5 Best Things About Ditching My Smartphone in 2024

And a wish for 2025

Let 2024 go down in history as the year I finally followed through on a New Year’s resolution—to get a hold of my toxic screentime habits. I’d had the same resolution for at least the half decade prior and had never come close to succeeding, which just goes to show you that sometimes it takes many, many false starts before you figure out how to make and sustain a positive lifestyle change.

Through most of my 30s, including my first five years of parenthood, I averaged four or five hours a day on my phone (this was in addition to time spent in front of my computer, which I typically used a few hours each day for my freelance work). I am not an outlier; the average millennial—aka the generation raising most of today’s young kids—spends 4.6 hours a day on their phone.¹ Sometimes I wonder how I would have reacted 15 years ago if someone told me that pretty soon I’d be spending over one quarter of my waking hours glued to a device that didn’t even exist yet. Yikes.

Anyway. During that time, I had a nagging feeling my life would be a lot better if I wasn’t spending such a significant part of it passively staring at a screen. Now that I’ve been without a smartphone for almost a year, I can attest that it is indeed better in many respects. So, in celebration of keeping a New Year’s resolution for pretty much the first time in my life, I want to share the top five things I’ve enjoyed since becoming what my husband affectionally calls a “smart woman with a dumb phone.”

1. Rediscovering the pleasure of reading whole books

In 2023, I think I read three books total. Maybe two and a half. In 2024, I set a goal to read 12 books, one for each month…and I ended up finishing 49!² Admittedly, one of them was a 48-page novella, The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, which I felt a bit sheepish about including. BUT, another was The Brothers Karamazov, which is over a thousand pages long, so I think that more than balances it.

I used to be an avid reader, but years of bouncing around the internet and social media all the time destroyed my attention span. I would try to read a book with my phone next to me, and the moment I got to a challenging passage that required brain power to decipher, I’d be reaching for the phone to distract myself from it. You can’t read like that. The good news is that after just a few weeks or so without a smartphone, my brain cells felt like they were coming back from the dead and I was able to read books again.

2. Thinking my own thinks

Whenever our kids complain of boredom, we quote Dr. Seuss at them: “You can think up some birds. That’s what you can do. You can think about yellow or think about blue.” They find it very annoying (sorry guys!), but I’ve never found better advice for dealing with boredom.

I used to pull out my phone whenever I’d feel the faintest prickle of boredom—in line at the store, at the playground with my kids, etc. But now I’ve gotten in the lovely habit of just allowing my mind to wander in those moments. This is how the idea popped into my head to write my alternate ending of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the first piece of creative writing I completed in a depressingly long time.³

Related: one of the things I lost during my era of smartphone distraction was the richness of solitude. True solitude isn’t just being by yourself; it’s being alone with your thoughts. You can’t experience solitude when you’re consuming media, and when you’re pulling out your phone a hundred-plus times a day, you’re almost always consuming media in some form or another. Now that solitude is back in my life, I’ve had more energy and inspiration than I’ve felt in years, which I’m pretty sure is no coincidence.

This is Lulu, an actual bird our six-year old thought up a few weeks ago.

3. Socializing like a normal (kind of) human being

Several months into my dumbphone life, I came home from an evening out with some girlfriends and told my husband that I felt different during this outing than I normally did in these situations. I sat at the table with these friends for several hours and didn’t feel twitchy or bored the entire time. As the evening wound down, I felt satiated, not spent.

This was a marked contrast to the fidgety mood that would frequently overtake me in recent years when socializing outside of my immediate family, as well as the depletion I’d feel afterward. I’d usually make an excuse to end an IRL conversation after ten or 15 minutes and would go find a quiet space to check my phone for a bit before steeling myself for the next interaction. After about an hour and a half of most social gatherings, I was itching to go home and sit by myself in a dark room. (Clearly, I was a lot of fun at parties!)

But I rarely feel like that now. More and more often, I feel calm and present during social gatherings. Often, several hours will pass at a social event with my barely realizing it. If there’s awkwardness—as there almost always is in the beginning of any gathering when people are getting acclimated to the space and the company—I no longer feel like I need to escape it. I just notice it and wait for the energy to shift into comfortable camaraderie, as it almost always does after a short while.

I always chalked up my discomfort with socializing to being an introvert, but I’m no longer sure I’d even use that label for myself. I think what I am is a person who needs a healthy balance of rich social connection and true solitude to feel fulfilled. My phone was getting in the way of both of those things, and it’s been wonderful to finally break free of that.

