I am a notoriously difficult person to get a hold of.  Texts are missed for days or weeks, emails too, my social media appearances are few and far between, if I don’t recognize a phone number I don’t answer the phone.

This is not because I don’t want to talk to people or because I want to make anybody’s life difficult, but rather because the thought of picking up a smartphone for anything, even to approve a multi-factor authentication request, has become repugnant.  I have no positive feelings about the device.  I resent it.  I want to throw it in a river or toss it as high as I can up in the air and watch it smash on my driveway.  It takes an act of grit and determination to remove it from the charger, unlock it, and check it for messages.

I enjoy going to the physical mailbox.  I enjoy socializing in person.  I enjoy PEOPLE.  I even enjoy talking on the phone and hearing the voice of somebody I love.  But the smartphone represents advertising, scammers, invasive tracking, disruptive notifications, and negativity.  No joy is to be found there.  No warmth.  No positive energy.  Just a cold, dead, screen, filled with vapid content dished up by entities intent on taking my money, my time, or both.  Why on earth would I ever want to use it for anything?  I truly hate that thing.  I’d rather pick up a dog turd than a smartphone.

It wasn’t always this way.  I loved the first iPhone I had, (it was a 3G, the second iPhone iteration).  That was a fun device.  Before that I had a proto-smartphone, the Motorola Razr, and I thought it was pretty fun too.  In fact, I was pretty smartphone crazy for the first decade they were available, TBH.  Then, sometime around the beginning of the Trump presidency, the smartphone just came to symbolize all that is wrong with the world for me.  They stopped being fun and started to make me feel terrible every time I touched one.  I don’t know what to do about it.

The smartphone is the thing everybody expects you to have.  People expect you to carry it with you at all times.  I was one of the early adopters.  I get it.  To be a person in the 21st century who avoids social media and doesn’t usually have a smartphone nearby is to basically be a caveman.  But here I am trying to  figure out how it would work if I were to switch to a no-smartphone life.  Landline or feature phone only, use a tablet or something else for MFA login authentication stuff.  The only thing I would miss is GPS but my car has that built in now.

As it stands I sometimes go most of a week without even picking up my smartphone so I feel like it would be doable.

I find it bizarre that a device that I once saw as the greatest innovation ever and quite a lot of fun is now something I want to get rid of forever.

Maybe this is coming from the big stupid big corporate social media internet we have now, which I hate, or maybe it’s just that I’ve been using smartphones (and proto smartphones) for over 20 years so the novelty has well and truly worn off, but I constantly find myself thinking about how nice it would be to simplify the number of ways that people can reach me.  One of the overwhelming things about the modern communications landscape is the sheer number of things that people monitor.  They monitor texts, DMs on multiple platforms, app notifications, phone calls, and email.  It’s a lot to respond to and keep up with and I just don’t want to do that anymore.  I only need one.  I don’t need one device with 47 inboxes, notifications, or messaging apps.  I just need one place to be contacted.  When I was a kid there were two ways to reach me.  You could mail me a letter or you could call my home phone number and if somebody was home to answer you could ask for me and if nobody was around you couldn’t.  In my early 20’s I added email to the mix.  Then PC messaging apps.  Then a cell phone.  Then texts.  The options kept multiplying and I just don’t monitor all of this stuff anymore.  I don’t want to.  Bill Murray has a voice mailbox that people can call to leave him messages about things.  That’s it.  There is no other way to get in touch with Bill Murray.  That’s genius.  I need to figure out something that simple.

And then I need to “accidentally” drop my smartphone in a wood-chipper.  🙂