After 6 months in Bali without a smartphone, I have acquired an iPhone 4. Mine was stolen from a nightclub in July and I never replaced it. The reason I resisted for so long was to avoid a very clear and tangible impediment to being fully present. (Coincidentally my iPhone was plucked the night after I got out of a silent -Vipassana- retreat)

This is a shot from a video that went viral earlier this fall, urging us to all take a look at how we’re using our devices. http://ti.me/1iM0uCy

During this time, by virtue of having no alternative, I was required to be very intentional about when and how I communicated with anyone who was not within ear/eye shot. Yeah, it was a little inconvenient at times. Much to my friends’ chagrin, I didn’t have Whatsapp. To SMS on my feature phone, it took minutes(!) to type the message, because it didn’t support T9 and I had to type each letter at a time. Imagine the frustration! If you received a text message from me in the past 6 months, you should know that I exerted a lot of mental and physical effort to do so. When our internet was down at the house, I’d sometimes drive in the middle of the night to a closed cafe, where I knew the wifi would still be working. I’d sit on my motorbike on the side of the road and check my email and Facebook or FaceTime my family using an iPod (by the way, new iPods are really awesome).

Once you’ve tasted the sweet mana of technology that moves as fast as you can perceive it within reach of your pocket, could you go back to the experience of requiring to be connected based on pre-determined fixed location that crawls, at times, as slow as old honey out of the jar?

And, is that better or worse than having something near you constantly bing bonging and vibrating saying “look at me,” or moreover, the reaction that bubbles up from your ego telling you that you need to respond? I basically wanted to engage in this experiment, and prevented myself from all the above and took a long break. After many years of being incredibly connected, it’s been a privilege and a luxury to be able to have a feature phone and let things wait.

Three major lessons: 

1) Boredom is a state of mind that should be inspected with care.

2) Trust that things can wait. Perhaps this is easier when you don’t have a job. But I’ll have to test this theory later.

3) Passive consumption in general is not rewarding. I didn’t have much opportunity for it, and I don’t feel like I missed much.

Now I have this device that can connect me to anyone anywhere at anytime, and I wonder, how will my behavior change, if at all? I realize that this is a silly post for many reasons; mostly I’m sensitive that it may read to some like an over-privileged wanker who bemoans having to actually type out text messages (eeegats!), and it’s like, “Can’t you just silence your phone you ding-dong?”

We live in a time where accessibility to and affordability of phones w/data is increasing at such a rate that in Indonesia, for example, you can buy phone with Facebook, Whatsapp, and a bunch of popular games for $50 on every corner (1 month salary at minimum wage = ~ $100). And social convention is such that it is the norm to have your phone present and often involved in social settings. There has been a lot written about this and even a nifty video that went viral earlier this fall. We’re all figuring it out as things change quickly and we all have our own path.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to let go of that smartphone once you’ve had it, I thought I would share my thoughts. Especially in the wake of the film Her, which I thought was pretty provocative. I’m back on the other side, with an iPhone in my pocket. Wish me luck.

Posted on 2/11/2014

Written by Katie Zacarian. You can follow Katie on Facebook here.  

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