4. Shedding the burden of photographing my kids constantly

One of my biggest hang-ups about ditching my smartphone has surprisingly turned out to be one of my favorite things about it: not being able to take photos of my kids all the time. I was discussing this with a fellow dumbphone-owning parent a few months ago, who told me about a trip to the zoo she took with her kids shortly after getting rid of her smartphone. She said she initially felt regretful when her kids did something super cute and she couldn’t take a picture of it, but then something clicked. She thought to herself, “I’m missing it!” And then, “Wait…no I’m not.” That’s exactly how I’ve felt too.

This is not to say we should never take photos of our kids—but doing it multiple times a day every day was not entirely healthy in my case. I think my obsession with documenting every moment that seemed even a little bit cute or special was actually diminishing some of those moments, and I’m not sure it was sending a great message to my kids either.

5. Living life instead of performing it

On a family vacation to Madrid last March, my husband and I dropped the kids off with their grandparents for a couple hours one day so we could visit the Prado museum, unencumbered. As we walked through the beautiful Retiro neighborhood on our way to the museum, I was thinking about how fabulous it was that we were spending the afternoon this way—walking leisurely miles through one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, on our way to see one of the most famous museums in the world. I was thinking this is what the good life looks like. And I was thinking about where we should take our selfie for my obligatory Instagram post, and what the caption should say. What I wasn’t doing was immersing myself in the actual moment—because I couldn’t. My preoccupation with documenting this moment for a virtual audience prevented me from actively living it.

I deleted my Instagram account shortly after that trip, and my only regret is not doing it sooner. As Katherine Johnson Martinko writes, “We treat the non-digital world merely as a source of raw material, a place where we gather content for use in the more real, more vital, digital space.”⁴ I lived like that for about a decade, and it’s such a relief to be done. No doubt there are some people who can maintain an active social media presence without it diminishing the vitality of their non-digital lives—but I was not one of them.

A wish for 2025

I employ “quiet eye” to crystallize both my worries and my hopes for the reader of the 21st century—whose eye increasingly will not stay still; whose mind darts like a nectar-driven hummingbird from one stimulus to another; whose “quality of attention” is slipping imperceptibly with consequences none could have predicted.—Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home

Smartphones have become deeply entangled with almost every aspect of modern life, and not everyone has a realistic option to get rid of theirs. I was discussing this recently with a friend who is an emergency room doctor, and he told me there are three separate apps on his phone that he is required to use to communicate with nurses and other healthcare workers at the hospital. This friend has always been a bit of a Luddite—he was a late adopter of the smartphone and is one of the few people I know who has never had a single social media account—but he told me, regretfully, that he’s felt his own “quality of attention” slipping away in recent years because of his (employer-mandated) use of technology. This is not what one wants to hear from anyone, let alone an ER doctor!

With that in mind, one wish I have for 2025 is a societal-level normalization of technological “unbundling.” Instead of requiring people to have one device that does everything (while also stealing their attention), let’s go back to using technology as a tool, even if it means we need to carry a few different tools with us rather than a single smartphone. Let’s at least give people the option. Just as no student should be required to use addictive technology for school purposes, I think no adult should be required to have a smartphone for work if they don’t want to.

In the meantime, if you’d like to be more intentional about your technology usage but a complete divorce from your smartphone isn’t feasible now, there are still things you can do. You can leave your phone in the glove compartment when you go to a restaurant and see how that feels. You can download the Freedom app and use it to block distracting apps or even the entire internet from your phone when you want to experience solitude or uninterrupted social time but don’t trust your own self control. Instead of texting with friends on and off throughout the day, consider being more intentional about those connections by scheduling a standing phone call or meeting in person. If you have other ideas, please share in the comments!

And Happy New Year!

1. Daily phone screen time in the United States in 2023, by generation

2. It is killing me a little bit that I didn’t achieve that beautiful round 50 mark, but I have only myself to blame. I picked Madame Bovary for my last read of the year and thought I could plow through it in five days with both kids home from school. As I write this, it’s 5:30pm on December 31, I have nearly 200 pages left in the book, and a friend is coming over in a moment with a bottle of chartreuse to ring in the New Year. So it’s not looking good for Madame Bovary.

3. What If the Grinch Had a Smartphone?

4. Don’t Be a Digiphrenic