Going for a Walk Without a Phone
This shouldn't be difficult, but it is
I’m a frequent walker. This habit, probably like many people who have developed a walking habit in recent years, was at first spurred by my increasingly sedentary lifestyle in the wake of the COVID pandemic. It was then reinforced by working remotely, as well as taking the advice of Andrew Huberman.1 I’ve always been an active person and have always had an exercise habit, but prior to the pandemic and taking on remote jobs, I never felt the need to take deliberate walks. I was either walking and moving enough as a regular part of my day or just not health conscious or old enough to really concern myself with thinking about that.
I’m also a “digital native.” I hate that phrase, but it’s true. I like to think I'm not as brain-rotted as most of my generation (i.e., Gen Z, though I identify more with the Zillennial micro-generation), and by account of my phone screen time2 and the fact that I’ve never signed up for or downloaded Tik Tok, I’m not. Nonetheless, like the rest of my generation, I essentially came of age smartphone dependent. I’m grateful for the fact that unlike the majority of kids nowadays, I never had a smartphone until I turned 14 and didn’t get my first cellphone until I was in 7th grade. But I kind of did have a smartphone, as I was a part of that weird micro-generation3 of kids who weren’t allowed to have phones until middle school but got iPod Touches when we were 11 (RIP iPod Touch), which could essentially do everything iPhones could do when they were on wifi. I think our parents maybe didn’t understand that; I’m not sure. Ironically my family didn’t even have reliable, unlimited wi-fi until I was 15, but that’s a whole other story.
Suffice it to say, like most the rest of my generation, my brain co-developed with smartphone in-hand, though thankfully not as early as others and thankfully not as dependently as others.4 This brings me to the point of this essay: why is it so f*cking hard for me to go on a walk without my phone?
I often will go on a walk to clear my mind, only to find myself going through my inbox, watching the “reals” that my girlfriend sent me on Instagram, using Snapchat, or doing some other not-so-mind-clearing phone activity, straining my neck down in that smartphone era defining stance. Sometimes I’ll bring it with and successfully not use it all. Usually it is something in between: I’ll check my notifications once or twice or respond to a text and spend about 30 seconds to a minute of a 5 to 10 minute walk on my phone. But rarely, very rarely, do I succeed in not using it all.
Why is this so f*cking difficult? It shouldn’t be that difficult.
There’s always some quick rationalizations. What if I have an emergency? What if someone I love has an emergency and isn’t able to contact me? What if I want to take a picture of something? And then the most pernicious: if I don’t need to use it, I won’t. WRONG.
I write about this today because I’m currently in England visiting my girlfriend sans cell service and went for a walk. I didn’t just go for a walk. I went for a walk phone free.
Even without cell service this was difficult. I could have carried her wifi hotspot (aka dongle, yes, they call them that here, very confusing given the other usage of that term) with me, and I could argue that being in a foreign country, maybe I should have. Who knows what could have gone wrong. But I “manned up” and left for a short walk without my phone. Risky business. Ultimately it was more for the sake of convenience that I didn’t bring my phone and the hotspot, because they are inconvenient and uncomfortable to carry in my short pockets (it was actually warm enough to wear shorts today in Liverpool). I’ll admit that I did have a passing thought at one point of: what if I passed out or died and couldn’t be contacted or identified? (I didn’t have my wallet or ID on me either. Very risky business.)
I made it home fine. It was probably the best walk I had in a long time. It was blissful. I’m going to try to do this more often. Let’s just hope nothing goes terribly wrong on one of these phone free walks. Then again, man walked without phone for millennia, so I think I might be alright. We’ll see. I’ll have to report back on this. Wish me luck in these daring walks. If I survive to tell the tales ;)
i.e., ~ go for a walk outside in the morning to get sunlight in your eyes to improve your circadian rhythm, see here
This survey found that the average “zoomer” spends 6 hours and 5 minutes on their phone per day. My screen time tends to be around 4 hours per day and invariably 20-30 minutes of that is spent on Duolingo, and typically another 15 minutes or so is work related. I’d actually really like to dig into my phone usage data more, but quite tragically my phone (Google Pixel 7) has recently started to have persistent screen malfunction – a 5 pixel wide strip on the left side of my screen is stuck on full-brightness white – so I factory reset it to see if that would fix the problem. It didn’t. And not only have I spend the last 2 days wasting my time logging back into all my various app accounts, my usage data was not included in the backup. WTF Google. When I fully backup my phone I expect it to be FULLY backed-up. I digress.
I didn’t think I’d use this word twice in one essay.
I feel quite lucky not to be a part of the “iPad kid” wave of Generation alpha.
Strolling phoneless is a refined pleasure these days. Good on you!