Life Without a SmartPhone

Cicadas, Metamorphosis & The Smart Phone's Lack of Boundaries

May 22, 2024

It’s funny how not having a cell phone feels like a radical idea. It’s funny because it wasn’t that long ago that I and everyone else did not have one. And we got along just fine. We lived wholly functional lives without them for all of human history. But life without the tiny, glowing screens in pockets or purses, those miniature super computers with powers beyond our forefathers imaginations, feels like a distant past. Like lifetimes ago.

Much of my life revolves around and depends on my phone. I use it several times an hour. I use it to keep track of my grocery and shopping lists. I manage my calendar on it. I record voice memos with it. Texting with it has somehow become the primary form of communication. I use it to take photos and watch other people’s lives on social media. I ask it questions and track time with it and use it as an alarm and as a map and listen to music off it and use it to pay people and get paid. I look at photos and check emails and it’s become an appendage like a third arm.

But I know I’ve given up much in exchange for its ease and convenience.

And I often wonder what life would feel like without it. Would I be forced to live in the moment? To read? To do a puzzle? To get bored? To take a walk? To have a conversation?

I hypothesize life would feel pretty good without it.

But I’m aware that I tend to fantasize other ways of life. Older ways of life.

The cicadas are starting to drop from the sky. Their thirteen or seventeen year (depending on the brood) lifecycles are coming to an end. There is a small sound like the plastic wrapped around the edge of a jar being broken open that I hear scattered throughout the night and across the yard. I follow the sound and find a cicada slowly dying. Maybe this plastic sound is their final exhalation of life.

Everybody says it’s a big year as two periodical broods are hatching at the same time here in Nashville. I’ve been watching them closely. Aside from that last expression of life, I hear two distinct voices. One is higher and sounds like an alarm coming from the sky. The other is lower and more acute and rises and falls in waves and is sometimes deafening. It’s odd to think these choruses are the calls for life. For reproduction.

Over the course of their fourteen or seventeen year lives, they live out of the ground for only several weeks. Some only for hours. So I am happy they have finally learned how to use their new winged bodies. When they first emerged in the darkness of night like slimy zombies slowly crawling out of the earth toward light, and eventually out of their old skin and into their final winged bodies, they were clumsy. I am happy that now they have a bit more ease when flying. They don’t run into walls quite as much and can finally flutter at the top of the canopy.

I was venting to my friend Anna about how I think it’s wrong that businesses nowadays expect people to have cell phones. During Covid, restaurants required them to view menus. Doctor offices require them for filling out paper work. Parking lots require them to scan the QR code and pay for a parking spot. Many businesses have abandoned a number to call altogether and now require texting to book and confirm appointments. There’s something about this that feels fundamentally wrong to me. Like when a business will not take cash and accepts only a credit card. It’s the same as that.

I was telling her that I’d like to get rid of my cell phone just so I can indignantly tell these businesses that I don’t have a cell and they’ll have to call or email me instead of text. Or offer me a paper form to fill out. Or give me a paper menu.

Cell phones are personal. They’re a direct way to reach into my world. And I don’t feel like anybody should be able to have access like that unless it’s intentionally granted. It most certainly should not be expected. There should be boundaries. Some barrier to entry.

A few days after talking with Anna, I drop my phone and it breaks.

It happens when I am out in a new part of town so I don’t have a map to guide me home. I can’t compulsively check my email and text messages and Instagram. I can’t make phone calls. And I feel free. Like how you feel when you go on vacation and don’t know quite where you are or where you’re going and that somehow makes you feel so alive.

I start thinking about not getting a replacement.

I’ll set up a landline.

I’ll set up an auto-text reply to alert people I no longer have text and that they’ll have to call my landline or send an email instead.

I’ll listen to the car radio.

I’ll determine my routes before leaving the house by drawing maps like I used to as a kid.

I just finished reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It’s about a young man who wakes up to discover he’s become a beetle. And it’s a terribly sad story.

The young man/beetle’s immense love for his family is shown through his dedicated work ethic, always striving to put food on the table while they sit at home, listlessly living off his earnings. But when he changes form and can no longer provide anything for them, they begin to despise him. They cannot stand to look at him. His love continues however and in the end, he dies to make his family’s life more convenient.

With his new form, he’s never again seen with eyes of love or compassion. Though I’ve begun to think that his new form only unveiled the lack of love and compassion that was perhaps never really there.

Years upon years spent underground in quiet darkness. Sleeping. Alone.

Until one day for no particular reason, you decide to wake up. You crawl upward. Towards what you do not know. You begin to hear voices. The songs of beings you cannot register but their song is so beautiful and familiar like it’s connected to something deep within you. Like a calling from home.

You reach the surface. You feel your skin itchy. It starts peeling off. You think you are dying. But still, you hear the voices and you know there’s some place you are reaching towards. Something is calling to you.

The last glorious moments of life. Lifting off the ground. Feeling the warmth of the sun. With thousands of others also feeling this freedom that’s at once frightening and beautiful. What a crescendo.

I will miss the orchestral beings.

A couple days have gone by and I miss my appendage. I don’t think I am ready to call it quits with the smart phone. I will probably get a replacement this afternoon.

I tell myself someday I will get rid of it for good. I will finally get a landline and then I will really be alive. I will sever off this technology that is melding itself into me until I cannot live without it. Until none of us can. Until there is no boundary, no difference between it and us and we have become one. Until we are so utterly under it’s control, in need of it, we cannot imagine living without it.

I tell myself someday I will get rid of it for good and then I will once again be free.