“I’d wake up in the morning, I’d be on my phone, I jump on the bus to uni, I’d be on my phone. I’d be in my class, I’d sneak a look at my phone. And then I’d come back from uni, be on my phone.”
Adam de Jong, 22, swapped his smartphone for a ‘dumb phone’ for two-and-a-half-years to fight his phone dependency.
It worked but it also made him a “social liability”, he says.
Watch the full video on TVNZ+
More than half of 18 to 24 year-olds-in New Zealand feel addicted to their smartphones, according to research from Victoria University of Wellington lecturer Alex Beattie.
It’s made dumb phones a popular choice for people wanting to lower their screentime.
The phones, also called ‘feature phones’, only have basic functions like calling and texting.
The morning’s headlines in 90 seconds, including the West Auckland builder sentenced over massive meth haul, fire on a commuter train, and how Bluey could teach kids about resilience. (Source: 1News)
When Adam decided to switch to a dumb phone, he was going through one of his hardest semesters of university and considered dropping out.
“Man, I felt like my phone was consuming my life,” he says.
“And I just had these visions, these fantasies of going to a bridge and throwing my phone off as far as I could.”
Adam was studying a visual arts degree and says his smartphone kept taking his eyes downwards when he should have been looking out at nature.
“What I really liked about my dumb phone is that it took a lot of effort to do anything. And when I was out, I couldn’t just pull out my phone and start scrolling.”
He says the most important lesson he learned from using a dumb phone was that he didn’t need to be online and accessible to people all the time, adding that these “weird social expectations” don’t match up with our “social reality”.
End of the experiment
However, Adam says he eventually switched back to a smartphone “mostly because I felt like my social life was falling apart”.
He realised there were many tasks he couldn’t do without a smartphone, including:
- Doing a bank transfer
- Using Google Maps
- Carrying e-tickets
- Receiving event invites
Texting became a pain, he says, so anytime he received a text he would have to weigh up if responding was worth the effort of typing the message out on a dumb phone keyboard.
“Before I got a dumb phone, I thought I was an excellent communicator, and then I got a dumb phone and I kind of stopped caring,” Adam says.
Learning to disconnect is a skill
Beattie, at Victoria University, researches ways in which people manage their screentime and says more than half of 18- to 24-year-old New Zealanders really struggle to disconnect from the internet.
He says the biggest barrier to giving up a smartphone is experiencing FOMO – the fear of missing out – but there are tools like Brick which can temporarily lock you out of apps that are distracting you.
Beattie says older people who blame younger people for being addicted to their phones don’t realise how different the world was when they were growing up.
“They would go to pubs. Things were cheaper or free. It’s just completely different now.
“The thing about social media is it’s one of the only free things young people have. Of course they’re going to be on it all the time.”
Watch the full video on TVNZ+
