When two balaclava-clad men on a motorbike mounted the pavement to rob me, recently, I remained oblivious. My eyes were pinned to a text message on my phone, and my hands were so clawed around it that they didn’t even bother to grab it. It wasn’t until an elderly woman shrieked and I felt the whoosh of air as the bike launched back on to the road that I looked up at all. They might have been unsuccessful but it did make me think: what else am I missing from the real world around me?
Before I’ve poured my first morning coffee I’ve already watched the lives of strangers unfold on Instagram, checked the headlines, responded to texts, swiped through some matches on a dating app, and refreshed my emails, twice. I check Apple Maps for my quickest route to work. I’ve usually left it too late to get the bus, so I rent a Lime bike using the app. During the day, my brother sends me some memes, I take a picture of a canal boat, and pay for my lunch on Apple Pay. I walk home listening to music on Spotify and a long voice note from a friend, then I watch a nondescript TV drama, while scrolling through Depop and Vinted for clothes.
I’m constantly contactable, I have no personal boundaries, and my attention span disappeared a long time ago. Since the first iPhone in 2007, smartphones have become indispensable to modern life, with the average person in the UK spending four hours and 20 minutes online per day. “Social media provides frictionless access to an infinite universe of mostly free digital drugs,” says Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation. “And the algorithm tailors the experience for each unique brain, making it very reinforcing, while also injecting just enough novelty in the infinite scroll to overcome boredom and tolerance. All these features combined keep us clicking and swiping long after we want to.” Over time we develop tolerance, which means “we need more of it and a more potent form to get the same effect.”
Increased screen time has been associated with depression, anxiety and poorer sleep. But is it possible to live lo-fi in a hi-tech world? For a month, I tried: swapping my iPhone for a Nokia which I can only use to text, call and play Snake; also, a Walkman and a film camera. I picked up physical copies of books, newspapers and magazines; I used a London A-Z for directions, and hunted down my physical bank cards or tried to use cash. The only screen time exception was for work, where from 9-5 I used my laptop to respond to emails and write.
Day 1
“You’re going to look like such a performative hipster,” my flatmate Ben says, as I’m setting up my new devices. He’s right. I leave the Walkman behind, but my bag is still heavier than usual with my book, notepad, A-Z and wallet. I haven’t taken the bus into work yet from my new home so I follow a hand-drawn map to the stop and run for a bus. I stupidly didn’t write down the bus number but that one sounds familiar. It’s not the one, two friendly strangers tell me, but I can swap on to another at Angel. “We’ve outsourced our memory to our phones,” says Nicholas Kardaras, author of Digital Madness and a former assistant clinical professor of psychology at Stony Brook University, New York. “And unfortunately the ease and comfort of being lubricated by technology just means our human skills atrophied. It is use it or lose it.”
The bus is crawling. Normally, I would have looked up a different route. I try to message a friend back but it’s difficult having to click each button multiple times for the letter I want. “Hard work,” I manage. I read for the rest of the journey.
Day 3
On my lunch break, my sister and I go for a walk around the park. When she leaves me to do another lap, I have an urge to check Instagram and my emails but I’m only getting the odd SMS. I’m craving the back-and-forth WhatsApps with friends telling me fun facts about their day. I feel a little unsettled, but I try to focus on the changing leaves on the trees. I have thoughts that wouldn’t usually have the time to surface. How stressful.
After work, I go to see the saxophone player cktrl at the ICA. I’m a little worried about collecting the tickets without access to the Dice app I bought them on, but I show them my passport instead. I would normally join the throngs of people filming a song or two, so I could upload some blurred clips with poor sound to social media to show that I had a great time. But I can’t, so I watch him play, undistracted. Then a flashlight glares behind me, as someone films an entire track. I vow never to be that annoying person again.
