How to Live Without Your Phone

If you don't do it for yourself, do it for your children

A screenshot of that infamous Apple ad

A long-held belief of mine is that both institutionalized education and the rule of law only wield enough power to imbue healthy behaviors in teenagers insofar as their families embody them in the first place.

A kid will hardly learn good eating habits at school if his parents are obese due to fast-food overconsumption. Genetics and environmental childhood upbringing remain undefeated as modeling forces of a person's character. Regulations and societal customs change collective behavior over time, and peer influence can steer kids away from their parents to some degree, but family sets a baseline that's hard to override.

Maybe you already know where I'm going with this, but in case it's not clear, let me say it straight: your smartphone addiction is the first and foremost cause of your children's smartphone addiction.

As a member of the younger half of society (not for long, although not so much because I’m getting older but because the pyramid is inverting), it's fascinating how often teenagers and young adults are used as scapegoats for behaviors and attitudes we learned from our parents, directly by copying or instruction, or indirectly, through an inevitable hereditary endowment. They will blame the ills of society on our annoying tendency to change the status quo as setters of fashions and tastes, but they forget, way too often, that we are the by-product of their existence. (Young people also blame the ills of society on older people, though; being human seems to be as much about fighting the out-group as it is about dodging accountability.)

But, setting aside battles I have no desire nor energy to wage, I will confidently claim that the current state of the world, insofar as smartphones have severely degraded it, is a clear case of vice by imitation: what kids see, kids do.

We—I include myself because I’m now closer to having kids of my own than being accurately defined as someone else’s child—handed them a world on fire, a digital panopticon to inhabit, and an economy of despair. It’s not in vogue to say that the past was better because it’s so easy to call out excessive rosy retrospection, but I genuinely believe the past was better. Our kids’ anxiety and depression aren't a disorder, but the only rational response to the future we built for them.

And we keep building it every day, for every day we wake up and check the phone before giving them a good morning kiss, until they grow too old for that, and then they leave the familiar home for good; and then, for some reason, despite being in their phones all day, they never call.

Their contempt—toward the world, toward themselves, toward you—is the first sign of their sanity; “Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society,” psychiatrist Thomas Szasz said. And kids, not having had time yet to metamorphose into a pretense of equanimity, remain candid. They don’t know who to blame for the entire world was plotting against their success before they were born.

You’re probably unwilling to do it for yourself, so do it for them: Kill your phone.

I don’t know what literal shape that takes exactly. Find a definition for “killing” that meets your circumstances. It can be using it only when they’re not present until they’re old enough, or swapping your last-generation iPhone for a flip phone, or joining the Amish or perhaps the Luddites. Or it can be something as straightforward as developing a better consumption habit, which we apply to everything else, but somehow collectively forget when it comes to the phone.

Elizabeth Gilbert put it like this: “I feel like social media is a party drug that we all started taking 10, 15 years ago in big doses. It was like, this is so fun. And now we're all addicted to it, and no one's getting high off it anymore.” Ok, so sober up.

I read a beautiful post by a Substack account that goes by Fyodor—I don’t know if you’ve heard of him; he used to be a gambler—that might help you. He appropriately titled it “Meditations for Phone Addicts.” You decide if you belong to his intended audience; I will share here my favorite excerpt, which, as it happens, is the first paragraph (God spare me from having to read five minutes of text in one sitting):

The modern soul finds itself divided. In one hand, we hold a device—a small, glowing rectangle that promises connection, knowledge, and distraction. In the other hand: nothing. And it is this nothing that terrifies us.

Learn to face the nothing, he says, and provides a six-step morning routine to “get back to ourselves.” One user commented: “I think this may have single handedly cured my phone addiction! If it doesn't do the same for you, pick up your phone, open Substack and read this again.”

I’m not crazy enough to read Fyodor on my phone, and perhaps that’s the key to the conundrum of how one can exist in modernity without relinquishing comfort while preserving both grip and clarity: Do everything you do on your phone without your phone. The old way. You don’t need to literally kill it, but replace it with things that achieve the same without keeping you glued to the screen. As Fyodor writes,

If you find yourself unable to sit with yourself in the quiet, if the silence feels unbearable, if the itch to check gnaws at you like a half-formed thought—then you must face the truth: you are no longer the master of your own attention.

In case you say this is impossible because the phone mediates your life in a way nothing else can, let me remind you of that Apple iPad Pro ad that was deservedly criticized: an industrial press crushing a bunch of beautiful things—toys, instruments, books, paint, cameras, statues, a lamp, a writing machine—to create the thinnest iPad. Now imagine it in reverse, which coincidentally would have been the best ad ever; imagine a world where devices were replaced by music returning as instruments and voices, communication as letters and conversations, photography as cameras and prints, light as lamps, stories as books, playing as toys and games; a world where the proxy disappears and the source is given back.

If the device is all those things, then all those things are the device. The point was never the phone, but what the phone can do for you. As Fyodor writes, “use it, but do not be used by it,” and I add: If you can’t, ditch it. Your children would appreciate it if you bought them instruments and toys and books—and even, hear me out, an actual rotary dial phone instead of the newest iPhone! That’s what Priscilla Harvey did, which I nominate for best mom of the year (after my own, that is):

I bought my kids an old-school phone to keep smartphones out of their hands while still letting them chat with friends. But it’s turned into the sweetest, most unexpected surprise: my son’s new daily conversations with his grandmothers. . . . There’s no scrolling, no distractions, no comparisons, no dopamine hits to chase. Instead he is just listening to stories, asking questions, and having the comfort of knowing someone who loves him is listening on the other end of the line. Somehow, what was once ordinary in my childhood feels sacred today.

I am all for institutions that hold sway over long-term changes in culture and society to apply policies in this direction, but in the meantime, parents must do their part, for they exert a major impact on their children’s lives. I write directly to you now: You can take an active role in doing things the way you consider best, with enough energy and aura that you imbue the desire to do the same in those who surround you.

As I’ve written elsewhere, it is only in this local, intimate sense that one can change the world. To cite Fyodor one last time, “remember: the truest moments of life happen in the spaces where there is no screen.” Do it for your children.