I hate my phone, the only reason I have it is because I need it for things like authenticating to the government and banks that I am indeed myself. In this experiment Thomas and I have put away our phones. This means that my phone is turned off for the whole day. I personally wanted to do this for a while, but after seeing this interesting youtube video and finding out that I can disable microsoft authenticator and using a normal one instead that I can commit to it. cause I needed the Microsoft authenticator for my school, and I need 2fa.
Specifics
will only use them under these conditions:
- I need to make a call and there is no one to ask.
- To check my voicemail once a day for like max 10m
- If I need my phone for any 2fa.
- In case of an emergency
The reason that I need to listen to my voicemail instead of just, buying a landline is because I do not live on my own.
For a while I will also take my phone with me to school since I have to travel 1 hour, but it will be off at the bottom of my bag. In case of emergancies.
My goal here is to not need my phone anymore. This doesn’t mean I go without internet though, I still have my computer and I still have a job and school. I don’t want to be internet less, I want to not have a pocket sized computer with me that I unconsciously start using whenever I carry it. I believe that using the internet is a good thing, just not every moment of the day. I believe that Gaming is acceptable when you do it on a dedicated device.
Preparations
I knew for a while that I had wanted to do this so I already had a lot of notepads ready to be used. I never used my phone to wake me up so I didn’t need to replace that. The only real preparation I did was telling my girlfriend about it and that is about it.
Journal
I am writing about my experiences in this section. Things I notice about life that changes.
4. 2025-04-20
Not much is changed, I have been more downstairs but that is more because of ✨Scoliosis✨ I decided to buy a flip phone, or “Senior Phone” which is how they are marketed.
I have noticed that I am more thinking about things, and there is more silence in my head. But again, that could just be because I am less on my pc because of ✨Scoliosis✨
2. 2025-04-18
It is quite a different experience to eat breakfast without watching a YouTube video. I started noticing that I kept wanting to grab my phone, so now I am keeping count of this in my notepad. I turned on my phone to see whether I had voicemails, I did not.
1. 2025-04-17
It is the start of the experiment. At 2:37PM We started it. I haven’t noticed many problems, I have turned it off and put it away so that I don’t see it laying around. After dinner I was able to do the dishes before even eating dessert, we were done with the food and I instantly started doing the dishes. Normally I’d first wait 10m on my phone if not more just like the others. So that was interesting.
At this point only 5 people know about this, Thomas, my girlfriend, Emiel and my parents.