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My Smartest Move Was Switching to a Dumber Phone
Trading my smartphone for a flip phone improved every aspect of my life
My son was born in 2006. The iPhone was born in 2007. They have been competing for my attention ever since.
I always knew it was wrong to steal a moment to look at my phone instead of my son. But I thought I had plenty of moments.
And then my son was 12.
My time as the father of a small child had come to an end. What had I given my device that I could have given my son? Like the average American, about four hours a day. Every day. Two waking months out of every year. Two waking years out of the dozen my son had been alive. Gone. And now my son wanted his own phone. Most of his friends already had one. What could I say? I wanted my son to see his thoughts as precious, private. I wanted him to keep his free time for himself.
“If the phone is so bad,” he asked, “why are you always on it?”
I wanted to tell him what Cal Newport wrote in Digital Minimalism, that “people don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable.” I wanted to tell him that when you look into your phone, you think it’s just your two eyes looking at a screen. What’s…
