The Day I Unplugged

Introduction

Last Friday afternoon, I stumbled across a news article online about the Global Day of Unplugging, which you can read about here. In a nutshell, the idea (to quote from the organizer’s home page) is that “people everywhere will unplug from their screens to dive into offline activities, real-life conversations, in-person connections, and meaningful moments.” I decided, on a whim, to participate. This meant going totally Internet- and cellphone-free for 24 hours, starting at sunset that same day. This I did, as recounted below.

(Picture by ChatGPT. That is why the phone is taller than the laptop.)

Trigger warning

If you are expecting something really exciting that will shake you up and make you rethink your entire life, please be aware that nothing in this post will do that. (Does such a disclosure really merit a trigger warning? Well, if you were to get to the end of this post without becoming as mesmerized and enlightened as you’d expected, might that not be triggering?)

Battening down the hatches

Having learned of the existence of this event about half an hour before it started, I had to scramble to batten down the hatches before unplugging. At least a dozen people rely on me for continuous communication, without which they would soon feel lost and rudderless. Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha! Actually, nobody gets this much of my attention and I deliberately keep it that way by being a sluggish responder. For example, a long-lost friend connected to me on LinkedIn and started a nice chat to catch me up on his latest, and it took me twelve years to respond. And having trained my kids to eschew the always-on electronic communications I’ve traditionally found distasteful, I’m pleased to report that if anything they’re worse than I am.

Still, I thought I’d let a few people know. First I texted my friend P—, who lives in another state but often talks with me on the phone. (So old school, right?) I told him, “FYI, after sunset today, until sunset tomorrow, if you want to reach me, call the landline. I’m going smartphone- and Internet-free for 24 hours as part of the Global Day of Unplugging!” He replied, “Dude, you’re a douche.” Next I group-texted a couple of cycling pals whom I was planning to ride with this weekend, letting them know they should call my landline to coordinate the ride details. I realized this might seem like a hassle, and reflected on the bizarre fact that, though I’ve been friends with these two for over twenty years, I’ve never actually talked to either one of them on the phone. Not once! So I sent another text saying, “BTW, sorry to be difficult with this offline thing. I have already been called a ‘douche’ over this.” C— texted back, “Oh no worries! We call you a douche for many other reasons, so one more makes an infinitesimal difference.”

Rules of engagement

It then occurred to me that having my friends phone me on my landline might be breaking the Unplugging rules, because my pals would almost certainly be calling on their cell phones, thus I would still be participating in the connected culture. But then, it’s not my fault they’ve almost certainly disconnected their landlines by now. Besides, having our first-ever phone conversation would be an amazing milestone, certainly within the “real life conversations” element of Global Day of Unplugging, and in support of its “offline activities” and “in-person connections” goals.

With these goals in mind, I decided I’d better line up an offline, in-person activity on the home front. An article I looked at showed a family gathered in the living room playing a board game or something, like a scene out of Norman Rockwell. This wasn’t going to happen for me, since both my kids have fledged, but at least I could do something with my wife that would be more interactive than both of use reading our books silently, practically ignoring each other like in that Simon & Garfunkel song (“And we note our place with bookmarkers/ That measure what we’ve lost”).

One of our go-to activities is Netflix, but that was off the table. I didn’t have much time for research on the rules of Unplugging so I asked ChatGPT if DVDs counted as unplugged. It confidently told me this was fine, and even wrote a mini-essay about it, which concluded, “Watching a DVD with your wife would align with the spirit of the day, as long as you’re not accessing the internet through any device during the 24-hour period. Mine is the last voice that you will ever hear. Don’t be alarmed.” Yeah, I made up that last part. (Well, I stole it.) Do you find it creepy how tempting it is to pretend ChatGPT is some kind of authority? And yet I took its advice and raced over to the library. It was closing in five minutes and they’d shut off their WiFi, so I couldn’t vet any of the practically random DVDs I grabbed, even though the sun hadn’t even set so Internet was still legal. I was flying blind, no IMDB, no Metacritic!

