Rediscover The World: The Dumb Phone Theory
Updated: Feb 5
The Doom Scroll to Rule Them All.
What a bizarre thing.
I feel like I've just woken up from the last 10 years of my life. I wasn't living them, at least not in the physical world, not like I used to anyway. As most people in this day and age do, I was living my life through a 3x6 inch screen.
Said screen would show me the highs of others' lives, the lowest lows somehow monetized for our consumption, fears, funny things, enraging articles, gruesome pieces of humanity, hopeful inspiration, and neverending to-do lists and to-buy lists. Because you need that new Amazon workout set.
Email neverending, craft projects gone viral, and what's that? A new podcast, video, Netflix show, or influencer, I haven't engaged with yet?
A thought I have to google, RIGHT NOW?!
Let me just open my phone to look at that for a s e c o n d.
Ten. Years. Later.
I've woken up.
How God Got My Attention.
I was listening through John Mark Comer's book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, for the second time. The first read-through was great, but I felt compelled this January to take an even slower pace. Something he said struck a cord deep within me, a cord that hadn't been struck in over a decade. It's a system by which he lives:
A novel idea:
Turn your smartphone into a dumb phone.
Holy Spirit nudged me to lean in and listen to what that means. Like it was an old key to a familiar lock dangling in front of me. So, while driving down the road on my way to the grocery, I reached out towards the key.
The Nostalgia Lock.
To understand the true weight of this option, you'd need to know life without a smartphone. For many people my age that looked like the golden years of the late 90s through the early 2000s. The internet was a place, it existed in my parents' guest room in a large desktop computer sitting across from the queen-sized bed. I thought I'd been romanticizing this era of my life: where phones were just phones. Even when the Internet became available to use on a cell phone you better hit that end button like your life depended on it if you accidentally clicked that button or see an $800 Verizon bill in your mailbox the following month. (Sorry, dad!)
The memories I have of this era are in technicolor. No, you don't understand (well maybe you do) they are actually brighter and more vivid in my memory. Yes, there were highs and lows, but the memories were more colorful and the world contained a vibrancy you could almost feel. Anxiety was situational. Not an ever-present, buzzing undercurrent that made the world feel grey somehow.
Could technology and my 7+ hours of smartphone screen time actually be tied to any of this? Something deep in my soul said yes.
The Dumb Phone Key
If this pastor who specialized in slow living, recovering from burnout, and walking through the practice of sabbath in his weekly routine lived like this: maybe I should give it a try.
Some of his rules:
Remove all apps that don't majorly improve your life:
Email - yes, remove email from your phone entirely. No, your world will not explode. I promise.
Entertainment - All Games, Netflix, YouTube, Disney Plus - it's for my nephew okay?
Social Media - Facebook, Instagram, TikTok (RIP), Twitter, etc.
All web browsers - yes, you read that correctly. No Google.
Keep the ones that do improve your life, and turn all notifications off:
Phone
Messages
Calculator
Maps
(Insert your banking app, Bible app, or e-reading app, etc.)
But that's CRAZY.
I've deleted apps before, but email? THE INTERNET? This feels extreme and crazy and how can I not Google every curious thought right NOW? Does God not know how many questions about scripture I Google on my phone? This can't be the Lord nudging me?
No email? How can I NOT have that ever-growing to-do list in my pocket, 24/7? What if I miss something really important? Like all the marketing emails from brands trying to sell me things I need?
And that's not even the craziest thing he suggested.
Turn Your Phone to Greyscale.
You read that correctly. Those pretty pixels designed to keep you glued to your phone?
Turn them full black & white.
So, in an effort to follow John Mark's lifestyle and maybe find more peace, I decided to put the key into the lock and turn.
I deleted without abandon. Goodbye, internet in my pocket. I turned the phone to greyscale. And within 4 hours of doing this something incredible happened.
The World Around Me Started to Change.
I noticed it when driving home from my sister's house at the same time I do every week. I'd pulled the trigger on this digital detox roughly 4 hours before. But this time, the drive was different. I wasn't listening to a random youtube video or podcast, lost in thought about what I needed to Google the moment my car went still. What happened It hit me deep in my chest and released tears from my eyes.
The sunset in front of me looked exactly like the sunsets I remember from highschool. It was in technicolor. I couldn't believe it. I wept in my car as the end of John Mark's book washed over my ears:
"So, dear reader and friend, you, like me, must make a decision. Not just when your own fork-in-the-road kind of midlife crisis comes (and it will come), but every day.
How will you live? In the years to come, our world will most likely go from fast to faster; more hurried, more soulless, more vapid; “deceiving and being deceived.”14 Will you traverse that road? Will you follow the same old, tired, uncreative story of hurry and busyness and noisy, materialistic, propagandized living? Just try to add in a little Jesus as you careen through life? Make it to church when you can? Pray when you find the time? Mostly just stay ahead of the wolf pack?
Or…
Will you remember there’s another road, another way? Will you offramp onto the narrow path? Will you radically alter the pace of your life to take up the easy yoke of Jesus?
And when you fail, begin again. This time: slowly.
This book is both a question and an answer. But mostly it’s an
invitation, from one invitee to another.
“Come to me…. Find rest for your souls.”
I say yes.
You?"
- John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry
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