Admittedly, I’m not the most representative subject for a no-tech experiment.
My screen time (to find it, I unlocked my phone, promptly forgot what I was doing, and went to messages instead, twice) averaged three hours per day pre experiment. I take notes and read on paper and don’t have social media, unless you count LinkedIn, having deleted Instagram after an embarrassing phishing scam.
I am as pretentious about all this as you’d expect — which makes me a hypocrite. I still reach for my phone compulsively to check texts as soon as I wake up; I still live by my Google Calendar like it’s gospel, scroll through apps to procrastinate or open the thing for no good reason. I can feel the constant stimuli corrode my cognition: my memory, attention and observation, the mental equivalents of sitting still. Flooded with media, every thought flushed out the nearest channel, nothing stays, nothing ferments. Efficiency is the spear of technological progress. We want quicker, smoother, easier. What do we lose?
I had my suspicions, but they were tinged by the misleading promise of nostalgia. There was one way to get an clear-eyed look: quit devices — everything, cold turkey — for a week. I shut down my phone and only opened my computer to finish schoolwork and check email and messages once a day.
12 a.m.
The experiment began. Nerves built up going into it, like separation anxiety. I had planned replacements — printed readings and a paper planner — but my electronics were so entangled with my brain that I was certain I’d missed something. Most nights, I text until I can’t keep my eyes open and slump into bed. That Monday night, I wrote in a journal — one of those things I want to but never do — and, lacking more diversions, slept.
8 a.m.
I blinked awake, reached for my phone on impulse, and, realizing I had powered it off, was at a loss for what to do next. My usual morning routine is atrocious: wake up, check texts, send bleary-eyed messages I’ll barely remember, check email, click through a gamut of news apps, roll over and fall asleep again; wake up again, play a podcast (Ezra Klein’s, usually), lay there half-listening and fall asleep again; wake up for the third or umpteenth time, check the clock, realize I have once again slept too late for breakfast, debate whether I really need to go to class, decide yes and finally hoist myself out of bed.
Without a phone, I just got up.
Two states became familiar to me over those six days: a reigning quiet and, straining against it, the urge for a dose of sensory stimuli. I felt the itch each time I stepped out of lecture. If I let it simmer, it dipped into existential, hollow unease. Think a yawning cavern, crossed between Cookie-Monster voraciousness and Charybdian void. I started to wonder if dread is what we’re staving off, all of us with headphones on and heads buried in phones.
Without devices, there were two places I could be — my brain or my immediate, physical surroundings. I craved a digital enclosure to escape the blandness of the former and the porousness of the latter. Under the discomfort, the quiet gained an allure. I tend to dismiss the boomer hand-wringing over “kids these days and their phones,” but it’s true. My mental health improved when my mental space was entirely mine to manage. No unwelcome notifications, no random browsing. Devices and their tantalizing possibility emit a constant hum, like a lump in the back of my brain that demands picking. With the option foreclosed, the hum stopped and the lump dissolved.
5 p.m.
I exited Angell Hall at sunset. The sun tossed pink on the stone facade, a sparrow waited on a high branch. I’m 75% sure it was a sparrow based on its chirp, but absent Merlin Bird ID could not confirm. I would usually pull out my phone, take a photo, walk on. I read, in the title of a paywalled Substack, that photography assuages our fear of the sublime because it absolves us of the burden of looking. I looked.
And felt a peculiar desperation over mortality, the inevitability of endings, each moment the death of the moment before — yet I still remember that scene, while most days have disappeared into the gloam of memory. “Life, after all, is just the sum total of the things you’ve paid attention to,” Ezra Klein said in a podcast. Compared to afternoons of reel-scrolling that left no recollection but an aftertaste of regret, I prefer the grit of three dimensions.
8 p.m.
