Thirty days without a smartphone.

Better living through pickpockets.

fortunate sun

I spent most of this winter in Sayulita, Mexico- one of my very favorite places to run off to for an extended working vacation. Sayulita has great restaurants, an amazing surf break, a beautiful beach, and quite a good co-working space.

On my second week there, my phone went missing from my pocket. I don’t know for sure if this was my carelessness driving a quad with the smartphone in my shorts, or more likely, someone who snatched it after I took some photos. No matter what happened, I was faced with a grim situation- for Sayulita has many fine qualities, but it does not have an Apple Store.

The phone is unbelievably locked down. I had zero worries about hacking or any such business. I watched it travel around in a little mini map in Find My Phone, visiting beaches and houses before finally going dark.

I hunched over my laptop, feeling a grip of panic. Every moment I got up to make coffee, to use the bathroom, to take some sun in the courtyard, my fingers glanced against my right-hand pocket, searching for the Dopamine Rectangle.

phantom limb

I have had a long and complicated relationship with smartphones. When I first saw an iPhone in the hands of my friend Rebecca Foon outside the Cagibi restaurant in Montreal, almost twenty years ago now, I desired the device with a furious passion that I did not understand. I remember looking at it, marvelling at it, and then pulling my tired BlackBerry out of my pocket, knowing already I lived in the past.

I have a real love of work. I adore what I do, and I do a lot of it. My phone is, in many ways, my primary work device, and I feel that, if you’ve properly set it up, you can run a very large business from a very small device. But that comes with some externalities. Ugly ones. Over the last ten years, I’ve become hopelessly addicted to my phone. I have tried to remedy this on several occasions.

In 2022, I spent the entire year in a dopamine reset. My screentime had gone over nine hours a day, and I desperately needed out. Besides quitting other vices, I also put that phone in black and white, and aside from a few month-long relapses, I’ve kept it that way ever since. I feel like I had a healthy relationship with my phone. What I mean by healthy is 3 1/2 to 5 1/2 hours a day, every day, for more than ten years.

And suddenly, I had the chance to make that zero.

a window of opportunity

As I sat there in Sayulita, panicked about my lack of device, thinking about who would go to an Apple store stateside and mail me one, etc I had a sudden revelation. There may never be another time better than this to take a little break from my phone.

I am in a paradise, and a paradise that functions well without access to a phone. Mexico is not a place that runs on apps. I am within a hundred feet of a wonderful surf break. More importantly than all of that, I am now addicted to something else: Claude. My screen time has already been going down as I use more and more my laptop to work because the efficiency of Claude is just that good. Here I was sitting in a beautiful place with a new workflow not only not even three months old, and a device doing its own little Mexican vacation. Now is the time to take a little break if I could handle it.

the first days

I am not somebody who keeps their phone in their bedroom, that’s a rule. I start my day with coffee and some contemplation before I ever touch the device, although I am guilty of bringing it back to bed sometimes to watch YouTube in the evening. The first few days, I woke up immediately craving my phone, something that would never happen when I knew where it was.

Its absence was a curious phenomenon. I could go surfing for three hours in the morning and not think about my phone one time, but give me a few moments sitting quietly in the sand, drinking a coffee while the sun came up, and I would be losing my mind about its location, desperate for it.

It truly did feel like a phantom limb that was missing. I would pat my pockets compulsively. I would think about it every time a moment passed where I had no stimulation in front of me. In my mind I was constantly out of touch, constantly missing messages from friends, constantly behind the ball. I lacked even the most basic courtesy to respond to people. I was missing everything. Everything important in the world.

the revelation

And then all of a sudden, it was wonderful.

Work, friends, family, responsibilities all lived in my laptop. The present moment, the streets of Mexico, the surf, the music around me- that was where I lived.

I felt a great weight lift from my shoulders. I felt connected. I felt childlike, given that my entire adult life, more or less, had had one of these devices glued to my hip.

Little changes in my behaviors that are manifesting like crazy. Music made me wanna move and dance. People-watching became profound, fascinating, compelling. The absence of phone meant the absence of headphones, which means I talked to about 10 times more people every day than I would with my phone on me. Strangers came up to me in the street to strike up a conversation. I got asked out on dates. Old people told me stories. The taqueria downstairs from the co-working I used was suddenly full of smiling employees that knew my name.

Life, in short, got richer and better.

I think two things caused this- my my presence in my environment, and the ease by which I was living opened me to these experiences. Seeing somebody reading a book or just quietly staring into the morning street begs an invitation. Headphones, screens, second words do not.

cartel collapse

A glorious month went by, and then it came to an end. the death of a cartel boss meant chaos in my little surf town, and suddenly I needed to leave. Returning back to the US from meetings made me realize that there’s no way you can operate in the U.S. without a smartphone at your hip- everything is too reliant. I landed at the San Francisco airport and tried to take a cab down to Hayes- the cabbie had no change, the car was rancid, he asked me to tap my card in the world’s most suspicious-looking app to pay, and he looked nothing like the photograph of the licensed cab driver on on the little sticker. this lifestyle was going to come to an abrupt end.

My experiment was over. For the first time in my entire adult life, I navigated 30 days with no phone. today, a new one arrives from Apple, and in moments I’ll be hooked back up to the dopamine rectangle, being drip-fed notifications from Twitter, picking the little red berries that grow on my apps, and this will seem like a distant dream.

🎂