I miss the phone. No, not that slab in my pocket that we call the smartphone.
Yes, that device can act like a phone. But it also doubles as a portable laptop, camera, alarm, console, TV, wallet, and so many other things â Iâm not sure what it is. But one thingâs for sure: calling an iPhone just a âphoneâ has never felt quite right.
Itâs easy to lose sight of just how utterly vast a smartphoneâs capabilities are. Hidden inside our pockets is a powerful machine that seems like it really can do everything, everywhere, all at once. Thereâs a reason the courts recently restricted FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to just a dumb phone. A smartphone is a powerful tool, especially in the hands of a math nerd who lost billions of other peopleâs money overnight.
And while my smartphone has improved my life immensely â and Iâm not about to get rid of it â itâs also made some things worse. Namely, my brain. The smartphone lets us easily check on things constantly and immediately, whether thatâs the news or our loved ones, but at the expense of our attention spans, mental health, and relationships. Hell, recently, I realized I barely remember most of the concerts Iâve gone to, and why? I was too busy taking hundreds of videos and sharing them on Instagram with my phone. Funnily enough, I never even watched the videos after and only did when I needed to delete them to free up storage.
Thatâs why I want the cheap dumb phone to make a comeback, and Iâm so excited itâs on the verge of potentially doing so as more Gen Zers increasingly embrace it. I need a break, and as long as my iPhone is this good, I donât think Iâm going to immediately give it to myself. I need a phone that, while waiting in line to fuel my caffeine addiction, lacks apps so I canât whip it out and distract myself with the news or FOMO-inducing vacation photos. A phone, ideally, with no camera, either, that wonât pull me away from enjoying the present moment with my baby nephew as he flashes me one of his first toothy smiles.
I want it to be a Thing, too. Something common again so I donât feel like a freak as I draw attention pulling out a dumb phone that looks like itâs from the early 2000s, which has actually happened. I also want it to be affordable so everybody can own one, not a couple of hundred bucks, as many popular dumb phones like the Light Phone currently cost.
And yes, I know what youâre thinking. âWhy donât you just put your phone on âDo Not Disturbâ?â I have. Multiple times. On good days when my willpower is high, sometimes it helps. But Iâm only human, and smartphones and apps are designed to be addictive. On those days when Iâm already feeling down or exhausted, the temptation to pull out my smartphone for a quick and easy dopamine rush gets too strong. I know Iâm not alone.
Weâve proposed bringing dumb phones back before, back in the days when Trump ran the country by Twitter and rattled our collective nerves with each new tweet. The need to log off was great, and now it feels even greater.
Since then, weâve suffered a global pandemic while the US witnessed a literal attempted coup. Russia invaded Ukraine, which has cost well over 200,000 people their lives, destabilized the region, and contributed to major food shortages. As that conflict continues to unfold, weâve also recently hit our â what? â millionth major financial crisis in 15 years? Every other week, we live in unprecedented times, and itâs no wonder depression diagnoses are on the rise.
At the same time, technology is just getting better â and even more distracting. There are even more addictive apps as well as more capable smartphones and AI tools to polish up our lives. And as social media companies continue to add more and more distracting features, research increasingly demonstrates the negative impact itâs all having on the mental health of young people and adults alike. Itâs no wonder: reading the news sometimes makes it feels like the worldâs about to end, yet somehow Instagram and LinkedIn feeds make it feel like everybodyâs winning at life every day and all the time. And theyâre doing it all while looking like supermodels, too, thanks to incredibly good AI filters.
And thatâs why I â no, we â need the dumb phone to make a comeback. We need something to help us temporarily disconnect from a fake digital world so we can be more connected to the real one. It used to be getting out of the house was how I could unplug, but now I never can with my smartphone in my pocket and tech everywhere. We canât hit a pause button on the world, but we can forcibly log off by using a dumb phone instead of a smart one.Â
Donât get me wrong: I donât want smartphones to go anywhere, and I donât want them to stop getting better, either. Rather, I imagine a world where we have our smartphones, but itâs also normal to have cheap dumb phones to use while, say, out of the house or just whenever you need a break. Just a basic phone that we can all use to just text and make calls with. No cameras, no apps, no internet, no none of that stuff. Just a phone â not another constant distraction.