot bills for parking, maintenance, insurance. So we’ve created this situation where the people with the most financial difficulty get stuck. You can’t get a job without a car, but you can’t afford a car without a job. If you do manage to get a car, you often can’t afford to insure or replace it. Your whole income will collapse like a house of cards if something happens to your vehicle.

In other words, we forced people into a mold, and now that mold makes their lives worse.

This didn’t happen the moment that cars were invented. It is a result of structuring everything in a way that assumes everyone has a car. We made car-free life not normal. There are still some places where cars aren’t mandatory. (I’m lucky enough to live in a one of these places.) But it is a shame that we’ve built so much of our collective lives around a device that, while convenient, is expensive, dangerous, noisy, and polluting.

We’re on the cusp of repeating this history with smartphones.

Now smartphones aren’t quite the death machines that cars are. They won’t slam into you and sixty miles per hour, and they destroy the environment in more insidious ways. But we’re currently in the process of building a society where smartphones are mandatory. I think that’s a mistake.

I don’t think smartphones (or cars for that matter) are simply speaking bad. There are tradeoffs. For some people, the tradeoffs are worth it. But, for many people, having a smartphone in their pocket makes their life worse on net. I’m one of those people, and if I wake up tomorrow and can’t pay my rent without a smartphone, I’ll be dismayed. But I’m not the person who’s most impacted by smartphone culture.

As with car culture, smartphone culture hits the most disadvantaged the hardest. I’m a relatively well-off office worker. My day job is with a company that has a healthy respect for work-life balance. I can afford to pay the penalties for doing my laundry app-less. I’m aware of the existence of weird boutique alt-phones that let me text without using a ten-digit keypad. And, if push comes to shove and I was forced to have a smartphone, while it would make my life noticeably worse, I would have resources to fall back on. I could go buy pricy mindfulness meditation lessons to counteract the bad phone vibes, or something. Point is, I’m navigating this phone-filled world from a place of privilege.

But not everyone enjoys that luxury. I’m confident that, right now, there are people who, like me, would be better off without a smartphone. But they can’t cut the fetter. Maybe it’s a work thing—they’re required to be constantly reachable by email for work and they can’t afford to give up the job. Maybe it’s in their personal life—the apartment they’re splitting four ways requires a smartphone to unlock the door, and they can’t drum up the roommate interest to make alternate housing affordable. Maybe something else. Whatever it is. They’re stuck.

I’m not saying all this to persuade you that the tyranny of the smartphone is an evil on par with urgent social, economic, environmental and civil rights injustices of our day. I’m not even trying to convince you that there’s a dark side to smartphone culture—you know that, everyone knows that. We’ve experienced it first-hand.

But the people who have leisure to muse about the downsides of the smartphone life tend to be upper-middle class think-piece types like me who still have the option of living differently. We face questions of value—with all that smartphones give us, is it worth it to give them up?—and questions of willpower—can we bear to live without TikTok?—but for the most part we haven’t had to face circumstances where we have no real power; where living chained to a phone is neither a free choice nor a malignant temptation but something imposed from entirely from without, a brute fact we can’t escape.

But it’s becoming that way for people with less power.

I wish that the people living before I was born had looked ahead, seen where car culture was taking us, and slammed the breaks. It will be much more work to undo those changes than it would have been to avoid them. I worry that the US is doomed to always be a place where only a privileged few can live carless.

But there’s still time for smartphones. I’m grateful that I’ve had the chance to opt-out of smartphone culture, but it shouldn’t be a privilege for middle-quintile earners like me.

People should have the power to engage with technology in a way that makes their life better. And, as much as possible, they shouldn’t be forced to engage with it in a way that makes their life worse. Let’s avoid trampling people with this whole march of progress thing, alright?