Despite the fact that smartphones in their modern form appeared not so long ago, we can no longer imagine our life without them. Banking applications, instant messengers, navigators, web browsers, music, video, games – today all these are united by smartphones regardless of brand and retail price, becoming, in fact, the most valuable item that accompanies us everywhere. We can forget our car keys, documents, travel card, wallet and much more at home. But not the smartphone itself. To be honest, such a dependence on this small device at some point began to scare me very much, and I even decided to abandon some of the applications, which turned out to be quite difficult from a psychological point of view. What happens if you give up your smartphone altogether?
Smartphone addiction disappears when you are in quarantine. Checked.
I confess right away: I did not set myself the goal of not using the gadget for a day, week or month. Therefore, what happened was not an experiment or an attempt at digital detox, but an event that, by and large, happened independently of me.
What to do in quarantine
The coronavirus forced me to isolate myself and showed that I cannot live without a smartphone, especially when working remotely
It all started around mid-March, when the government had not yet thought about quarantine measures, but coronavirus infection was already atrocities in Russia. Therefore, after evaluating the experience of foreign colleagues, I decided to self-isolate with my family – fortunately, I myself worked remotely, and my wife's employer allowed all willing employees to go on paid sick leave at the slightest symptoms of SARS. Therefore, we stocked up food for a couple of weeks ahead, stuffing the entire refrigerator to capacity, and locked ourselves at home.
Despite the fact that I have been working remotely for five years, I have never been a recluse. Therefore, I tried not to sit at home at all, which means that I needed a smartphone all the time to stay in touch, pay for purchases and follow the latest events, so that if something happens, I can quickly write about it on the site.
How to replace a smartphone
Why do you need a smartphone if you have a laptop and even more so a tablet?
However, from the moment of self-isolation, all the functions that I usually performed on a smartphone began to be performed on a laptop. I started surfing the web, chatting with colleagues, tracking news bulletins, watching videos on YouTube, and even controlling the weather forecast (I wonder why?) On my MacBook Air. After all, perceiving information on a large screen, not to mention typing messages in a messenger on a physical keyboard, turned out to be corny more convenient. It's not that I didn't know this before, it's just that now it has acquired some completely unique charm, as if I woke up from many years of sleep and began to notice something that I had not noticed before.
Roughly the same thing happened after I deleted social networking applications from my smartphone, unsubscribed from telegram channels and stopped opening like crazy every 10 minutes Instagram and flipping through the feed of new publications and stories. Firstly, much more time appeared in my day, secondly, I realized that my life had not changed for the worse, and thirdly, I realized that it is quite possible to live without a smartphone. But what is more remarkable is that in the case of self-isolation from the smartphone, I did not even notice it.
How to beat smartphone addiction
Smartphone is too time consuming. It's a pity that not everyone understands this
Yes, the last time I decided to slightly change my approach to using my smartphone, it was difficult for me to get used to it at first. The hand itself reached for the device, removed the blocking and made the finger look for the Instagram, Twitter icon or Nezygar's Telegram channel. Now there is nothing of the kind. Perhaps if I hadn't trained my willpower before quarantine, I would now be spending a lot of time staring at the screen of my smartphone. But since I, albeit unwittingly, did some preliminary preparation, now I do not take my smartphone in my hands at all, unless they call me.
It seems to me that after the coronavirus pandemic subsides, we will learn to live in a completely new reality, nullifying our previous experience. Businesses, realizing that part of the work can be done remotely, will begin to reduce the number of full-time employees, electronics manufacturers, realizing that people after forced and unpaid vacations have no money to buy expensive equipment, will begin to pay less attention to flagships, and those who have come to the conclusion about the optionality of smartphones, they will still be able to take their eyes off the screens and understand that there are much more interesting things in the world.