I have been trying to write this post for a very long time. Trying to outline my experiment of using a flip phone again because it is the culmination of a few years of wanting to try it, knowing I can’t and then slowly walking myself back from the edge. This time my wife pushed me over the edge with words along the line of “stop talking about it and do it” with comical results and some realisations along the way.

I say this with the knowledge that I have written and rewritten this post quite a few times. I hoped that my thoughts would come easily as they are plentiful, but my fear was that they could be judged as more than a little preachy. This would have destroyed the message behind this post and removed any hope of people reading it. So I hope this version finds the right spot in your motivation to keep reading. It circles a realisation I had about a week into the experiment and applies to numerous things in tech circles.

On the first boot of my sim being in a new Nokia 2660, I hit barriers. The phone cost me a whopping £25 from a local business and ticked all the boxes I wanted it to tick, but the barriers came from other places. There is no way to transfer contacts over, so I had to spend quite a bit of time doing the new phone dance that people of a certain age will remember. Typing all the numbers and contact names in on the t9 keypad, that after ten minutes, made my hand cramp. I used to be able to send a text without even looking, and although some muscle memory remained, the dexterity to do so did not.

Once this was done, I put the phone down and stared at it. You see, the great thing about a dumb phone, although this particular model did have Facebook installed, is that there is nothing to do with it. Outside the occasional game of snake, unless the phone beeped, or I needed to contact someone, it never moved from the table in my kitchen. For something to do, I even when and connected it to my car’s bluetooth, which went about as easily as any other phone I have used. Which was frustrating because I expected to hit more annoyances than this. How dare this ridiculous phone be easy to use and peaceful.

Truth be told, for the first couple of days, I wished we had never moved past this stage in the mobile phone evolution. I wanted to stay with this device that asked absolutely nothing from me. It delivered on everything it promises, which is next to nothing, and that was one with me. That’s the thing about weekends though, they are not the indicator of normal usage, and once the week rolled around I was sure the issues would start showing up. Secretly hoping I would have a good enough excuse to shove my sim back into a phone it deserved. Unfortunately, nothing major happened.

The calls were answered. Texts were replaced with telephone calls because it couldn’t be bothered to give myself hand cramp. Most importantly, no-one was any the wiser. This marvellous device sat on my desk next to my computer and did exactly what was asked of it. It wasn’t until the dawn of the third day that I began to release what I needed from a phone. It came in the most embarrassing of situations, at the front of a queue of people trying to pay for something. My card would not work for whatever reason and I had no way of getting another one, nor using a banking app.

I walked away in a grump, with my dumb phone in my hand and simmering over imagined sniggering from people in the queue behind. Curse my desire for a simple life and not having the world at my fingertips when I most needed it. It suddenly occurred to me — well once I had been home, sorted my card out, and then gone to a different shop to buy the things I required — that I do need my device to do more. I began to think of all the occasions where I might need a device with me. Quickly putting together ideas of how I could overcome them.

I ran through them all in my mind to make sure I could solve these problems and continue in blissful device silence. Banking was simple. I return to carrying a wallet with me at all times. The next one was running, that would require a new watch because I can’t use my beloved Apple Watch now. Something simple will do, a cheep Casio and a good route planning session to log my milage means I can jump that hurdle effortlessly. Podcasts on long runs might take a bit more thought.

After exploring the web for MP3 devices, which there are quite a few of even with the rise of smartphones, the possibility of more expenditure started to pull the curtain down on my experiment. Not because of the cost, a simple MP3 player with bluetooth is around £40, but more because of the hassle. I could download the episodes I want to listen to, convert them to MP3 and then put them on the device. Worry about keeping it charged and tracking my run on a new watch. Or I could just use Apple Watch as I have done for years.

I could ask for paper menus and order forms in places that relied on QR code scanning or online ordering. Printing out things I needed to have with me, or writing them in my notebook. All the issues that cropped up had solutions, but after a certain point the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. Despite all the attention it tended to suck away, and all the outlay it cost — the smartphone has pushed itself into my life to such a point that it is just easier to have one. That sucks.