I’m so sick of my phone. But like, really really sick of it. It’s a trap! Despite being Gen X, I spend hardly any time actually using it as a ‘telephone’, the device’s initial intended purpose. Many are feeling this way which is leading to a rise in ‘analogue living’.
The first iPhone was released on 29th June 2007, which is less than twenty years ago, and in such a short space of time smartphones have subsumed a planet into a trap that’s nigh on impossible to escape from. In 2025, 96% of people in the UK who are Gen X and younger have a smartphone. In this time, smartphones have permeated nearly every facet of life for so many people. A lot of this is by choice, or stealth, and a lot of it is by necessity.
The necessity side of things is that you simply can’t do everyday stuff anymore without a smartphone or computer. Banking, paying bills, making a booking, being able to buy certain things – it’s a long list. Sometimes this is useful (bank apps are good when they work), sometimes it all seems to be a lot more hassle than it needs to be.
The choice side of things is something else.
A few years ago I made some basic changes to my phone notifications. Apart from the client support email address, I disabled notifications for all work emails. It’s one of the best things I did and helped me to switch off more after hours. During working hours if I’m out-and-about, I’ll check emails, but the rest of the time I’m in the office anyway. I turned off nearly all app notifications – I don’t need to know that the bank has sent me a message that badly – and unsubscribed from about a million newsletters that I never signed up for (well, GDPR really worked). This really helped.
Then around Christmas 2025, sick of doomscrolling and the general inanity of it all, I went through every app on my phone and uninstalled all the ones I didn’t either use, need, or that weren’t critical. Social media went (I only really had Facebook which is just full of ads and is basically anti-social media because I never see friends’ posts anymore), all the ones that promise productivity but don’t, gig ticket apps, media streaming apps, and photo processing apps. All I am left with is stuff I can’t function without like banking apps, parking apps, music, and shared calendars. I’ve also kept a couple of news apps. And Wikipedia.
Well, that felt better. Nothing like a good purge. The usual morning routine was the daily rotation round the apps, and the same again last thing at night. But, they’d gone. After flicking through the news, I’d got nothing to do. I was bored. So I flicked through the news again just in case I’d missed anything. Now what? This was quite a shock, and an indication of what these devices have done to our brains, and also how much they dictate our time. Time to re-evaluate my life.
A recent study discovered that half of adults in the UK don’t read for pleasure and around a third have given up altogether over the last ten years. That’s quite a lot. I used to read all the time and love it, but this has reduced somewhat, funnily enough, over the last ten years or so. Reading books became harder, mainly for the reasons outlined in the above Guardian article. In my case, social media and the damn phone itself was a distraction, less spare time because the kids were younger then, and thinking about work.
After deleting all those apps, I began to think about how much further I could possible go to create even more brain space. Fantasising and getting nostalgic about just having a Nokia 3210 and binning everything, I realised a part of the trap. WhatsApp. WhatsApp is a great comms app, and nearly everyone uses it. So much of my life’s various relationships are entwined in WhatsApp. Pretty much everything else on my phone I could practically get rid of: Spotify? Get an mp3 player. Banking and shopping? Use a tablet or computer. Calendar? Get a diary. News? TV or radio. Photos? Get a camera. Basically, use all the stuff we had before smartphones. I still like a Filofax. But, binning WhatsApp and insisting everyone you know sends you an SMS and keeps you up-to-date with what’s going on in the WhatsApp group you’re supposed to be in, is a bit much – you’d be the vegan at the Argentinian steak house.
Getting rid of everything and living a pious puritanical pre-smartphone life isn’t really the way to go anyway. You’d become annoying and lose friends and miss stuff. But at least you’d be booted out of WhatsApp groups. But it seems that quite a lot of people are feeling the same way about their phones and are wanting to reduce the amount of time they spend on them. This is the return to ‘analogue living’ and I didn’t know it existed as a movement before my digital purge – I didn’t spend enough time on loads of social media apps to know.
Hilariously, and without one iota of irony, tons people are posting their plans and guides on social media of how to reduce screen time and live a more un-digital life. Even more hilariously, and with no less irony, people are also posting on social media about how much of a struggle it is and how much their failing. This behaviour is obviously a social media fad posted by people who want online attention. Recommendations for analogue living include getting a digital camera (not a 35mm camera, I notice – that’s too analogue!), become part of a snail mail group (£1.80 for a first-class stamp?!), colouring books (Are you 9?) and creating an ‘analogue bag’ full of things like puzzle books, knitting, magazines, and sketchbooks (Sweet Jesus! We’re you into these things before?).
This is just one version of analogue living – and it’s pretty contrived. But there shouldn’t be a set of guidelines, nor should there be a particular way of doing it. Smartphones are addictive – we’re all addicts to some degree – so weaning ourselves off them should be right and achievable for the individual.
For me, analogue living is just being more mindful about what I use my phone, or any screen, for. I still use it a lot – I can’t practically get through the day without it, and I still use computers at work for most things. For me, it’s not practical to bin off my phone as it would be an inconvenience to me, and to other people in my life (the trap again!). What I can do, and have done, is reduce the importance or, rather, my reliance on my phone and screens in general. All the useless apps are gone which has significantly reduced my screen time. I’ve flogged all the Alexa devices on eBay. I’ve shelved my Kindle in favour of real books (much nicer but, admittedly, still mainly from Amazon rather than Waterstones). I’ve finally got round to sorting out and gluing my recipe scrapbook together after years of ripping out recipes from magazines and printing off the internet (actually much better than recipes on websites because a recipe book doesn’t need waking up). And now the kids are older, I’ve finally started home recording again on a digital portastudio rather than on computer software (you get a more ‘live’ sound result rather than processed quantised perfection).
Smartphones are dead handy. But they’re also a massive pain in the arse, and they’re time sponges. Like anything that’s bad for you, moderation is the key, and avoid when you can. BBC Sounds and Bluetooth I couldn’t live without. Spotify: music is life (So is cheese. And curry). WhatsApp, I need. TimeTree shared calendar for the band, I need. BBC News and the iPaper, I like. I’m trapped, we all are, but my screen time has massively reduced. And I’m happy, and happier, for that.
(NB: I am aware that dumbphones are available with WhatsApp. But they are rubbish.)
