The Only Digital Detox That Worked

Becca Farsace did something I've been circling for years. She left her phone at home and went out into the world carrying a Hasselblad, a notebook, a pen, a cassette player, and a book. Directions written down. Phone numbers scrawled on paper. The whole thing.

The first rule to leaving your phone at home is writing everything down. Directions, times you have to be places, phone numbers. Oh, it's crazy how much we've offloaded our brains into our phones.

Not the leaving-your-phone-at-home part. I've done that. I've gone further and shoved my SIM into a Nokia flip phone for weeks. It's the offloading part that's worth paying attention to. We don't actually know anything anymore. We've handed our memory, our navigation, our sense of time and place, to a slab of glass and metal. And we did it so gradually that nobody noticed.

I noticed when I tried to remember a phone number during my flip phone experiment. I couldn't. Not a single one. My wife's, my mum's, my own work number. All gone. Stored somewhere in a server, accessible through a device I was deliberately not carrying. That's not convenience. That's dependency.

The thing that makes Becca's approach interesting is she didn't try to go without. She replaced. A camera for photos. A notebook for information. A book for entertainment. A cassette player for music. She carried more objects but needed less from any single one of them. Each thing did one job and did it without demanding anything in return. No notifications. No algorithmic suggestions. No dopamine loops designed by people smarter than both of us.

I've written about this exact trap before. The irony of the dumb phone crowd carrying a phone, an MP3 player, a camera, a kindle, and a notebook when a smartphone does all of that. I called it ridiculous. And it is, if you're doing it to be minimal. But that's not what Becca was doing. She wasn't trying to own less. She was trying to think more. There's a difference.

When everything lives in your phone, you never have to engage your brain. You don't remember directions because Maps remembers them. You don't know what time you need to be somewhere because your calendar will ping you. You don't even decide what to listen to because the algorithm picks for you. Your brain becomes a passenger in your own life. I've felt this. The phone murders any chance of being present, of feeling full in a moment, of letting a thought develop without interruption.

And here's the thing. Everything she carried fit into one phone. That's the sales pitch, right? That's the whole point of the smartphone. All your stuff, in one place, in your pocket. Except the phone doesn't just hold your stuff. It holds everyone else's stuff too. Their opinions, their outrage, their marketing, their engagement metrics. You reach in for a phone number and come out twenty minutes later having read three arguments about nothing.

A notebook doesn't do that. A cassette player doesn't do that. A camera with no internet connection doesn't do that.

I'm not about to start carrying a cassette player around. I already know from experience that replacing one device with five separate ones isn't the answer. But the underlying point stands. The detox that works isn't the one where you white-knuckle it through a weekend without screens. It's the one where you give your brain back the jobs you took away from it. Write things down. Remember a route. Sit with silence instead of filling it with a podcast.