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how to use a flip phone

part 1: break

  1. Stand on a northbound 22 bus, hurtling up Fillmore St., just past Webster, on a warm Friday afternoon. Feel your front-left pants pocket start to burn.
  2. Try to ignore it. Watch the burn spread down your left leg.
  3. Resist the urge to check. Tell yourself giving in means weakness. Giving in means admitting you're not special. Giving in means admitting some small, stupid rectangle holds power over you.
  4. Breathe. Four counts in, four counts out, through the nose.
  5. List rational reasons to check: messages from friends you love, all living far away. Invitations from new neighborhood friends to Friday evening plans. Responses from Hinge matches.
  6. Consider there might be nothing. Maybe they need you less than you need them.
  7. Feel the burn spread from your leg up through your torso. Watch it reach your heart.
  8. Cave. Remove the device from your pocket, miraculously cold to the touch.
  9. Assume the position: standing with curved spine, neck hunched forward, looking straight down, right arm bent at 90 degrees, holding the black rectangle face-up.
  10. Look down at an empty lock screen.
  11. Run your thumb over the cracked glass screen. Count the cracks. Lose count.
  12. Remember the first crack. Chicago, August 2020. Your Hyde Park apartment on a beautiful afternoon. Scroll Twitter to convince yourself you’re doing useful “education” in this time of anguish and angst. Realize that all you’re doing is pacifying your loneliness. The cocktail of dependence and insecurity and self-judgment erupts into fury.
  13. Throw your phone at the couch. Watch the leather cushions launch it back out with nearly the same velocity. Watch it hit the wall, then hit the hardwood floor.
  14. Hear the crack.
  15. Pick it up 30 minutes later. Use it like nothing happened. Throw it again two weeks later. And again. And again.
  16. Think back to Villa Anita. October 2020. The desert oasis, recycled art studio, AirBnB where you lived for three months.
  17. Remember no WiFi in your trailer. No cell signal anywhere on the property.
  18. Remember losing yourself to a great book, more so than any since elementary school. When you devoured The Overstory in two days and lay awake all night dreaming about the Redwoods.
  19. Remember dinner with Portia and whomever else showed up that night. Remember walking together afterward through the maze of unstable plywood and haphazard sculptures in near-complete darkness to lie on the desert floor.
  20. Remember the stars. So many you never tried to count.
  21. Remember the writing. Pages and pages, trying to document every detail, channeling all your nervous creative energy into words.
  22. Remember the presence you felt there. The way disconnection hurt at first, then funneled into creativity. Remember the fire that burned endlessly.
  23. Wonder if you can find that fire again.
  24. Turn 26. Feel paranoid about getting older. Feel time start to slip away.
  25. Start wondering. Wonder if you could live without distraction. With intention. Wonder what a sustainable, unexamined life could look like. Wonder if you could bring a piece of Villa Anita back to San Francisco.
  26. Discover that once you start wondering, you can't stop. Your brain won't let you.
  27. Recall the line from your favorite childhood movie, your mantra ever since: "You can't die a wonderer."
  28. Try to set a goal to motivate yourself.
  29. Lose faith in metrics and SMART goals. Realize the only thing that's ever motivated you: pictures. Daydreams of futures you want to live.
  30. Remember the picture you built of UChicago after ten minutes on campus. Spent a year designing your future life there in your head before ever moving in.
  31. Remember the picture of Villa Anita you conjured from one phone call with Carlo. Saw the desert oasis in your mind before laying eyes on it.
  32. Remember how once you could see those pictures clearly, the path to reaching them felt obvious. Hundreds of hours on college applications, long days digging holes in Mojave sun — easy, because you could see the path forward.
  33. Start building a new picture: your life without distraction. It's opaque at first. But you know if you can see it clearly enough, you'll find a way there.
  34. Acknowledge the ego in it. You don’t need a smartphone. You're not like the rest of them. You're different. Special. You've always known it.
  35. Feel guilty about that feeling. Don't fight it.
  36. Commit.
  37. Search for the cheapest flip phone. Follow-through has always been your weakness, so don't splurge on the fantasy.
  38. Settle on a TCL. $35. Compatible with AT&T, so you can just switch the SIM.
  39. Buy it on Amazon, despite your family's boycott. Wait 10 days for delivery because you don't have Prime.
  40. Appreciate the irony: using the heart of efficiency culture to buy a device that makes your life tremendously less efficient.
  41. Get the package. Hold the flip phone in your hand. Feel lighter already.
  42. Put your SIM in the TCL. Try to text. Marvel that anyone ever did this, tapping each key multiple times for a single letter.
  43. Arrive at your office. Stand at the electronic, sliding glass door. Remember your phone can't open it anymore.
  44. Open your laptop on the 15th & Mission sidewalk. Connect to the building WiFi. Navigate to a guest pass you sent yourself months ago. Open the door.
  45. Explain at lunch to your coworkers that you're resourceful, not crazy. Believe this. Notice they don’t.
  46. Spend more time on your laptop to compensate for lack of iPhone. Music, texting, WhatsApp, YouTube. Realize your total screen time hasn’t changed.
  47. Struggle to coordinate plans with a flip phone. Worry you’re missing group texts. Feel like you're missing out.
  48. Decide the benefits aren't worth the hassle.
  49. Give up. Put the SIM back in your iPhone.
  50. Shove the flip phone in your drawer. Let it mock you.

