I will have my phone for this interview.
Okay.
And you have your flip-phone.
I've got this.
Phone-five. Phone-five.
(laughing)
(beep)
(upbeat rock music) Hi,
my name is Elana Mugden
and I just successfully completed a year
without use of any smartphone, tablet,
or handheld scrolling technology in order to win $100,000.
(cash register bings)
If you were to describe this entire experience
in one word, what would it be?
"Liberating" is the first thing that comes to mind.
But I think the more apt description
would probably be "empowering."
(phone snapping shut)
This old flip-phone was all Elana could use
for an entire year.
That's right, no smartphone allowed.
(glass shattering)
It was part of a competition put on by Vitamin Water.
Tired of missing out on important conversations?
With no phone, you'll have no choice
but to interact with your loved ones.
This was her contest entry
that beat out 100,000 people.
But with no phone, I can finally
spend time with my friends,
catch up on all my writing work,
and get out and enjoy nature.
It wasn't a technology ban, (plinking tictoc music)
I was allowed to use a desktop, obviously.
When you got the challenge,
how hard did you think it was gonna be?
I really, uh, didn't think it was going to be that hard.
But I can definitively say that,
in this one-year experiment without the phone,
I feel better.
Great.
And I feel happier.
Would you say you were someone
who used your phone as a crutch?
Yes, absolutely.
It was an enabling device.
(upbeat jazz music)
Her smart phone was locked up
in a little jail cell, with the data plan turned off
for the year. (electric beeping music)
Without it, she carried around
a big bag full of necessities.
My dad gifted me his 10-year-old iPod Shuffle.
Which still works great.
You don't always get lucky because
you can't control what comes on next.
I didn't have a printer at home
so I would, like, Google the instructions,
write them down by hand.
I have an atlas, an actual honest-to-goodness road atlas.
Oh, and the camera.
Hi, guys, I'm Elana Mugden.
I voluntarily vlogged about my experience.
So, of course, I don't have a phone to just record myself.
But I do have this old DSL-R camera.
And
it is not
travel friendly.
It's this big, bulky bag.
Here's the flip-phone.
I'm gonna try and add contacts now.
Okay, oh (beep). (laughing)
Did you see that?
I'm trying to,
it's just like automatic, what do I do, how do I...
It was time consuming, you know?
It was not as easy as it would've been
had I had the phone to just snap pictures
and do social media and upload videos and what-have-you.
(air whooshing)
What is the most important feature of the smartphone
that you miss daily?
The maps.
I've actually gotten very good at offline navigation.
We've got our handy-dandy directions.
I printed out two versions of the directions.
It was accountability, it was transparency
if anyone wants to contest my claim,
I invite them to go to the YouTube channel
and watch all 52 episodes and see, you know, what happened.
It's the last chapter after all, it's the end of an era.
You were able to still live your life,
Yes.
But not be on a smartphone.
Correct.
What ultimately happened is I curtailed
how many people I'm really interacting with
on a meaningful level.
When the last day came, when the day ended,
what was the feeling like for you?
Interestingly, I woke up that day and
it was just another day.
It wasn't really, in my mind, it wasn't really over,
really, until I took the lie-detector test.
You passed. I passed!
I passed.
Speed round.
(funny gameshow music)
I'm gonna ask you a few questions,
answer them as quick as possible.
On a scale of one to 10, how hard was this challenge?
Six.
Did you miss people's birthdays?
No.
What about big announcements from friends?
Sometimes.
Did you miss any big moments in the news?
Yes.
How annoyed did you get with the people
around you on their phone?
Not so much annoyed as, like, terrified.
That you would look at their screen.
I didn't wanna be involved.
Did you miss taking any photos?
Yes.
How did you change your behavior without your phone?
I feel like I improved myself as a person,
as a daughter, as a friend.
How productive were you?
A hundred-thousand percent more productive.
Yes!
Is everyone mentally better off with or without
their smartphones?
I would say without.
Any regrets?
I regret that it took me this long to see
how
complicit I had been in my own self-destruction.
How poetic, how poetic that it is this moment,
the last, final vlog, that I discover the true lesson.
Because I knew, for a long time I knew,
that I was learning to value my time.
But in valuing my time,
I have learned to more greatly value myself.
And now, you said, this is it,
I'm not going back to the smartphone ever again.
Correct.
I'm not.
Because I feel like what I gained
from being without it is much greater
than what I lost not having it.
And obviously, I can navigate the world without it.
It is a little bit more difficult than one might desire,
in 2020.
And she's never turning back.
(lovely piano music)