When I was in high school, cell phones were just starting to become popular.
In my sophomore year, my first classmate got a flip phone. By my senior year, I was one of just a few students who didn’t have one.
In our rural area, cell phones were mostly employed as an emergency device to be kept in the car, so I didn’t really feel like I was missing out. My friends all still called each other on our landlines every night. At a quarter a pop, texting was not an option.
When I arrived at college, I certainly felt like the odd man out without a phone in hand, but I just wasn’t all that interested in joining the crowd. I couldn’t see the appeal of zoning out for hours like a zombie staring into a device in my lap.
As the cost of texting got cheaper, and then eventually free with most phone plans, the problem got worse. It seemed like my cohorts were chained to their phones. They couldn’t do anything or go anywhere without them. I decided that if somebody wanted to contact me, they could call me on the landline in my dorm room or write on my Facebook wall. I did not owe anyone instant availability.
I happily proceeded in my phoneless existence until my senior year of college when two of my older sisters, frustrated at never being able to catch me on my dorm room phone, purchased me a cheap flip phone so I wouldn’t miss any more of their calls. I used it a little for making plans with friends, but without the draw of apps, such as the ubiquitous Farmville app that everybody seemed to be spamming me with invites to play, it just wasn’t all that interesting to me.
After college, I went backpacking through Europe and happily left my phone stateside with my sisters. At the time, the cost to bring and use your cell phone in Europe was astronomical, so it made more sense to just go to an internet café and call them on Skype when I wanted to catch up. Of course, my sisters were terrified I’d end up dead in a European ditch without my phone, but it was a relief to me to not worry about it being lost or stolen or dropped in a canal.
I reluctantly took the phone back when I returned home, knowing it was necessary in this day and age for gainful employment, to socialize with friends and for dating.
When I met my now-husband, he begged me to join the 21st century and get a smartphone, which I was extremely reluctant to do because of how smartphones seemed to have completely taken over everyone’s lives. People couldn’t seem to even scratch their noses without their phones telling them to do so.
Eventually, I was sold on getting a smartphone because of the Google Maps app. Until then, I was still going to MapQuest and printing off directions to where I needed to go. If I made a wrong turn, I was out of luck with help getting back on track. As someone who gets lost a lot while traveling, this was a big pain.
Slowly over the last decade, my smartphone has infiltrated nearly every aspect of my life. From music, to news, weather and shopping, everything has moved onto an app for me now.
I didn’t realize how big the problem had become until recently when my trusty old phone mysteriously stopped working. My husband had been asking me to replace it for months. I’d had it for more than five years, and it had been an older refurbished model when we’d bought it. He had expressed concerns about security upgrades and had mentioned a couple of times that it may go caput suddenly at any moment.
Did I listen to him?
No, I did not.
He graciously refrained from saying “I told you so” too many times.
But it just seemed like a huge hassle to get a new phone. I liked the one I had. I didn’t want to learn a whole new system and figuring which way I have to swipe for this or that. I didn’t want to have to re-download all the apps I use. And I definitely didn’t want to have to re-enter all my usernames and passwords into all of those apps.
After my phone bit the dust, my husband ordered a new one online, and I used my very first smartphone I never threw away until the new one came in. I decided not to put any apps that were not absolutely necessary onto the old phone while I waited for the new one to arrive. I didn’t want to go through that whole rigamarole twice in one week.
It wasn’t long before I realized how reliant on apps my life had become. I have somehow acquired an app for nearly every single aspect of my life.
Let me count the ways:
■ From the utilitarian apps such as my calendar, my watch, our home vacuum, our home security cameras, two for email accounts, three for bank accounts and four different grocery stores.
■ Apps for work: one for clocking in and out, and three for recording my story interviews.
■ Food related apps: five for restaurants, three coffee shops and multiple apps for calorie tracking and exercise.
■ Apps for entertainment: one each for podcasts and music, two for books, three for sharing videos with friends and family, and an embarrassing number of social media apps.
■ One to translate my cats’ meows into English, ones to learn all the countries of the world, one to identify famous works of art, one to learn new languages and one for plant identification so I stop accidentally weeding flowers out of my garden.
■ And the apps that I have no idea why they are necessary: one to change my thermostat, one to read my bathroom scale, oh, and look here, an app to remind me to scratch my own nose.
While waiting for my new phone to arrive, I enjoyed the silence. No more constant notifications from the 85 million apps on my phone. It was peaceful.
When my new phone came in, many of the apps that I previously had on my old phone did not get reinstalled. My phone had somehow clawed its way into every moment of my life, and it was beyond time to loosen its grip.
It’s so easy to let our devices rule our lives. I hope it doesn’t take another phone crashing to wake me up from a zombified stupor and get me looking at the world around me instead of into my lap.