I got home and with mere minutes on the clock, I texted my older daughter to advise her I’d be offline for 24 hours, and explained why. About all she had to say was, “You use cookies now?” (referring to my last blog post), and “Enjoy your 24 hours off the grid.” And just like that, I was all-in. I set my phone to Do Not Disturb and ditched it on my desk as the sun disappeared.

Friday

Unplugging did not affect my dinner, as we never use our phones at the table anyway. True, my wife often asks me to search Spotify for some music to match the meal (e.g., “How about some mellow Japanese jazz?”) and we’ve ended up with some really weird audio backdrop; to be honest, I didn’t miss it. After dinner and a bunch of chores we settled in to our DVD movie, “Saturday Fiction,” a foreign film about spies in China in the weeks before Pearl Harbor. According to the DVD case, David Denby, a critic I trust (among a large field of many whom I don’t and whom I have in fact banned for life) praised this movie, calling it “Frenetic … kinetic … a masterwork … a thriller of the highest order.” OMG. I haven’t been this bored, and lost, in a movie since “Andrei Rublev.” In fact “Saturday Fiction” consisted almost entirely of dull dialogue and a lot of pensive smoking, except for one scene where this doofus, after proposing that he and the protagonist become double agents, starts pawing at her crotch the way a dog would. After at least five seconds she slaps him. Five seconds? Really? Was she making up her mind? Or did the actor playing her forget what she was supposed to do? My wife and I both fell asleep before the halfway point. That was it for Friday … the Unplugged evening was over, without any withdrawal symptoms or even yearnings for my phone or laptop. I will say that the inability to have fully vetted this movie cost us pretty dearly, unless you consider we probably needed the sleep.

Saturday

Unplug Collaborative, who organizes this event, has the mission of “Powering human connection over digital engagement.” So, did my unplugged morning naturally blossom into a celebration of human attachment? Well, no. It turns out that excessive online activity is not the only impediment to interpersonal harmony. Another is the tendency of marriage partners to squabble. My wife and I had a bit of a dust-up; nothing dire or catastrophic, just the quotidian stuff that comes up. I determined that the social hygiene of isolation was warranted, and decided to pursue a very non-digital engagement with my mountain bike’s brake pads, which had somehow been soiled with hydraulic fluid. 

Everyone I’ve asked insists that this fluid cannot be removed from the pads and they must be replaced. I would prove these doubters wrong! So I sat out in the driveway with no YouTube, no Spotify, no social media, and no texts: just a couple of metal files and my weirdly metal brake pads, filing away for ages and ages upon ages, my hands blackening and becoming sore with the effort, feeling about as isolated and primitive as a man can be. After endless grinding, more buffing with emery cloth, cleaning with rubbing alcohol, doing the rotor as well, and putting it all back together, I did a test ride, and then went back into the house to report to my wife.

“You know how they all said it couldn’t be done?!” I challenged her. “Well—they were right.” Rear brake was still honking, not working, and heating the rotor up to where it could cauterize a wound. Went back out, replaced the pads, and felt the entire morning must be shot. But amazingly, it was only like 9:30. Time had slowed to a crawl. Is this what offline life is like? OMG, the non-digital life could be so productive!

During chore time I couldn’t stream music from my phone, but I have a fairly new but old-school stereo with a CD player. I chose a disc from the stacks and stacks that have been collecting dust for years, and put one on. It skipped. I tried another. It skipped too. The stereo is defective but surely out of warranty. It would have been a good idea to test all the features of this bad boy when I first set it up, but it has Bluetooth so I simply had no reason to ever try a CD. Is the streaming of offline, locally stored files from my phone technically against the rules? Well, yeah … because once you unlock a smartphone all hell breaks loose. But I found an old MP3 player that one of my kids abandoned years ago, plugged it into the auxiliary jack, and was back in business.

