A picture from the weekend taken in Central Park by my dad with my Sony a5000 camera. No smart phones were involved in the making of this picture.
I picked the most inopportune time to drop my iPhone in the toilet. I’d made it past security at MIA with my phone and ID in the back pocket of my new J. Brand jeans–you know, because we use our iPhones for EVERYTHING now and at the moment mine was acting as my boarding pass. When I went to use the restroom, it leapt from my back pocket and into the toilet bowl, proceeding to conk out immediately thereafter.
Great! I thought. I’m off to New York without a phone. How am I supposed to coordinate with my mom when I get to LGA and communicate with my friends over the weekend? After the requisite freak out, I accessed my Zen and said, oh well, whatever, I’ll just have to get a new one.
Look, I’ve had more iPhones stolen at Miami nightclubs than I care to admit, and I know the song and dance that comes with replacing these $600+ contraptions that we can’t seem to live without. The fact is, of all the things you can lose, an iPhone is the easiest to replace. Just throw down a cool $199 deductible from your insurance policy and voila! your phone is restored to its former glory in about 48 hours with all your contacts, apps and pictures still intact. Meanwhile, Apple is raking in the cash. Did you know that their iPhone profits alone are more than all of Microsoft and Google combined (heard it on NPR this week, okay)?
Of course, there’s stress involved in being without your device, and I was definitely aided by other advances in technology to make connections over the weekend (not to mention other people’s iPhones), but there was something kind of liberating in going analog in NYC for a long weekend. Sure, it meant I wasn’t going to be Instagramming or live tweeting my experiences while in the city–something that might send bloggers and travel writers into a cold sweat–but, I mean, whatever. I do not abide by the sentiment, “I tweet therefore I am” (even if I do tweet).
Being without a phone makes you a little less available, but it also makes your plans a little more crystalized. You kind of have to meet up at the specified time and place. Also, give your number to a guy at a bar? Just explain you’ve lost your phone and then it’s no biggie if you can’t text him back. Not able to coordinate plans with every single friend you have in the city? Sorry guys, I lost my phone! It also makes you a little more present in what’s going on around you. I wasn’t obsessed with who was liking my Instagram or composing seemingly witty tweets in my head. I was just hanging out.
Coincidentally, I was reading The Art of Stillness by Pico Iyer, an essay published as a slim book by TED, on the flight to New York. The book questions the benefits of being so “connected” by technology today and advocates taking time out of our lives for stillness to achieve true happiness and appreciate the mysteries of the world. Is it really so great that anyone can contact us at anytime no matter where we are? But we’ll meditate more on that in a later blog post…
Fortunately for me in New York, my new MacBook Air has iMessage (something I was initially annoyed by because like Greta Garbo, sometimes I want to be left alone), so I was still able to message people from the hotel and jot down phone numbers into my little notebook for when I was on the go. In fact, I came to call my little purple notebook my iPhone because that’s where I stored phone numbers and addresses I needed for getting around, just like I used to do back in the day when I lived in New York, navigating the city streets without a virtual pocket map (remember asking for directions?). I also packed my new Sony a5000 camera, so I still managed to snap a few pics.
I tried to pitch the idea of the anti-smartphone to my friends. I mean, obviously, I guess they already exist, but what about a cool, smartly designed, sort of hipster, steampunk version that can only be used for talking and texting? It could be a companion to your smartphone for when you want to disconnect and be less distracted. Overwhelmingly, though, everyone’s response was an emphatic, “No! Why would anyone want to do that?” Okay, fair enough.
Oh, and what about the blizzard? My flight home was Monday evening and the snow started falling at dawn. Fortunately for me, I changed my flight to mid-afternoon and got out just fine–all without an iPhone. But I did get a taste of New York’s biting cold (18 degrees, anyone?), snow flurries, winter storm hysteria and my first time in a plane getting de-iced during a blizzard before take off. When I touched down in Miami, it was at sunset with clear skies and palm trees.
Stay tuned for more on how I spent my weekend in New York without an iPhone in the next couple of days, including “A Night Out on the LES” and “All Aboard the Pizza Train: Manhattan to Bushwick.”
And look man, sorry there’s not more pictures in this post. I didn’t have my iPhone.
So, I’m curious, do you ever feel overburdened and distracted by the demands of modern technology and constant connectedness? Would you (could you) trade it in for an anti-smartphone?
