When is the last time you checked your phone, found yourself transported into a world a photon thin and yet still felt powerless to escape? Did you lose a few minutes? A few hours? How about the last time you had a conversation with a stranger, gotten to know someone you would never see again? If you’re anything like me, the former has been much more common than the latter.
I still remember the first time I ever got any sort of social media. I was a freshman in college and my sister had forced me to download Snapchat and Instagram so that we could keep in touch - more like so she could gain endless amounts of material with which to roast me, but then again that’s what little sisters do best, isn’t it?
I had never been one for social media. Growing up classically homeschooled will do that to a person. Why spend time fine-tuning the description of a post for people you see every day or every week anyways when you could spend time reading or writing or learning something new about the world? That would have been 2017 - I would have been 18 years old. Now, as I write in the living room of my childhood home I have just turned 25. Somewhere in just seven swift years I lost that wistful disinterest. I fell under the spell of the lotus eaters. I went to sleep.
Some of this has been explored already in my first post, On Returning. But there’s a technological aspect to my story which that piece only brushes. I’ve always been profoundly interested in technology. It was one of those things which just made sense, even if the technological space was so immense that no one could ever understand it all. It felt like a new frontier ripe for exploration and discovery. But even with all the tools of character, wisdom, and knowledge which I inherited from my upbringing and education, I was like a paper boat set adrift amidst a storm in the deep sea. We all were; I don’t think anyone could have predicted in the late 2000’s or early 2010’s the extent or potency of the creatures we were creating in the hearts of our soon to be largest and most valuable companies.
Fortunately for me, my early childhood was relatively technology-free. I was allowed to play games on the computer sometimes, but we never got a video game console until I was in late middle or early high school. Homeschooling and my dad’s ability to work remotely afforded us the opportunity to take trips to Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, D.C. and other historical sites with some regularity. We grew up hiking the many trails and metro parks near our house which would eventually become the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, or visiting a local historical farm replete with re-enactors dressed in 1800’s clothes running brick kilns, one-room school-houses, historical baseball games1, candle-making stations and all sorts of other mesmerizing attractions. I had a magical childhood.
All this to say that, even if I certainly had my fair share of digital distraction, I had a childhood full of real-world experiences. Play dates consisted of dress-up and make-believe, painstakingly prepared battles of Playmobil or LEGO collections, and yes, the occasional late night playing Star Wars Battlefront II on my friend’s PlayStation 2. But even back then my parents were concerned about the effects of things like video games on me, as indeed many were. Digital experiences were things I had to fight for, seek out, relish with friends. They were far from a given. I remember when I was in middle school several families from my church went to a boy’s camp in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a full day’s drive north. One of the older guys, who served as a counselor, brought his PlayStation along and a tiny portable screen which we used to have video game tournaments for the entire day’s drive, rotating out competitors when they got too car-sick to continue. It felt awesome, in just the same way sneaking extra candy from your Halloween bucket felt awesome: because it was an adventure. Sure, an ill-advised adventure which you knew was probably wrong and would probably make you feel sick later, but an adventure nonetheless.
But even this 8-hour video game binge was tempered by a week completely devoid of technology: making ice-cream by tossing a bag of milk and ice around a circle (and hoping your bag didn’t break), shooting bows and .22’s, riding mountain bikes, wake boarding, and taking an overnight backpacking trip to a campsite where the well-water stank so bad of sulfur that we had to mix in a kool-aid packet just to make it palatable. Even if I had tasted of the forbidden technological fruit, I still knew what it meant to have adventures in the real world. I relished all of it, the sleep-over video game tournaments and the rough and tumble backwoods adventures pretty much every boy knows, though I fear the generations after me may know them less and less well if we continue in our current heading.
So, given that context, imagine my surprise and shame when I realized that after being more than two years removed from the pandemic, I still hadn’t re-acclimated to life in the real world. I was more anxious and depressed than I had ever been2, I was convinced that most of my friends hated me or thought me a pitiful nobody3, I felt horribly alone. I was a wreck.
