Can you live without smartphone for at least a week?

Smartphone has transform to become a device that help our daily life. Beside its core function as a communication tool, it can do a lot more to help things done. Even now we can make a transaction that involved money just through a smartphone. But, can you live without it?

Smartphone can be good

Every tool is depend on how we use it, that also applied on a smartphone. If we use it properly, it can help us make us more productive, healthier, and happier. Smartphone make us possible to keep in touch with our high school friends even after graduated 5 years ago or more.

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We can take photos & videos and share to everyone within just 5 minutes. We can write whatever ideas come through our head into notes and read it later. We can even pay coffee with smartphone, or switch lights on/off. It all so fast that we able to save more time and do other activities.

It also can be bad

It didn’t hard to find an incident that cause by someone who using their smartphone not properly and harm themself sometimes cause the death. I’m also feeling sad with children which become addicted to a smartphone just using it for gaming. I mean there’s nothing wrong with game, the problem is when they play a game 8, 12, 24 hours non-stop. It can cause some serious health issue (headache, eye problems, mental, etc) and can be interfere their growth.

And there are a lot of new type of crime that occurred alongside the growth of smartphone usage such as data theft, social media fraud, etc. Someone easily becomes a victim of those crimes.

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The most negative effect of smartphone, internet, and social media today I think are the feel of depressed, overthinking, insecurity, fail, etc. Especially on social media, when everyone share their success, their branded gadget, shoes, cars. When we see it we will start comparing those people achievements with our self, and start to feel insecure and fail in this life. Someone who don’t have a strong mental and vision will easily feeling down. They need support from their families, friends, relations.

The idea of live without smartphone

It started to come into my mind when I claimed the warranty for my dead smartphone and must wait for more than a week. Then I think, can I live without smartphone for that long?

I already backup all my data before so I didn’t lose it all and think it will be easy. I can still open my social media with my laptop. But I have one problem, and that’s I can’t open WhatsApp when my phone still dead unless I open WhatsApp on other phone which I don’t have. Then I decided to insert my SIM card to my android tablet and open it there. But, iOs and Android still don’t have a got relationship. I can get my chat history which I backed up on my iPhone to my tablet, so the option is either I don’t use WhatsApp until I get my phone back or use my tablet to open WhatsApp and start over. That’s why I don’t like WhatsApp, I prefer Telegram to be honest.

When I started live a life without using smartphone, of course I felt harder to contact anyone. But other than that, I feel that I did more job done, more focus to work, become worry-less. I just feel I get rid of the most distraction thing, smartphone.

Maybe it because when there’s no physical appearance of a smartphone next to me. I can’t do the habit to check it every 5 minutes, open Instagram every 10 minutes, scrolling timeline, found happy feed suddenly feeling happy, found sad feed then suddenly also feel sad, angry, anxious. I feel more serenity, actually living life, interacting with people, real people. I usually use my phone on bed at night before sleep, after I don’t have a smartphone in my hand I forced to do something else, reading or even just sleep. I wake up with more energy the next day.

Maybe we can make it as a habit, apply something called “smartphone detox” it help to release us from bad smartphone habit. I found interesting article from The New York Times that tell the story about someone who have some problems with smartphone and got a rehab:

I’ve been a heavy phone user for my entire adult life. But sometime last year, I crossed the invisible line into problem territory. My symptoms were all the typical ones: I found myself incapable of reading books, watching full-length movies or having long uninterrupted conversations.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/business/cell-phone-addiction.html

I mean smartphone is good, really good. But we as a human, can limit our use of smartphones. Don’t let us be enslaved by smartphones and endanger our physical and mental health.