Life Without a Cell Phone? Possible or Impossible?

The Case of the Vacationing Cell Phone

Could you go a month without one?

I have … and it’s not all bad.

Matter of fact, it will be six weeks tomorrow. If my friend Aleena Imran succeeds in her persistent attempt to get it released from customs in Pakistan and shipped back to me in the States, the drought will soon be over. From its birth in Shenzhen, China to a store in Denver to Islamabad and back will put the phone at roughly 30,000 airplane miles before I finally get to say hello. Ours has been a most unusual relationship.

Last year was a tough one for me and phones. I started 2019 with an old one, got a new one, lost the new one when I fell in a winter blizzard, bought another, took it to Pakistan and Turkey with me this fall, and got pickpocketed on a jam-packed rush hour tram when we stopped at Istanbul’s Sultanhamet Square. Blue Mosque or no Blue Mosque, a team of bad guys got me. By the time I realized what had happened, I was gone, they were gone, and the phone was gone. C’est la guerre–Such is war. Pros got me, fair and square. So much for the shirt pocket.

As the father of Managing the Worry Circle and its foremost practitioner, getting filched was annoying but hardly worth agonizing over. The last time I got pinched was in Mexico way back when tequila was the secret sauce of all of collegians. Considering the places I’ve been and calendar pages between then and now, twice in a lifetime is not too bad.

Because my support team in Pakistan communicates with me by text due to my often fluid schedule, I did not want to inconvenience them any more than I had to. I was returning from Istanbul to Islamabad a couple days after I lost my phone, so I had a new phone shipped via express delivery from the USA to my hotel in Islamabad, a place I am well known since I stayed there for ten weeks in three months.

Two weeks later, the phone hadn’t made it. It was corralled in customs, which I was not informed of. Multiple attempts to trace the package by my hotel concierge yielded only the news that the phone was in the country. Not much of a clue in the world’s sixth most popular governance.

It’s one thing to quit using a phone by choice or as an experiment, but totally another to have its removal forced upon you. After a few days, I sort of got used to not having it. Once you get past the initial panic of sudden separation neuroses, life settles back down. Sort of like it was in the good old days. The concierge and I scrambled to locate it before I came back to the States, a reunion that sadly did not happen, and I left Pakistan without it, trusting that it soon would catch up with me. Maybe, I thought, it will beat me back home. 

I am an optimist by nature and did not want to abandon an unused new phone and purchase another. A fourth cell phone in a single calendar year is too much pain for any man to endure, much less explain. I assumed that one of my work pals could just swing by customs, explain what happened, and have the unopened box shipped back to the States.

Au contraire.  Customs wanted to tax it anyway, a huge sum. Money is very tight in Pakistan and the government wasn’t picking on me; they pick on everybody shipping stuff in. Aleena waded into the fray to navigate and deal with the system on my behalf. Bless her patience, persistence, and kindness.

Flying home, I did what I always do when I’m spending two days going to or coming from anywhere: I watched people. I am a behaviorist by trade and watch people all the time, anyway. I am not a stare-at-the-phone slave. I am a watcher. I watch people’s relationships with their phones. With so much time on my hands, what I saw was a re-validation of what I teach: digital addiction is everywhere and growing fast.

The average adult spends nearly six hours per day with digital media, full hour more than it was five years ago and double the hours from ten years ago. While desktop and laptop usage have stayed stable at a couple hours a day, mobile is skyrocketing. When the iPhone 4 was released in 2008, users averaged eighteen minutes a day on cell phones. Today? Nearly 3½ hours each and every day.

This growing attachment to various digital gizmos means that roughly 40 percent of daily waking hours are spent staring at a screen. That percentage is far more when you subtract the time needed for life’s necessary tasks like getting ready in the morning, commuting, running errands, and fulfilling personal task-centric obligations.

Social media is one reason why, but a bigger impact factor is the dramatic improvements in customer usability. Easy, intuitive use has turned mobile devices into extensions of ourselves.
Since consumers continue cutting the cord in preference for watching content through streaming devices—year-over-year statistics peg the rate at a 33 percent increase—it is safe to assume that user-friendly convenience, coupled with greater transmission speeds, will fuel a continued rise in engagement minutes.

Tech and social media giants have succeeded enabling their products to do what they were designed to do: keep us tapping and scrolling for hours on end but now face an almost forced challenge of social responsibility.

Apple, Google, and others are offering ways to pull us back in with serial notifications. Users are able to set app time limits, monitor usage, and prevent themselves from checking notifications at bedtime.

There is little argument about whether or not tech addiction is real. It is. And the problem is growing.

Nothing has changed human behavior in the decades I’ve been dealing with it anywhere close to the impact of technology. The question now is focusing more on where it needs to be: Given the problems digital seduction and addiction cause, what can we do about it?

Digital addicts have no interest in stopping. What they seek is a method to better manage what they know, deep down, is a behavioral march in a dangerous direction.

I don’t have that problem and hope I never succumb but I do miss the convenience of my phone if and when it’s needed. I look forward to our reunion, but I will always be grateful for what I learned, and re-learned, during our civil separation. Six weeks has been okay. Seven will be alright. At some point it will show up on the doorstep and things will seem as if the phone’s global walkabout never even happened.

Next time in Istanbul, guard your stuff on the tram. Next time in Pakistan, thank Aleena for me. True friends do the unglamorous stuff. I am grateful for her kindness.

 

Ocean Palmer