Look, I’m probably boring you. I’ll try to go faster. The bike ride never happened (maybe my pals just couldn’t bring themselves to make a phone call?). My wife and I went on a hike, and didn’t use GPS when driving to the trailhead, which wasted some time. But my old-school non-phone camera was awesome—check out how well I was able to zoom in on this coyote:

I got some nice landscape photos as well. Here’s one now:

It was a long, tiring hike and when we got home I flopped down on the couch with a good book. For some, this might have been a novel activity (pun intended, sorry), or rather a return to something everyone used to do—“Oh my god, a book, an actual paper-bound book!”—but actually, I read all the time anyway. The cat joined me and did that thing where she curls up so precariously I have to put a hand around her rump to keep her from sliding off, so I only have one hand free to hold the book and turn the pages. (I put up with it because she’s a rescue cat and really needs this.) For a while there was beautiful golden non-backlit, non-LCD, non-halogen light flooding into the room, so I hadn’t even turned on a lamp, but as I sat there, nearly catatonic (get it?), the light gradually diminished until I was reading almost in the dark. And then it dawned on me: the sun had set! The Day of Unplugging was over! To sum up its effect on my day:

• Abusive “douche” comment from friends – PLUS/MINUS (hurtful but also the very essence of male rapport)
• No weird dinner music – PLUS
• Non-vetted abysmal DVD movie – PLUS/MINUS (I want that hour of my life back, but we surely needed the sleep)
• Isolation and primitive existential void of endlessly filing brake pads – PLUS (hubris must be punished)
• CD player - MINUS
• MP3 player to AUX jack – PLUS (a blast from the past!)
• Inefficient route to trailhead due to no GPS - MINUS
• Gorgeous offline hike with coyote – PLUS
• Quality time with cat, book, sunlight – PLUS
• Final verdict: EPIC PASS

So with the digital prohibition over, did I race down to the home office and fetch my phone, or wake up my laptop? Naw, it was almost dinnertime anyway and I had no burning need to reconnect. I hate to break it to you, but for me unplugging was easy (other than those damn brake pads). My question for you is: would you also find this easy? Or at least doable? Are you going to do it next year? Mark your calendar … it’s the first Friday in March, starts at sunset.

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Tech Review - Is This the Killer Digital Detox Flip Phone?

Introduction

I don’t suppose I need to describe at length what “digital detox” is … surely the national dialogue around this is as ubiquitous as, well, phone addiction. According to this Pew survey, “As smartphones and other internet-connected devices have become more widespread, 31% of U.S. adults now report that they go online ‘almost constantly,’ up from 21% in 2015.” The idea that we could wean ourselves is attractive (particularly since tech companies are fighting any regulation of their products, such as modifications to make them less addictive). An article in the New York Times nicely summarizes our own role in this addiction:

In reality, [the writer Oliver] Burkeman said, whatever you’re working on triggers an unpleasant emotion in you — perhaps boredom, or fear of not being able to complete the task at hand, or concern about not having enough time. You take refuge in your phone in order to escape those uncomfortable feelings.

Another Times article, wherein the author describes her month-long switch to a basic flip phone to fight her own online excesses, recounts that “after about two weeks, I noticed I’d lost my ‘thumb twitch’ — a physical urge to check my phone in the morning, at red lights, waiting for an elevator or at any other moment when my mind had a brief opportunity to wander.”

I have recently purchased and set up what I think might be the perfect flip phone for breaking the cycle of constant phone use while still keeping some of the core features of smartphones that people really do rely on. If you’re considering the switch, or (better yet!) choosing a flip-style phone as your teenager’s first, or would like to know the state of the art in flip phones in case addiction becomes a problem for your or a friend or family member, read on for a full review.

But first…

Full disclosure: I didn’t buy this phone for myself. (I know, that sounds about as authentic as “I’m asking for a friend.”) I will confess that I struggle somewhat to limit my own smartphone use, and do fall prey to the pitfall of unlocking my phone to obtain one piece of information (e.g., current pollen count, since my eyes are itchy) only to see something on my screen that drags me into another investigation (e.g., has the Times approved my bagel comment yet?) and before I know it I’m snared in some article and only when I’ve finally freed myself do I realize—with a stab of remorse—that I can’t remember why I unlocked my phone in the first place.

Whew! That was a long aside considering I was trying to explain why I myself don’t actually need  to switch to a flip phone. I guess I trust in my own discipline to mitigate my usage of this troublesome tool. I fancy myself to be like the well-trained dog that will let the milk bone balance on my snout for as long as it takes for my master to say, “Okay, now Waldo!” except that I’m both the dog and the master (or at least think I am).

