What does a lifestyle of not having home internet and using a feature (read: dumb) phone as a daily driver look like?
Pros:
- I’m encouraged to go to bed at a reasonable time more often.
- I’ve been running more consistently due to having nothing better to do.
- I’m encouraged to hang out at school more to mooch off of free Wi-Fi, and with that comes social reinforcement to study and mindfulness about what websites I choose to browse in public.
- I find myself practicing music more without really trying due to easy access to practice rooms and not having to worry about bothering my neighbors and roommates.
- I’ve had less anxiety about being alone without YouTube videos to fill up that empty space. There’d be times I didn’t remotely care for anything in my feed, but still put on a video at random in hopes of getting in the mood, akin to opening the fridge 1000 times. Nowadays, I flip through the radio for a bit when I’m bored at my desk or put on my Japanese passive immersion when I’m bored doing menial chores.
- Social media and YouTube would have to be consoomed deliberately. I found myself giving up feed scrolling entirely instead of going through the trouble to stay up to date on content creators and influencers, and I usually don’t think too much of this until a bugman starts talking to me about pop culture.
Annoyances followed by solutions/adaptations:
- Time sensitive correspondence in group chats is impossible without data, not made any easier by my avoidance of big tech platforms like Messenger, Line, and Discord. People often tell me in person what everyone already knew from reading “the chat”. As a middle ground, I convinced my bandmates to get on Signal and start a chat there. I used a degoogled burner phone for the set-up, but exclusively use the (electron bloat meme) Linux client. I might look at setting up a Matrix or XMPP server, but for now, this duct tape solution works. Everyone else, I don’t find myself missing anything important, surprisingly enough. To date, I’ve never been adversely affected in the real world by what went on in the virtual world without my consent.
- I can’t have Zoom calls at home, which as a music student and not a corporate salaryman, isn’t a dealbreaker. For doctor appointments and the like, I go to school and use the soundproof booths the campus generously installed, or a cozy spot outside where the Wi-Fi reaches. There might be a point where I will be asked to give music lessons over Zoom, but I could probably use a practice room and spend the $10 on a low gain lavalier mic. Either way, I detest Zoom classes and would have laid out my graduation plan around all in-person offerings regardless of this experiment.
- I try to tie up all my loose ends at school, but every so often, I forget to send an email or need to print something last minute. For those times, I schlep over to the nearest (usually packed) Starbucks 5 minutes away on foot, and sit outside the glass wall on the floor for the few minutes I need. At one point, I had a car, which made parking outside good hotspots easy and gave me a private space to work for longer periods of time, but alas, I make do with what is geographically and financially feasable.
- I can’t easily collaborate on music making at home. Recording and exchanging takes has to be done in two seperate places, which is particually annoying when meeting a deadline. Real time feedback is restricted to what a phone in the 2000’s could do: T9 texting (which isn’t as bad as I thought), blurry MMS photos for notation examples, and a narrowband voice line.
- Being hardly at home anymore means I need to both buy and prepare food in advance to avoid paying for expensive junk food. Unfortunately, the first thing that I usually sacrifice for the sake of not missing the bus is packing lunch. Packing the night before works better.
- An ongoing project of mine has been atuning my ear to new genres of music, but I no longer have ready access to streaming services or the YouTube algorithm, leaving me to fish for whatever my friends and the radio happen to put on. Even then, I can’t use Shazam or SoundHound on the spot to catalog these new finds, so I need to be extra meticulous about either writing down the title/artist on pen and paper, or recording the source on my phone in potato quality for later lookup.
- Syncing files and information between devices is a no go. In fact, I sold my desktop PC because the money I got and the time I saved not transfering files anymore beat the comfort and power of a home rig. I manually keep part of my music library synced with my phone for when someone hands me the aux cord, but all the housekeeping a cloud service would normally take care of like calendars, notes, homework, and passwords is on my laptop. So instead of quickly typing away info on my phone, I choose to always have my laptop close at hand to jot down “open loops” (GTD/Covey term) that would frankly be faster to tap into something like Google Keep or Joplin.
- When I think of a spicy meme to share, I need to wait until I’m on campus to send it after the fact, although this is becoming less and less of a problem. At one point, I had all of my memes constantly synced via Google Photos for instant autism, and at another point, I had a constantly updated meme slideshow as my wallpaper that gave me the impression that I was q u i r k y and had a good sense of humor, but since getting rid of the instinct to pull out my phone under the pretense of supplementing my meme library like some kind of pack rat, I’ve deleted everything. The good memes tend to find me anyway, instead of the other way around.
- QR codes are a pain in the rear to work with, especially ones that link to a form to fill out. I use zbarcam on my laptop, but that still requires me to (1) have my laptop, (2) snag some public wi-fi, and (3) look like an idiot holding my laptop up against the board. Opening links texted to me is also annoying; I need to type the link out by hand into my laptop’s to-do list to open later.
- I don’t know how to get to new places, and sometimes I don’t even know the address. This has turned out to be a non issue 90% of the time as I’m usually going with a friend with a smartphone and data. For the other 10%, I have to either download then print directions at home, or (gasp) ask a stranger around me for directions. I am also very forturnate to have a decent sense of direction; even while travelling, I can count on myself to know where I’ve been and to take chances.
The next logical step seems to be ditching my cell phone, but as much as I would love to order a landline and be done with it, I don’t follow through - mainly because I’m hardly at home in the first place and I want to be available for my friends (which is already made hard by not being on social media or apps). Almost nobody calls me anyway, so there isn’t much of a difference either way.
In short, there’s a lot of planning ahead when you don’t have that fluffy pillow of information to fall back on, but life goes on and I get by.