Day 6
My digital detox is starting to stress out my friends. Nicole finally gets through to me, saying: “I hate your dumb phone.” She’s been texting, but didn’t realise you had to click twice to make it send as an SMS not an iMessage. Another friend wants to share a dating story and texts: “Omg this is a terrible time not to access voice note.” And, when my landlord messages asking us to send pictures of the new carpet on WhatsApp, which I can’t do, Ben texts: “You’re going to be such a liability this month.”
In the evening, my date sends me the address of a pub to meet him at “for your A-Z”. I allow lots of time to decipher its tiny font and navigate my way there. He’s running late, so I sit by the fireplace in the pub and read my book. I look like I’m waiting for someone to chat me up. When he arrives, he shows me how to turn on predictive text, which is a relief for my very tired thumbs.
Day 8
At lunchtime, I put on the terrestrial TV and watch Escape to the Country, where I learn about the housing market in Herefordshire. I want to cook myself an elaborate meal – for dinner, and also for entertainment, but when I get to the shops, I remember that I can’t look up a recipe on my phone, so I settle for tomato pasta.
Day 9
My flatmate picked up a Nina Simone CD for me in a charity shop. I try to play it on my Walkman, but realise it needs batteries. On my lunch break I buy some (who knew there were so many sizes?) and walk home from the office listening to it. Spotify can be overwhelming with its hundred million tracks, so it’s nice to remove the element of choice and focus on the album as it was intended, not scrambled by shuffle mode. Rosanna Irwin, who runs Samsú – a collection of digital detox cabins in Ireland – knows the importance of analogue listening: she leaves her guests with cassette tapes she makes with her father. After reaching a state of burnout, working long hours in tech – first at Meta and later for a climate tech company – she visited the Danish island of Samsø with her husband in 2023, and found peace amid the scrappy phone service and incredible nature.
“My mental health was very poor,” she says. “I was spending a lot of time online and I did an accidental digital detox on this island and came back invigorated from the experience.” She recommends a three-day retreat. “There’s a lot of science to show that it’s around 72 hours in nature where the true magic starts to happen.”
Day 12
I meet my friend at Vauxhall station, and we walk to a cafe for breakfast, then to Tate Britain. Camilla is pretty offline: she’s a doctor and doesn’t have social media. She rarely responds to texts and is maybe one of the most joyful people I know. But she says she feels so much guilt about not replying sooner and hates the fact that phones are like this ever-present person in the room, distracting you from being totally engaged with the real-life friends around you.The sentiment resonates with me; we both want to be more spontaneous.
Inspired by our conversation, I call Aakriti, who doesn’t live too far away. I meet her and two of her friends and we eat empanadas. On the way home, I have to ask the only man on the platform for help. The overground isn’t due for 24 minutes, so I wonder if there is a faster route. There isn’t, so I shiver at the outdoor station wishing I could book an Uber.
Day 13
It’s tipping down with rain when I arrive at Canada Water, and I don’t want to ruin my A-Z to search for Rotherhithe Street. I know The Mayflower pub is on the river and ask a man at a convenience store to point me in the right direction. I’m early, so I squint at my book in the candle-lit pub, feeling very Victorian. There’s a hilarious waiter, who is telling dating stories from Grindr, and it’s much better than my book. This no-technology thing is making me nosy. I pay for my roast with cash, which feels almost fake now, like I’m in a game. Then my friend and I go to the cinema – the Picturehouse in central London, because it’s in between where we both live. They charge us £20 for a ticket, which I would never have paid had I known before we made the trip. I’m left fuming, but luckily the movie is good.
Day 14
I need to call the bank. My flatmate has sent rent money to my Monzo account, which I can only access on the app, and I get a text saying that I’ve gone into an unarranged overdraft. When I get to the tube in the morning, my Oyster card has run out, so I top up the credit and miss my train – I would usually have used a payment card on Apple Pay instead. I have to wait eight minutes for the next one. I’m flustered by the time I get to the office and feel stressed about not being able to check how much money is in my account or transfer money between accounts.