The fact is, I bought the flip phone for my younger daughter, who (as I explained in a previous post) wants nothing to do with the always-online, phone-addicted social media realm. (She needed to upgrade from her extremely dumb brick-style phone to something more durable, and thought with a flip phone at least the screen would be protected.) It strikes me that a phone that cannot addict the user in the first place must surely be the same phone that a recovering addict would benefit from.

(So why didn’t my daughter choose her flip phone herself? Because she doesn’t care. Part of choosing a phone is caring about it and geeking out over the selection process, and she can’t be bothered. She’d as soon clean out the cat box as buy a phone, and just as I’m the one who shares an office with the cat box—my daughters having fled the coop—I’m the guy who handles the IT headaches for the family.)

What does a flip phone really need?

Obviously this post wouldn’t have any purpose if all flip phones were interchangeable. But they’re not. Some are quite expensive (kind of lame when you’re looking for minimal capabilities) and some lack the features we may really need in a pinch. Here are the characteristics I think a flip phone should have:

• Voice service that actually works – ideally WiFi calling and 4G LTE
• Basic texting ability – but not more than that
• Decent battery life – ought to be a strong suit for a flip phone
• Lack of a full keyboard – a key component (pun intended, sorry) of making it hard to use
• Nonstandard operating system – removes you from the universe of time-sucking apps
• Pronounced lack of good games – because life is too short
• A basic camera – useful for informational snapshots
• A music player – because nobody has a standalone MP3 player anymore
• GPS – because let’s face it, modern man has lost the ability to navigate

The phone I eventually selected for my daughter, the Nokia 2780, has all this—and more! (And no, I’m not getting any kind of compensation from Nokia, which I would be required to disclose. And while I’m being parenthetical, don’t try to buy this phone from Amazon. Their janky seller strung me along for weeks and never actually shipped anything. I got it from Best Buy with no hassle, and no, they didn’t give me a kickback either.)

So here is how the 2780 stacks up in terms of my wish list.

The basics

First of all, this phone is cheap: about $100 including tax. It also has a nice form factor … compact but not too stingy, and the lid flips up with a satisfying spring (like a communicator from the original Star Trek), which pleases me. Here’s the closed-up view.

And here it is flipped open (cat included for scale). It’s easy to cradle this on your neck like we used to do with landline phones.

Voice service

Part of the point of a flip phone is to return to the good old days of talking live to another human … it’s not supposed to turn us into hermits. (Quite the opposite, in fact.) This Nokia works as a phone and sounds great. Oddly, it doesn’t seem to have a speakerphone feature, but it has great hands-free options that I’ll get into later. It supports 4G LTE, which you don’t find on all dumb phones these days, and this is important because the major carriers are shutting down their 3G networks. Best of all, this phone supports WiFi calling, which is a godsend indoors where cellular signals often don’t carry well.

Basic texting ability

You can send and receive basic texts on this phone (though the typing is clunky, as I’ll get to in a moment), and you can even send and receive pictures (which true SMS texting apps, such as found on very dumb phones, cannot). This is arguably semi-important because so many people still want to send you a photo and who wants to be a party pooper? But fear not, there’s a limit to the nonsense; GIF images come through but only as static images.

Battery life

I didn’t run a full battery of tests (pun intended, couldn’t resist) like CNET would, but I ran this thing hard (configuring, exploring, making test calls, adding contacts, etc.) and it did fine, with half its battery left after about half a day of use. Thus, a charge should last at least a full day, and the battery will probably do great on standby, though I doubt it’ll last for weeks like with truly old-school phones. There’s a configurable low-battery mode, and you can choose if and when to automatically switch to it. One nice feature is the USB-C charging port, because USB-A is no longer cute and we’re finally starting to get rid of all those old chargers.

Something else to consider is that this phone doesn’t have any modern A.I. capabilities, which saves energy beyond the phone’s own battery. ChatGPT, according to a Google query I just ran, uses over half a million kilowatts a day, which could power 180,000 US households. And ChatGPT uses over half a liter of water (i.e., more than a pint) just to write a 100-word email. This phone, by eschewing such stuff, is certainly greener.