part 2: try (and try again)

  1. Go to Germany. Then South Africa, the Netherlands, the UK, and finally NYC. Two months with family and old friends.
  2. Take a photo of Amsterdam at night, the street lamps making Van Gogh paintings on the canals below.
  3. Scroll through your recent messages. Realize there’s nobody back in San Francisco you really want to send it to. Nobody whose connection you long for.
  4. Put your phone away. Keep the photo for yourself.
  5. Realize the people you want to share with are here. Not back home.
  6. Return to San Francisco. Decide this changes everything.
  7. Dig the TCL out of your drawer. Swap the SIM from iPhone to flip phone.
  8. Tell yourself this time is different. Mean it.
  9. Lean into being "the flip phone guy.”
  10. Put it on the table at dinner parties. Ask five Hinge matches for their email. Get three. Go on one first date. Realize it’s much harder to not ask for a second date after she’s already borne her soul to you in pages-long emails. Google “love bombing.”
  11. Make it your personality. Use social pressure as accountability.
  12. Map out exactly what you need devices to do. Open your office door. Play Spotify. Connect to the Kilter Board at the climbing gym. Everything else has to go.
  13. Research e-ink Android devices at 2am. Fall down a rabbit hole on r/digitalminimalism. Discover the Boox Palma.
  14. Buy it. $280. Justify the purchase by calculating hours of your life you're buying back. Ignore doubts about whether this math makes any sense.
  15. Order a reMarkable tablet with keyboard. Another $400. Tell yourself you need it to write at home. Omit that you could just use paper.
  16. Calculate that you've spent $715 on devices to simplify your life. Wonder if this makes you a hypocrite. Shrug. Move forward anyway.
  17. Make a new rule: laptop stays at the office. Leave it on your desk every evening. Walk home empty-handed except for your flip phone and a book.
  18. Arrive home the first night. Stand in your apartment. Have no idea what to do with yourself.
  19. Panic for twenty minutes.
  20. Read a book. Then another. Finish two books in four days.
  21. Confront the final problem: your iPhone still exists. Without a SIM, it connects to WiFi. YouTube works. Porn works.
  22. Watch yourself at 11pm walk to your closet, dig out the iPhone, dig out the charger, plug it in, wait for it to boot, open YouTube, watch three videos about nothing.
  23. Hate yourself a little. Then a lot.
  24. Walk to work past the same people nodded out on the sidewalk, syringes nearby. Think about addiction — drugs, media, and more. Wonder if there's a connection. Decide that's too grandiose. Decide maybe it isn't.
  25. Bring your iPhone to the office Monday. Leave it on the shelf behind you. Never touch it again.
  26. Marvel at how easy this is. Out of sight, out of mind.
  27. Feel something close to freedom.
  28. Bring your minimalism home. Donate clothes you haven't worn in a year. Deep-clean your hardwood floors for the first time since moving in.
  29. Hang small hooks by your bedroom door. Keys, wallet, pocket journal, cassette player — every object gets its spot. Clear your desk of everything that isn't essential.
  30. Swap your bed frame and mattress for a tatami mat and futon. Fold it up every morning. Watch your bedroom transform into open space.
  31. Pin letters and postcards to your wall. The collage Mélusine made you four years ago. The postcard Alia sent you from the PCT. Physical proof that the people you love think about you. Proof that that love transcends digital connection.
  32. Sit on your empty tatami mat one evening. Look around at the bare walls, the folded futon, the letters. Feel something you haven't felt in years: clarity about what matters.
  33. Miss cultural references at work. Feel clueless about Labubus and Dubai Chocolate when the Performative Male competition comes to town.
  34. Expect to feel FOMO. Notice you mostly don't.
  35. Surprise yourself at how little you actually feel out of the loop.