Initially I blamed this on being in a new city. I moved to St. Louis in September 2021 after graduating college and knew no one but a handful of fellow misfits who had moved to the city for their first ‘real’ jobs just as I had. My first year was difficult, but bolstered by that special type of camaraderie experienced by those trying to build a community with strangers who find themselves in the same place for the same reasons. The second winter was much worse. I barely talked to anyone, hardly went anywhere except for necessities, was glued to my phone, trying to find solace in YouTube and Instagram and Netflix and Spotify, bouncing from one platform to another chasing anything that would give me a small hit of dopamine to keep me from spiraling to rock bottom. Interests and hobbies I once found profoundly interesting and life-giving ceased to have any appeal to me. I had always known I had a bent for melancholy, but this was the first time I had fallen into a depression I could no longer blame on a lack of self-discipline or a bad day at work.
Those weren’t a particularly easy couple of paragraphs to write. I don’t want to make things sound more fraught than they were but I also don’t want to whitewash them. I was not in a good place. For a time I blamed it on the city, I blamed it on my family history with mental health issues, my own lack of faith, the technology inundating my life, but eventually I had to look in the mirror and recognize that the one common denominator of all of these was me. I am human. I am imperfect. I need rescue. All things I acknowledged a thousand times from song and sermon, but which I had never really lived through. At least, not like this.
I say all this to preface what comes next, because I’ve gone through phases of blaming technology for my woes before. I don’t want anyone to mistake my argument as an indictment against technology for any and all bad things I’ve experienced in my life. I am no longer so naive. The problem is not the technology. The problem is the oldest problem in human history:
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
The problem is within the very core of us. You know this. I know this. I can scarcely believe that anyone living in a first world country could say with a straight face that they haven’t experienced suffering both at their own hands and the hands of others, mediated through technologies like smartphones and the internet. To indulge in cliche, hurt people hurt people.
Eventually, I was fed up with it. I had always toyed around with getting off of my smartphone, but I had never found a particularly practical way of doing so. That, and the fact that it’s frightening to remove what you tell yourself is an easy way to cheer yourself up on a bad day, keep in touch with friends, keep on top of current affairs, generally engage with the things that make you a modern “cultured” person. But one day I decided it was time to try cutting myself off, freeing myself from the burden that having the internet in my pocket 24/7 had become. So I ordered a LightPhone II and a few days later it arrived, on the same day I was taking a summer trip to a cabin in the Ozarks with a few friends. Providential timing if you ask me.
I expected my friends to first and foremost make fun of the decision. I knew ahead of time that the switch to green text bubbles4 would make things frustrating for people. But In my first of many moments of surprise over the next few days, I found my friends profoundly supportive. I called one of the friends I would be driving with to make sure I wasn’t missing group messages and to my surprise without any sort of tongue-in-cheek retort, he went above and beyond to make sure I was kept in the loop, messaging me directly to make sure I had the details I needed.
When we finally arrived in the Ozarks, everyone wanted to see “the phone.” And rather than making fun of the small size, or clunky way the e-ink screen flickered to refresh the screen, I was met almost universally with curiosity and support. In fact the only responses I got in a negative register were statements of regret: “Oh, it’s too bad they don’t have Spotify,” or “I don’t think I could go without a camera.” (I went for a pretty extreme version of a dumb phone, I admit. 😅) That night I had the best sleep I had in years. That whole weekend felt like I had stepped foot in Lothlorien; I was a new man.
In full disclosure, I’ve had to keep my old phone around in a drawer, because my wok enforces multi-factor authentication and some platforms we use require you to use a smartphone app (I’m looking at you Microsoft). But even so, my dependency on my smartphone has reduced immensely. I only ever take it out of the house with me if I need to keep tabs on Slack (my LightPhone has a hotspot, so I could really just use a laptop for this) or occasionally when I want music at the gym. But the smartphone only has wifi now, so whenever I take it out of the house, it’s effectively neutered unless I intentionally give it internet access, and at home I try to keep it in a designated spot unless I’m using it to get around Netflix’s stupid demand that every household have it’s own paid account. Oh, and did I mention that my data plan is only $15/month now?