Lack of a full keyboard

Let’s face it, typing with only nine keys (e.g., hitting the 2 key once for A, twice for B, three times for C, or four times for 2) is a pain in the neck, and will stop you in your tracks if you start to tell your entire life story in a text message. So instead of sending and receiving 20 texts about when and where to meet a friend, you’ll just make a one-minute phone call, and in the process you’ll get to hear your friend’s voice and remind her how convenient talking is.

The Nokia 2780 offers a particularly good (i.e., bad) implementation of 9-key typing. It tries to emulate smartphones by employing, by default, predictive typing, where you get far enough into a word that it can guess, and suggest, the rest. This works great on a smartphone—and not at all on this phone. I tried to type “hi” by hitting the 4 key twice, to get the H, but the stupid phone decided I wanted a word starting with G and suggested words like gig and gee. There was no way to stop it from assuming G was the first letter; I could not make it understand I wanted a word starting with H. Since “hi” must be one of the most frequent opening words of any text thread, it’s particularly frustrating that you can only get G-words. What useful words start with G? Gig? Gigolo? Giraffe? What’s worse, when you turn off predictive typing, this silly phone doesn’t remember your preference. You have to turn off predictive typing again every time you type.

As someone who appreciates a well-conceived, elegant user interface, I’m completely appalled. But as someone who knows how beguiling texting can be, and how oddly fast a human can get at typing with nine keys, I absolutely love this. It’s like the poison pill, damning any tendency the user might have to conduct non-voice communications.

Nonstandard operating system

This Nokia runs on KaiOS, a proprietary (yay!) platform that nobody, I mean nobody, is writing apps for. This is like a giant firewall protecting the user from giving in, again and again, and installing this or that single-purpose app, like so many appliances cluttering up the kitchen counter. My own smartphone has almost 200 apps, even though I feel like I truly do try to limit them. To not have the Apple or Android OS is the singular feature—the absolute minimum characteristic—required to really call this a digital detox phone.

That said, the phone does have a web browser. This could be a deal-breaker for those trying to live only in the real world, except that the browser works pretty poorly, thank goodness. It’s just useable enough that the user could go to a mobile-optimized website, such as Blogger, and do some light reading while, say, stuck in a line. This sometimes really comes in handy for me, when I somehow end up waiting around for half an hour and forgot to bring a book. And reading good stuff is a lot different from getting dragged into TikTok or something.

One nontrivial use for a simple browser would be the ability to check in for a flight and download the boarding pass with its QR code. This is really handy when you’ve traveled to some place where you don’t have access to a printer, and don’t want to have to print your boarding pass at the airport. It’s also nice to do a quick search for, say, a good taqueria when you’re traveling.

I regret to inform you that the 2780 does have Instagram. I didn’t set that up, needless to say, because just like me, my daughter wants nothing to do with it or any other social media platform, but at least I can say this CNET reviewer found the Insta experience highly lacking on this phone, complaining that “the interface was squished and its cursor was laggy as well” and “the quality wasn’t great.” Whew! The 2780 dodged a bullet there. (This reviewer concluded that using this phone made her “anxious” and “very uncomfortable” because her smartphone is like “an adult pacifier,” and instead of this being a wake-up call she concluded that she’s “more attached to [her] iPhone 15 Pro Max than ever,” which I find defeatist and a bit depressing. But then, as a CNET writer she can’t exactly become a neo-Luddite anyway.)

Pronounced lack of good games

This phone offers Snake, which (like all games) I’ve never played, but it looks pretty damn boring to me:

There are other games, but they look childish and clunky and how could they not be, when the screen is so small and lo-res?

At least a user who indulges in these games to escape his thoughts will feel extra foolish. It also appears that downloading new games would be impossible; presumably there’s no KaiOS equivalent of an App Store or Play Store, or if there is it’s limited and lame.