part 3: try not try

  1. Wake up at 4am for the third week in a row. Stare at the ceiling. Watch your brain spin uselessly.
  2. Crave something to scroll. Ache for a glowing screen. Remember there's nothing.
  3. Congratulate yourself on your discipline. Play monk.
  4. Burn through another book by 6am. Start to hate books.
  5. Wake at 4am again the next night. Pull out the stack of letters you've been "meaning to write" for over a year.
  6. Write to Portia. Describe those cool desert nights, lying on the plywood, staring up at uncounted stars. Tell her you've been chasing that feeling of presence. Omit that you're not sure it's working.
  7. Write to Mélusine about the hike you enjoyed together, which began with pasties and idyllic Welsh countrysides, and ended with too-large cider pours and free rides from Czech strangers. Slip in a polaroid of your bedroom well, where the collage she made for your 22nd birthday hangs prominent.
  8. Realize you’re clueless about international postage. Slap on two forever stamps and throw it in the mailbox. Pray it's enough.
  9. Discover that these 4am sessions, which began as torture, have become the hours you crave most. The whole world sleeps. Your mind is free.
  10. Ache with loneliness anyway. Sharp and specific. You're launching Polaroids and stamps to people scattered across continents because you can't text a photo.
  11. Question everything.
  12. Receive Portia's letter three weeks later. Real paper, real ink, her unmistakable handwriting. She remembered the stars too. She's been thinking about that version of herself — the one who had time to lie still and just look up.
  13. Tape her letter to your wall. Watch more color fill the picture.
  14. Walk past a lamppost flyer for "Lit Nights" on your way to work. Prose readings and wine at a nearby writers' co-working space.
  15. Text Adi. Save a seat for him on Friday evening. Give yours up so an elderly man can sit instead.
  16. Listen to ten readings. Drink two glasses of chilled white wine.
  17. Approach the author closest to your age afterward. Congratulate him. Sit with him and his girlfriend around a small table.
  18. Talk about writing, regret, dreams, what you're willing to give up for them.
  19. Experience your recurring out-of-body phenomenon: watching yourself from two inches behind your head, giddy that you're having one of those interactions you moved here to have.
  20. Walk home. Notice a touch more color in the picture.
  21. Leave your apartment the next morning in a fog. Feel yourself crumble under loneliness and a life unfulfilled.
  22. Fight back. Blast the new Crux album through your retro headphones with red foam earcaps. Slow your walk to feel your footfall on the pavement.
  23. Smell the flowers. Notice lamppost flyers. Jot events in your pocket journal.
  24. Win the fight. Burst the cloud.
  25. Swing into a high. Stop to read a plaque about the "Drugs" sign on Haight and Fillmore. Pause in Duboce Park to scribble ideas for a geography of San Francisco through music.
  26. Feel the way you always do when creative moments strike. Your blood runs warm. Your knees bounce. Your hands shake.
  27. Walk to Studio Aurora. Buy focaccia. Pull out your pocket journal. Start writing.
  28. Ride the 22 bus northbound on Fillmore, again. It’s been five months. Reach your left hand down and pat an empty pocket.
  29. Feel the absence of the thing a small part of you still wishes was there. Small, growing smaller.
  30. Pull out your journal instead. Sketch an idea for this essay.
  31. Feel the burn fade. Watch it disappear completely.
  32. Look up. Notice the passengers around you, doubled over their phones. Notice you're the only one looking up.
  33. Don't feel superior. Don't feel different. Just feel present.
  34. Return to your journal. Keep writing.
  35. Watch a touch more color fill in. The picture's not complete — it never will be. But you can see it clearer than ever before.