I still have a desktop computer and a TV5. I’m not (currently) trying to turn into a complete digital ascetic, but I am trying to reclaim control over how I engage with technology and how I allow technology to engage with me. And it appears to be working. I relish going out and about now - and have found myself on many occasions starting up conversations with strangers where before I would have simply checked my notifications to avoid awkward eye-contact. I’ve been bringing books with me to more places, and when I hang out with my friends I feel far more present. I’m just overall finding myself much more grounded in the real world - I no longer feel like a liminal person, floating between physical and digital at all times. My smartphone certainly wasn’t the root of my issues, but boy is it proving that it was an easy vector for my struggles and insecurities to attack me.
That I think is my broader point here. If a recovering drug addict says he can’t walk down that street or a recovering alcoholic tells you he can’t be around that drink, we don’t bat an eye. Sure, we think, why would you go near such things if they’ve proved to be a weakness to you before? We support and accommodate. Even things aren’t so extreme, we know that nicotine, alcohol, drugs, porn, and so many other vices exacerbate other issues like anxiety, depression, and physical health. Look to the sober-curious movement: people who realize that, despite not having a dependancy, cutting back on alcohol can have its benefits. This is, I think the direction that the technology conversation should go — some people would be well served to cut out the digital world entirely, but far more of us could benefit drastically by simply getting more intentional, setting a firm boundary around what you will accept from your technology and what you will not. And we haven’t even touched on issues like predatory Terms of Service agreements, mass surveillance, or myriad others.
To me the attitude around technology today feels much like the Sexual Revolution — most people think the more technology you have, the better your life will be; so much so that we’re constantly trying to inject technology into every facet of life. I think we’d be well-served as a society to see moving to something like a LightPhone, or a Techless Wisephone, or even a Nokia not as the extreme behavior of a few tech-addicted people, but as a perfectly rational boundary to set with the technological world. I don’t need the unfettered internet by my side 24/7 to be a functioning human, and it shouldn’t make me a social pariah to say it.
I’m not going to even remotely suggest that restricting my smartphone and adopting a semi-dumb phone solved my struggles with depression and anxiety. It would be dishonest to suggest it. But I will say that it makes the fight feel less hopeless sometimes. When I fill my life with Plato, C.S. Lewis, Shakespeare (I’ve been watching a lot of Shakespeare lately in lieu of Netlfix), and the like, and remove some of the sickly-sweet kaleidoscope of influencers trying to sell me a lifestyle that doesn’t really exist, of dating apps (a whole discussion on it’s own), of so much empty “content,” I find myself surrounded by wise and supportive voices, rather than voices solely designed to entice and exploit me. And when I think about it that way it seems too obvious to be worth saying that I feel better, happier, more human.
As a final word of support for my case, check out
’s publication for proper reasearch into the havoc social media is unleashing on the minds of the younger generations. Even if social media isn’t the source of all problems, it certainly exacerbates them to such a degree that it demands a mature, considered solution.A far superior form of the sport if you ask me, played with no mitts and a much softer ball
Hormone-driven teen angst phase notwithstanding
I’m still shocked at my brain’s ability to concoct such ridiculous lies, and even more shocked that I can be in such a place that I believe them
For those not in the know, Apple insists on using their own system for group chats between iPhone users, so that when you leave the Apple eco-system you meet all sorts of unexpected issues. The most extreme one being effectively erased from your previous iMessage group chats without any of your friends being the wiser.
In fact I’ve built myself a home server so that I can host my own digital services that act as my own personal Dropbox, Netflix, etc, just to further reduce my dependency on large tech companies.