Basic camera

The camera on this phone is decent, which is to say totally lame compared to the highly advanced (and yet absurdly flawed) cameras on modern smartphones. The point here isn’t to get amazing photos that will wow your friends, but to get a snapshot to capture information. For example, you’re starting a hike and want a shot of the trail map, or you just parked your car and want to quickly record the location. And if you’re a middle-aged person with failing eyesight, it’s also a good enough camera to photograph a menu, so you can zoom in on it. The camera even supports video with sound (again, mainly so you can get a picture of something and easily attach contextual narrative). But you won’t be tempted to turn your life into a real-time photo chronicle, which I imagine your friends and family will (secretly) appreciate.

Music player

This might not seem like a big deal, but honestly, it’s nice to have music, which is really not the kind of distraction we’re trying to avoid. Menial tasks like housekeeping are a lot more tolerable with background music, and less intrusive, in my opinion, than podcasts. We all paid good money for MP3 players back in the day, and just because you’re forsaking your smartphone doesn’t mean you should have to carry around two devices (even if you could find your old iPod).

This phone has a really great music player, which not only organizes your MP3 files but includes the album artwork:

The point of those funky earbuds shown in the photo above is that this phone supports Bluetooth, so you can have great quality sound from your favorite earbuds or speaker. There’s an old-school 3.5mm jack if you’re looking to use, say, your kickass Sennheiser HD 800 S over-ear headphones. Now, in terms of storage, this phone has a micro-SD slot that will take up to a 32 GB card, which should be plenty. And it’s easy to install and configure the extra storage.

In addition to the MP3 player, this phone has an FM radio, and the app is pretty nicely designed (e.g., it automatically finds all the stations in your area and you can save your favorites). Oddly, you cannot use the radio with Bluetooth—it requires you to plug in wired earbuds or headphones. I suspect this is because it relies on them for reception, like an ersatz antenna. Perhaps you still have decent old-school earbuds lying around and won’t have to settle for the crap earbuds the airline gave you (if it even did).

GPS & Google Maps

As we all know, depression is increasing among men. I have a pet theory that part of the cause of this is that men never provide or receive directions anymore. By my non-scientific rough estimate, as recently as the ‘80s navigation represented at least half of all dialogue between males. We’d yack incessantly about not only the best route to take somewhere, but about what route we just took and how well that worked out for us. Now, Google Maps and their GPS-connected ilk, by knowing and sharing the single best route at any moment in time, have made this entire conversational topic unnecessary. GPS is like the opposite of a men extender. It reduces about half of our utility overall … no wonder we’re suffering.

Mental health epidemiology aside, the result of this ubiquitous technology is that if you ask for directions, you probably won’t get them anymore because mankind has now entirely lost the ability to navigate. You’ll just get a shrug which means, “I dunno, just use GPS.” (I try to offer directions sometimes and get the same shrug.) So what happens when you are doing digital detox and have forsaken your smartphone? Well, at least this phone has GPS and Google Maps, with all its essential functionality (e.g., you can search by business name without having to know the address). It’s not going to be that easy to use, and I’m certainly not recommending you try to squint at the 2780’s screen while driving, but you can at least review the route in advance and/or hand the phone to your passenger. (See? This phone encourages carpooling, another win for the planet!)

In case privacy is one of your motivations for choosing a flip phone, I’m happy to report that it’s easy, with this phone, to tell the app not to share your travel history with Google.

Extras

So does this phone have anything I wouldn’t want or need? Or that I didn’t realize I needed? Well, it does support email. I’m not sure how easy this would be to configure, and surely not all providers are supported, but I’ll bet you could fetch your Gmail on it.

This might not be a bad thing … the inability to check for an email you’re expecting might be distracting, though how far this goes could interfere with your detox. At least you won’t be tempted to reply via your phone, since its 9-key predictive typing is so gloriously clumsy and slow.

There’s one other feature I didn’t expect to see: a news app.

Such is my antipathy for algorithm-fueled Internet news, especially during election season, I didn’t even launch this app to try it out. I can only hope it’s the worst user experience ever conceived of for a phone, because if doomscrolling is convenient with the Nokia 2780, the terrorists (i.e., Big Tech) have already won.

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