Day 18
There’s a group of children on a school trip on my train. The teacher is trying to keep them entertained by getting them to play a word association game. “When I say ‘bread’,” she says. “You could say, ‘sandwich’. Let’s have a go. ‘School,’” the teacher says. “Prison,” a child shouts back. When I arrive in Notting Hill, I study the map at the station to make sure I surface from the correct exit. I memorise key landmarks so I know where to turn – the Gate Cinema is by the road I need to get to Uxbridge Street. I’m late, and don’t have time for mistakes, so I start walking down the street quickly, scouring every restaurant until I find the Palestinian cafe I’m looking for.
Day 21
The worries I felt at the start of the experiment about getting lost and not being able to communicate with friends seem to have diminished. I’m calmer, and present when I’m with people. I look around the train on my morning commute and notice that everyone except one person has their eyes glued to their phones. The man opposite me doesn’t have earphones, a phone or a book. I try not to catch his eye, as I’m worried I’ve been staring. Things are less relaxed when I try to meet my friend Navid after work. We can’t pick a place to meet and he is frustrated because he can’t send me links: “Please return to WhatsApp you Neanderthal.” He’s late, so I wait outside the station for 45 minutes. He arrives with a big grin, knowing I’m a bit irritated, but I get my own back by torturing him with two hours of experimental jazz.
Day 23
After work, I go to see my friend Scarlett, who is being held captive by a corgi puppy. It’s dark and damp when I arrive in south-east London but I’ve written out the directions to the house as carefully as I can. I didn’t bring my A-Z because my bag was too heavy, but I’m certain I can’t mess up the 10-minute walk. I call my mum and we natter for 20 minutes before I realise I haven’t spotted the turning. In a panic, I ask her to look up my location on Google Maps, which is obviously cheating, but I’m now late and in the middle of a cemetery. I’ve gone completely the wrong way and she has to narrate the route to my destination.
Day 27
It’s been a busy weekend so far and I feel like having a lazy day. I walk to a yoga class and then go for a wander. As I’m walking, and listening to my one CD, I get a call from the guy I’m dating who has just finished work. We try to hunt down a board game to play, but when the local charity shops fail us, we pick up some newspapers and magazines and the ingredients for a roast chicken instead. We then sit on the sofa playing music and reading in the old fashioned way. It feels like we’ve retired.
Day 30
I finally get around to calling the bank to pay my rent, which is late for the first time. I’ve been putting off the inevitable 20-minute call that includes reading out lots of sort codes and bank numbers and spelling the names of my landlord along with the various friends I owe money to. It’s quite unnerving transferring money without checking the details with my own eyes, and the woman on the phone keeps telling me that it would be much easier to do this online.
Day 31
For all the frustrations of the month, I’m sad the experiment is over. I’m left with the feeling that living offline puts other people out: if we’re looking for a place to eat or a pub to go to it’s down to them, they’re on map duty, and I’m not able to book Ubers. But I was happier and calmer – relieved of the endless scrolling, waiting for texts back, and the need to communicate with people all the time. After about a week, I wasn’t reaching for my phone and I had the patience to read. It was nice not to be able to look at my work emails in the evening. I’m determined to delete my main distractions: Depop, Hinge and Instagram. Scouring charity shops for clothes is much more satisfying; dating with no distractions is so much easier; and I can live without reels about botched Botox and AI animals. “Big tech platforms are not addictive accidentally, they’re addictive by design,” says Kardaras. “They’re selling their product by targeting the vulnerable: if the algorithm detects that a young person has a body image issue or is struggling with self-harm or depression, then they bombard them with content on that subject that exacerbates their mental unwellness.” On my last day, I get an email from Scarlett: “Splashed my phone with water whilst listening to the Lily Allen album in the bath, now phoneless and actually want to copy you.” It seems I’m not the only one keen to disconnect.
