I dream of quitting
Against accepting fruit as dessert, changing someone's life, canceling my gym membership, a conversation with my neighbor, a dead phone, and learning to take a fall.
My phone died. It didn’t run out of battery, nor was it a temporary glitch. It died. This happened two weeks ago and, as uneventful as it may seem, the deceased cell phone snowballed into a series of incidents I’m still recovering from.
The first and saddest one was an argument with my husband, triggered by my serious consideration of getting a flip phone instead of a new smartphone. “Ale, come on, you’re being delusional, there’s no way you can go through today’s world without an iPhone, you need it for so many things,” he yelled at me, very annoyed. “Let me at least entertain the idea for a couple of minutes,” I yelled back at him. That morning, there was no room for this recurrent dream of mine: becoming a Luddite.
I must admit, the man is right. There’s no way I can go about my day without a smartphone. I need it for so many things: Checking my son’s school activities, going somewhere new with Google Maps, checking if this place is open right now, FaceTime when my husband is working late or on a work trip, listening to music and podcasts when I go out for a walk or a run, tracking my runs, and texting comfortably.
The only thing that makes me want to quit my smartphone, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, is the pull these apps have on my attention. “You can just not have those apps, Ale, for God’s sake.” He never says things like, for God’s sake. So he must’ve been serious. I listened to the man and got a new device.
I no longer have social media apps on my phone. Twice a week, I download Instagram just to post (because when I don’t, fewer people read this newsletter and that’s sad, I know, but it’s also true), have a 5-minute promenade through the few people I haven’t muted, and then I delete it again. It’s a great system. It might be the perfect system for now. I don’t disappear entirely from the platform and the platform doesn’t steal my time and mental bandwidth. Still,
Everything. I dream of quitting everything. I fantasize about quitting this newsletter. I’ve toyed with that idea since day one. However, the harsh truth is that I earn more with this newsletter than I would by publishing in print. Isn’t that terribly sad?