Looking Up

When I looked away from my phone, I regained so much.

105 days ago, I began an experiment. You can read about it in detail in the October 17, 2024, issue of my newsletter, Under the Bridge and Past the App Store, but the basic idea is that I removed a ton of apps from my iPhone for 100 days, including social media apps, email apps … so many apps.

Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers reportedly wrote the song “Under the Bridge” when he was thinking about loneliness and his struggle with drug addiction. The feelings he expresses in that song are similar to the feelings I felt when I thought about my addiction to my iPhone and the ways in which our society has become so connected via our phones, social media, etc. So connected, more connected than ever before, perhaps too connected, and yet we are so disconnected from one another in terms of community.

25 years ago, in his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam wrote about the ways our society’s idea of community has changed. Putnam was a guest on The Daily Show this past November. He talked about his book, which prophesied 25 years ago many things that have come about today, largely due to our lack of community. He also talked about a new documentary available on Netflix, Join or Die, which traces the breakdown in community in the years since his book was published.

The premise of Putnam’s book is that the breakdown in community has caused us all kinds of problems. We used to belong to bowling leagues and clubs. We used to know our neighbors. We had things in common with people, even if we didn’t have everything in common, and so we weren’t as divided.

I can see the ways community has diminished in a micro way in my own life. I’m a busy person, and I don’t spend time with my neighbors.

My neighbors are older on one side of me, retired, and our politics are different, but they are much more willing to engage and to ask for and offer help. We don’t share political idealogies, but we do share a neighborhood and help one another when one of us goes out of town or with gardening or trash issues. Frances brings me baked goods once in awhile and leaves them on my doorstep. I try to get to them before the crows do. If I see Frances or her husband Ed outside or at the grocery store, we’re going to stop and chat. I enjoy this relationship with my neighbors, but I’ll be honest—it wouldn’t exist without their efforts. I’m largely busy with writing, work, and family.

My neighbors on the other side are much younger than I am, still raising young children. I get the impression our politics are more similar, but the thing we most have in common is that we are super busy and don’t feel the need to get to know one another. What if we did, though? What if we knew one another well, trusted one another, and could lean on one another a little? I was a young mom once. I wonder if Chalise might benefit from a babysitter once in a while, so she could run to the store in peace or meet her girlfriends for coffee.

I see this change in the way we do community with our local writing organization, too. It is difficult to get younger generations of writers involved. Who needs an in-person local writing organization when we can connect and engage with writers here on Substack or in Facebook groups? We are no longer “joiners,” we are busier, and we get some of the things we used to get from our fellow human beings online versus in person, including playing games and engaging in conversation. But it’s not the same.

What does any of this have to do with my 100-day iPhone experiment? And more importantly, what does it have to do with writing? A lot, actually. I wrote recently about another thing I did in 2024, My Year of Yes. I set out to be more social—every week in 2024, I engaged in at least one social activity outside my home. I unexpectedly found that the 100-day iPhone experiment dovetailed nicely into that.

When the 100-day iPhone experiment ended, I was allowed to add any and all apps back to my phone. But I only added two back—Instagram and Repost, which allows me to repost Instagram posts. Instagram is made for phones, and my photos are on my phone, and there are some things you cannot do in Instagram on a PC, so it was a real pain trying to use it exclusively on my PC. I used to have a reel-scrolling problem, so I have to be careful, but last night, when I thought about reaching for my phone and scrolling through Instagram, I found myself saying, “Nah,” and reaching for the book I’m currently reading instead.

I didn’t miss the other apps, not even my email app. In fact, it’s been a breath of fresh air to be released from those things when I log off my computer in the evening. It’s a little inconvenient when someone cancels an early-morning Zoom meeting via email and I don’t know about it until I log onto my computer just before the meeting, but that’s no big deal. No one is going to email me about anything that’s super urgent in the big scheme of things—they’ll call, right? And friends, I know I removed a ton of apps from my phone 100 days ago, but I honestly can’t even remember what most of them were.

As I shared in Under the Bridge and Past the App Store, I was spending an embarrassing amount of time on my phone. Being off of it has meant more writing productivity, more time for reading, more time to spend with actual human beings, in community with my family and my friends, writers and non-writers alike. It’s meant more time to engage with the world and to live. So if you’re a writer who feels like you don’t have time to write, this might be one place to start recovering some of your time.