Turns out, people are really worried about what cell phones are doing to our brains. Society’s uptick in wireless phone use has seen a corresponding rise in books, articles, movies, cartoons, and editorials condemning what these devices are doing to our psyche and our relationships. (As a comment on the sheer volume of content produced on this topic, I briefly considered making each word in the above sentences a hyperlink to a different piece of media condemning cell phone use. My roommate assured me that that would be obnoxious.)
The abundance of media criticizing cell phone use simultaneously terrifies and excites me. The articles seem to promise that if I jettison that one 2.31 by 4.87 inch piece of machinery, I will become a paragon of physical and emotional health. I’ll be more productive. I’ll save money. My interpersonal relationships will be fuller. I’ll balance the two infinities of past and future into a quasi-divine understanding of the present. All I have to do is get rid of the phone.
Finally, after weeks of begging my editor to let me write this story, she acquiesced. I gave up my phone and Facebook account to my roommate. The terms of this experiment were laughably soft. Five full days is hardly a huge commitment. Also, I was allowed email, which admittedly ruins the point a little but was necessary if I wanted to stay enrolled in school. Given this set of constraints, I figured that this week probably best mirrored the conditions for a student in the early 2000s: access to email but not to phones or social media platforms.
While poking around the Internet, I quickly learned there’s a specific sort of outline for the “I went a certain period of time without my phone/electronics” article. First, you talk about how terrible your phone addiction was making your life. Then, you talk about how much more rich/full/overall cheerful your life was after you got rid of your phone. Lastly, you exhort everybody to join you in setting down their phone for a little while to come bask in the joy of self-actualization.
That’s not exactly how things happened.
I quickly found that if I wasn’t checking my phone, I needed something else to do. As it turns out, that something was constantly eating Gold Emblem Peanut Butter Filled Pretzel Nuggets. I bought a large tub of them at CVS on a whim the night I gave up the phone and proceeded to munch on them throughout the night and well into the next day. Before midnight of the first day, I had finished the tub. For reference, that’s around 3,500 calories and 322 percent of my recommended daily intake of sodium solely from Gold Emblem Peanut Butter Filled Pretzel Nuggets.
Thankfully for my future cardiologist, my sodium intake gradually declined as the week progressed. Nevertheless, my diet was abysmal during the period without my phone, although that might be due to a willful resentment of my Nutrition Gen Ed more than any phone-related reasons.
More important perhaps than my impending triple bypass surgery was the difficulty of making a phone call on the dorm red phones. Harvard, it seems, has allowed its landline infrastructure to fall into a disgraceful state of disrepair. Although it was undoubtedly cool to take calls (admittedly exclusively from my parents) on the dorm red phone like I was JFK negotiating the Cuban Missile Crisis, the dorm phones are operating at far from peak performance. Outgoing calls were impossible. The ringer was either inaudibly quiet or terrifyingly loud. And on Thursday, my mother somehow ended up connecting with Weld 42’s phone rather than my own after dialing my dorm’s number. I apologize to Mingu and his roommates for the inconvenience.
Overall, however, my time without my phone wasn’t particularly harrowing or even very noteworthy. Despite weird bouts of desire to make a fake Facebook account to catch up on all the crucial Facebook activity I had missed, I didn’t miss my phone too much. What was upsetting was realizing that those articles lied to me. I didn’t suddenly have the work ethic of Alexey Stakhanov just because I didn’t have a small buzzing box in my pocket. I didn’t even finish my weekly pset any earlier than usual (damn you, CS51). Last and most shocking of all, I didn’t suddenly understand all human emotion or achieve self-actualization.
That said, there were definite benefits to the experiment. Walks to class were much more pleasant without my head craned over my phone. I got to see Weld 42’s tastefully appointed common room (credit to Mingu and his roommates). And, I got to scoff pretentiously at my roommates for using their phones while I surreptitiously ate some Gold Emblem Peanut Buter Filled Pretzel Nuggets I’d snuck into Annenberg in my pocket.
— C. Ramsey Fahs
