2 Weeks Into 1 Year Without A Smartphone

I am now in the 14th day of a year without a smartphone, without any cellular connection as I travel through the world.

I was asked this morning if I have been experiencing withdrawal, and was struck at the aptness of that word to describe what it has felt like to be without my little companion, to have surrendered my prop of tapping, flicking, swiping. It’s stranger than I had anticipated.

The purpose of this experiment was to withdraw, as a hermit might have withdrawn from the city in the past, from the perpetual link that has formed between us and that greater digital organism of which we are now members. Yet, the truth is that I feel more like a junkie experiencing drug withdrawal than a wise hermit sitting in a mountain cave.

I feel the powerful pull of empty moments now, pauses that I had before composed over with filler notes of checking and responding to things that required no response, things that I already had checked and remembered ten times. Every empty space of time feels like a failure. I enter an elevator and reflexively wonder what is wrong with me, that I have nothing to glance at. Even if I am driving or riding or walking to get to an appointment, I feel lazy not to be listening to something that could inform or prepare me for where I am going.

I am de-optimized. It is an insecure feeling to have nothing to do, to have to actually wait as I wait.

I feel unsure how to interpret my life now, as I lack the feedback that flows so freely from a glowing screen. It is as if I have suddenly stepped off a spinning contraption at a playground and, standing still, am watching the world swirl around me, struggling desperately not to fall as tremendous invisible waves, existing only in my earbudless ears, draw me this way and that.

At home, I watch my wife with an awful combination of jealousy and judgment as she sits at the kitchen table with her iPhone, not glancing up at me for the better part of an hour. I want to be where she is at the same time that I want her to see where I am, and to be there, instead of where she is. I ask her how things are in there every now and then, but she does not answer.

My first experience in my iPhone-free year was to become lost. I was driving from my home far Upstate to meet a client in New York City, but without GPS navigation to assist me, I became fretful, and took the wrong turn as I approached the Hudson River. I had forgotten to purchase a travel atlas, and so I compounded my error with a string of additional errors, refusing to turn around until I had no idea where I was. With a compass in the car as my only guidance, I drove all the way into Manhattan and paid an exorbitant parking fee, rather than taking a train from upriver as would have been the sensible thing to do.

It was a thrilling, unfamiliar emotion I experienced, moving through the world without knowing what I would see next. I felt like an animal, rather than an idea, for the first time in a long time. With my iPhone and iPad always present to guide me, I had lost getting lost.

At times, it is thrilling, the knowledge that I have declared for myself the right to be often unreachable. In the absence of constant conversation, I am beginning to hear another voice reassert itself within my own mind, though only at the level of a distant whisper.

I have been writing poetry, which has been an agony for me, mostly because I cannot force it into the quality I expect. I have committed to writing one poem per day about the experience of being completely free of cellular technology. The idea was to replace the loss of the iPhone with something else, something contrary in nature to the digital certainty that lies at the foundation of its technology. I have kept the commitment so far, but I am not pleased with the results, and so had kept the poems to myself, until yesterday, when I shared The Snawfus Hunt.

Yesterday, however, I was asked about the progress of the poetry, and was provoked by that question alone to consider that the project of writing poems may not be about the poems themselves, but about the mental exercise that creating them requires. I have noticed a kind of shift in the poems over the last few days, that I am at least feeling less directly purposeful in my composition of them, which brings me some hope. I have decided to retroactively publish the first two weeks of poems later today.

I am, even as I am working on this individual poetry project, also editing together a collection of poems written by residents of the 2018 House of Beautiful Business. That should be ready to share by the end of the week, if I am not sidetracked, though sidetracks can be thrilling. I find myself entertaining ideas of ridiculous projects that, if achieved, could either finally fulfill my potential or wreck me completely.

At this early point, I feel exposed, vulnerable, and foolish for having entered into this year of cellular abstinence. My hope is that, by the time 2020 arrives, I will have resolved this feeling into something respectable, but for now, I admit, it’s a bit of a mess.