Living without a phone

Posted by Patrick Lam on Saturday, October 31, 2020
credit: Ashwin Kumar@Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

I dropped my phone last Thursday and got it back from the shop yesterday (Wednesday). Some reflections on not having a phone for a week (in the city).

  • can’t take pictures of random cats…
  • anxiety about getting lost when walking around town to places I don’t walk to often (let alone driving a car);
  • have to get my spouse to sign into venues with the NZ COVID tracing app or sign in manually;
  • can’t read my phone in bed (supposedly a good thing I guess; didn’t affect me too noticeably);
  • don’t know what time it is in the morning when I wake up (obviously after dawn);
  • the urge to randomly pull out the phone looking for notifications was super easy to resist for me;
  • didn’t feel more or less productive without being able to look things up on second screen while using computer.
Sylvester the Allenby Cat

This is quite different from using phone-as-GPS-and-clock in the wilderness.