“After dropping my smartphone in a lake, I switched to a flip phone and never looked back”

I got my first smartphone when I was 15. I used it for music, texting and gaming, but I wasn’t much of a social media guy. Between going to school and making music with my band, I felt like I had a full, balanced life.

When I moved out of my parents’ house, though, I started spending a lot more time on my phone. My friends and roommates would send me memes, podcasts and videos. If I had consumed them all, I wouldn’t have had a life. Yet I felt obligated to respond—I’m not able to just ignore people. I lost several hours a day looking at my phone, watching YouTube and scrolling through Instagram. During rough patches in my life, I used my phone as a crutch, ignoring reality by bingeing content.

Related: How smartphone addiction is ruining our lives

By the time I turned 21, I wanted to unplug. I’m a go-big-or-go-home kind of guy, and I was lucky enough not to need a phone or social media for work. So I said screw it. I got rid of my phone and deleted all my social media accounts. If people needed to get a hold of me, I figured they could email me.

The purge was wonderful. I was more present with my friends. I did a lot of gardening. I spent more time on music and filmmaking. I thought back to all those internet rabbit holes I’d gone down and realized that none of it mattered. Tech companies are so good at getting you to feel like their content is important: you need to click on this, you need to know what’s next. In hindsight, it was all filler—none of it was valuable.

I went without a phone for six blissful months. But, as my filmmaking work picked up, I was collaborating with a lot of creators and clients, which meant I needed to get in touch with people quickly. Not having a phone was getting in the way of my career. In the spring of 2020, rather than returning to a smartphone, I bought myself a flip phone. I liked how it was just for communication, not entertainment. It left no room for doomscrolling and time-wasting. It was the perfect balance for me—but it didn’t last.

Related: A psychologist on how to counter smartphone addiction

That fall, one of my roommates gave me an old smartphone he had lying around. Without thinking, I started using it. It was so subtle how it took over my life. Whenever the phone was within reach, I found myself using it, and suddenly it was the first thing I looked at when I woke up and the last thing I checked before I went to bed. It was more powerful than my ability to say no. After a year without a smartphone, I’d unintentionally ended up back at square one.

By last summer, I’d soured on my smartphone again. As my friends and I were driving up to cottage country one weekend, I started griping about it. “I want to get rid of this thing,” I said. It was one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for moments. Two days later, I was using my phone to play music off a portable speaker when the sound suddenly cut out. I went to investigate the problem only to discover that my phone had slipped off the dock and sunk to the bottom of the lake.

After a momentary panic, I realized I’d gotten exactly what I wanted. Later that day, I ordered a $60 flip phone made by a Japanese company called Kyocera. When it arrived, I hooked it up to my computer and loaded Spotify and some audiobooks. It has an internet browser and YouTube, too, but they’re hardly worth using. The device is clunky and slow. It doesn’t hijack my brain, which is what I love about it. That and the fact that closing a flip phone is the most satisfying thing in the world.

I’ve gone without a smartphone for about a year now. Any time I meet someone new, they’re shocked: “Is that a flip phone!?” Sometimes they’ll mention how they wish they could switch to a flip too, but then they make excuses: they need a smartphone for work, or they require certain apps to do this or that. I get it, but I just do those things on my computer.

It’s so liberating not having the entire internet in my pocket and to use a phone that I enjoy instead of resent. My flip is my little sidekick. I’m very effective with it. I use the voice-to-text function all the time, and I make a million phone calls. People hear my voice, and I hear theirs. It’s more human.

There are so many other benefits. When I’m in line at the grocery store or stuck at a red light, I don’t reflexively reach for my phone. I use that time to think, breathe deeply, stretch. I feel like I’m living better. I have more time for the things that resonate in my heart and my soul. And the fact that there are others out there who want to unplug too is proof that there’s more to life than just scrolling.