The moment I returned to my room: Gmail time. I was ravenous. Alas, of the 20 emails, only two were necessary — I made a mental note to unsubscribe from all newsletters postexperiment. Then, iMessage. I felt the difference immediately, like releasing a valve in my head. The aforementioned silence dissolved into red notification bubbles and the speed of a text conversation and ah, this is why my brain always feels cluttered. What I assumed was normal was constructed by digital design. It was almost a relief to return to the analog quiet.
By the second day, I had found replacements for all device-mediated needs except one: music. Your Media Exchange housed $25 cassette players along with racks of used and new tapes and, in the absence of Google, I asked the storekeeper if he could show me how to use it. Talking, how awkward — being looked at by a person instead of the cool gaze of an algorithm.
Two batteries and 20 minutes of Gen Z struggle later, Bob Dylan sounded through my Bose headphones; a strange pairing with the decidedly not-sleek plastic player. Cassettes are stubbornly material things, made for one purpose. You hear the whir of tapes spinning, feel the vibrations of music moving from magnetic imprints to sound waves. Listening became an event. Instead of Spotify and bluetooth, I needed the cassette player, a cassette, wired headphones and spare batteries — which meant I had to know what I wanted to hear, and moreover, I had to actively want it. No more relying on Daylist to regurgitate my taste in artificial intelligence-generated adjectives — “bitter animalistic sunday afternoon?” “Crunchy?”
The machine had play, pause and fast forward buttons. I couldn’t rewind, so bad songs were to be sat through and good songs, waited for. Five cassettes cost me as much as five months on Spotify, so each object accrued the value of money spent, the effort of finding it, and the place it came from. It gave me a strange autonomy. If and when Spotify crashes, the Internet blacks out, an apocalypse hits, I’ll still have music (provided I also have a stockpile of AA batteries).
And, it had radio. At risk of sounding unbearably young, it felt magical: To scroll through the static, hone your ears on blips of coherent sound and tune it into a song or someone’s voice, reaching you from who-knows-how-far away. There was an intimacy to it, knowing there would always be people out in the electromagnetic ether, tucked between 88 and 108 MHz, 530 and 1710 kHz.
Armed with the cassette and the passage of time, the tides turned. I got accustomed to the silence; it was nearly preferable, so much so that I worried I would never return to devices (read: modern society) given the choice. I ran errands in person instead of on Amazon: Literati for pens, Encore for more cassettes, Ragstock for jeans, Dawn Treader for a dictionary; I got a booklet for the Ann Arbor bus system, though I didn’t get to use it.
I caved a few times. An insatiable desire for ASMR hit, and was satiated, in the middle of the week. At another point, a hankering for Google Sheets spiraled into a Goodreads trip followed by Instagram stalking before I snapped out of the digital brain haze. It took effort to keep my impulses on a tight leash. Just being on a computer bombarded me with a trigger-happy urge to let loose and click around for something, anything novel.
Going into the experiment, I expected affirmation for my device disdain. Technological discourse tends toward binary; it’s either humanity’s savior or scapegoat. What I found was more nuanced. Most of us — Gen Z, digital natives — slid into technology without a conscious say. My iPod shuffle became a yellow iPhone 5c became a shared laptop with my sister became a MacBook and my current iPhone X. What I did on each device depended on software updates and Silicon Valley trends. Stripping away tech meant I could boil devices down to their basic functions and choose what to add back.
12 a.m.
I counted down the minutes (mostly so I could text my boyfriend) for the experiment to end. I still left my phone in my room the following days, out of fear that the reverie would break and I would go back to a phone-hungry mind fog. Already, the end of experimental constraint meant there was little more than my flimsy self-control to stop myself from succumbing to keyboard shortcut frenzy — command T-ing to Google search, four-finger swiping to check notifications. I could feel my brain shift up gear, crowded with things to look at, things to do.
Desperate for some quiet, I switched my phone to grayscale, hated it, then removed all my apps (except phone and messages) from the home screen. The computer remains a problem. If you know where to find a typewriter, let me know.
Statement Web Editor and Contributor Emily Sun can be reached at emisun@umich.edu.