Gen Zer Used Flip Phone for 9 Months, Is Now Less Glued to Her Screen

• Ella Jones wanted to know if she could live without her smartphone, so she got a flip phone.
• She found it clunky and slow, but said it reduced her urge to mindlessly use her screen.
• She’s now back on a smartphone, but she’s confident she won’t fall into a screen addiction.

This essay as told is based on a transcribed conversation with Ella Jones, 23, from Belfast, Northern Ireland, about her experience trying to manage her screen time. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I was born in 2000 and I can’t remember a time when my family didn’t have a computer.

I didn’t have a phone until I was about 12 and I saved up to buy a Samsung Galaxy Young. My social media phase started around age 13. I had an iPhone 3GS and was on Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr and YouTube – it was normal for everyone in my social circles to use them.

In college, I had phases where I found Instagram addictive and tried to detox from it. One summer, my boyfriend, now my husband, asked me, “What would happen if we didn’t have our smartphones?”

I had never thought about it. We have reviewed all the essential things we use our smartphones for. For me it was things like texting, calling, and Google Maps.

We wondered if there was a phone that wasn’t a smartphone but had all these functions. We decided to try them as an experiment to see if we could reduce our reliance on technology. My boyfriend bought a Nokia 800 and I got the Nokia 2720 Flip in July 2021. I wanted the cool “flip”.

I ended up using mine for nine months until it was no longer practical, and I found a job that required me to have a better phone.

I discovered that I was more dependent on technology than I thought.

Having a flip phone removed the urge to mindlessly do things on my phone

The flip phone I received was bulky and slow. You had to press the button up to three times to type a letter, and there was no touchscreen. It didn’t have the fast, colorful, addictive design that I associate with smartphones.

It removed that urge to mindlessly do things on my phone because it slowed down the process. He didn’t seem “intelligent”, even though he had access to the Internet.

I had group chats on WhatsApp, but I wasn’t able to keep up with the messages due to the time it took me to type, so I spent less time interacting with them.

There was an app store. In theory, you can scroll through Facebook, but the screen is the size of a thumb, so you can’t really interact with the feed. I almost never used it to go on social media.

There was Google Maps, but it didn’t read directions to me, which meant I couldn’t use it while driving and had to write the directions on a sticky note instead. Eventually I started memorizing routes and felt so much better about navigating.

Even though I didn’t use my phone as often, I often replaced it with time spent on a laptop. It wasn’t like I wasn’t using social media, as I was always checking Instagram and watching YouTube on the web.

His camera sucked and I missed being able to take pictures. In restaurants they often have QR codes that you have to scan for the menus. I would have to ask my friend to do it or ask for a physical menu, which they often wouldn’t have.

I had to get a smartphone again for work

I stopped using the flip phone after nine months. There was an interim period where I was still trying to figure out if the flip phone worked for my life, and starting a new job in June 2022 as a content creator for a company called StudentCrowd reversed the situation. trend: I needed a smartphone. to manage social networks.

I also felt like having a flip phone made it harder for me to meet people and be easy to communicate with.

I now use an iPhone 12 mini, which I received from my brother-in-law in November 2023.

It allows 4K video recording, which is very important to me because I do YouTube. I definitely felt the temptation to download a lot of apps on it.

I feel a sense of failure, but I’m not as glued to my phone as I used to be

By owning a flip phone, I wanted to fight against the culture of convenience and the overconsumption of content.

I think fighting grain is good. We should question things – but it was difficult. Every day my approach to tasks had to be different, like when I set aside time to do things on my laptop or write instructions.

In a rat race, if you try to run in the opposite direction to the other rats, you will simply be dragged along. I think maybe that’s what happened to me. I tried to go back and fight against it, but technology and culture eventually move forward, so I had to go for it.

I feel like a failure having a smartphone again.

But I also have the certainty that I will not fall into dependence because I have seen how I can work without a smartphone. If I got to a point where I felt like I was using my phone too much, I would know that I could go back to using a flip phone.

Before I had a flip phone, I spent five or more hours a day on my smartphone, but now I think it’s more like one or two hours. In December, I decided not to use Instagram and Facebook in 2024.

I feel like I’m no longer glued to a phone like I was when I was a teenager.