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Modern phones are great. Odds are right now that you are watching this show on a smart
phone, and you probably have half a dozen apps all running in the background waiting
for you to switch to them with the flick of a finger. But do you really think you could
live your life without your phone? How about just for one week? No texting, no instagram,
no net on the go- what would it be like to be disconnected from the world without a phone
for a full week? Today we're putting your favourite, and our least important, writer
through another challenge for the sake of your curiosity, in Challenge: no phone for
a week!
Day 1: I actually remember life without cell phones. In fact I didn't get my first cell
phone until I was 18, shortly after I got out of basic training and finished all my
initial military training schools. I remember how isolated we were from the world during
basic and then all the schools that came after, and I remember the shock of returning to the
civilized world almost a year after. Two things stood out the most: first, there were ads
playing in movie theaters, and second, everyone had blackberries and could browse the web
on their phone. It literally felt like I had been away from the world for years.
This challenge seems deceptively easy: how hard can it be to not have a phone for a week?
After all, it's not like I'm on a total media blackout, I still have my laptop and my desktop
at home. Nobody uses a phone for calls anymore, and if you are one of those people that insists
on calling when you could just text, you're a terrible person. Calls are for emergencies
only- and like big ones. Missing limbs or getting Taken by eastern European sex traffickers
kind of stuff. Literally everything else can be texted. I digress though, even if I wanted
to call someone I could just skype from either of my computers. Browse the web? Computer.
Play games? Computer. Email? Computer. Honestly, this challenge is going to be a cinch- and
it's kind of nice for once that Infographics is giving me something easy to work with.
I'll check in every few days, but honestly this might be the easiest challenge yet. Nice
to finally get an easy layup.
Day 3: I underestimated this challenge. At first I thought it would be no big deal, anything
that I can do on my phone I can do on my laptop- from calling people to writing emails and
even ordering food. But you know what, it's kind of a giant pain in the ass to do everything
you could do from your phone on your laptop. I don't mean to sound super First World about
this, but having to constantly go back to the laptop for everything from ordering food
to sending an email is a serious pain.
Without a phone you suddenly remember just how boring life is, and I kind of feel sorry
for those of you young enough to never have experienced the absolute drudgery that life
is without being constantly connected. You really can't appreciate how good you have
it. With no phone you remember how terrible it is to sit in traffic and be forced to listen
to music on the radio. Don't like the song they're playing? Sure, you can skip it- in
about three and a half minutes. Not your style? No problem, just flip to another station and
hope they're playing something you actually like, and that the reception is good. Finally
find a station playing a song you really dig? Crank it up and sing along- then cringe as
hard as you can when the ending gets chopped off for some inane commentary from some stupid
radio dj. Especially in the mornings. Oh god do I hate radio in the mornings. Morning shows
are stupid, and people who grow up wanting to be morning show djs should be removed from
the gene pool. Oh and do you remember what commercials were? Don't worry, here's ten
minutes straight of commercials to remind you.
Yeah, ok. This challenge is harder than I thought.
Day 5: I've never realized how very boring and inane my life is. Well, I mean, it isn't-
I actually happen to enjoy my life, but I guess what I mean is that I never realized
how much boringness pervades my day to day life. I went to the doctor today and had to
wait a solid half hour due to a scheduling mix-up, and predictably all of the magazines
were terrible- who even reads golfing magazines anyway? It's like a rule that doctors carry
only the most random and uninteresting magazines in the world, along with a bunch of celebrity
trash rags. Anyways, the magazines sucked, so ok no problem, I'll pull up Popular Mechanics
on my phone- oh wait, that's right. No phone. F. M. L.
What else could I do but read about the top twelve golf courses in the world, which were
all pretty but... isn't golf just hitting a ball with a stick and trying to put it in
a hole far away? What could possibly be so different about each course? Put some random
windmills and robots and giant clown faces you have to shoot into and then you've got
my attention- because golf sucks but mini-golf is awesome.
That wasn't all though. I went to meet a client hiring me to do a script rewrite and as usual,
she was late- because everybody in LA is always late, everywhere. I reached for my phone and
forgot- no phone. Instead I had a slip of paper in my pocket with her phone number,
just in case I had to call her when I got there. That's right, just in case something
happened and I had to physically call her on a landline telephone from somewhere and
let her know I'd be late. That statement sounds insane, but it used to be real life when I
was growing up. Now I'm not even sure that businesses have physical landlines anymore,
and I haven't carried numbers written on pieces of actual paper in... I think 20 years. I
actually remember getting girls' numbers on slips of paper, that used to be a thing, and
then you'd lose the slip of paper and you hated yourself forever.
So I sat in the coffee shop waiting for my meeting having literally nothing to do, and
you know what I've discovered? When you're sitting at a public coffee shop alone and
doing nothing- not typing on a laptop, not watching something or texting on your phone,
not listening to music, just sitting at your table doing absolutely nothing- you look like
a serious creep. I kept catching people looking at me out of the corner of their eye, probably
thinking things like, “omg what is that weirdo doing sitting alone doing nothing?!”
You know what, growing up people did that and it was perfectly normal. They just went
places, sat down, and enjoyed a drink and getting out of the house. Now you get treated
like a sex offender if you're not texting or watching something on a phone in public.
Like people can't trust you, you're an alien unless they know you are physically connected
to the electronic world through your cellular umbilical. Or homeless. Because one person
actually left a quarter on my table as he passed by. What the hell have phones turned
our world into? Although hey, free quarter.
Day 7: Alright, I admit it; I'm an over privileged First Worlder that needs his gadgets to enjoy
life. A week without a phone has been terrible, and a lot more difficult- and boring- than
I thought. It's weird to have to ask to use people's phones at businesses to make calls,
people literally look at you like you're robbing them or like you're the weirdest person in
the world. Yet just years ago this was a thing everybody did all the time. You'd walk into
a shop and say, “Hey can I use your phone to make a call?” and they'd be like, “Sure,
no problem.” And that was it. Now you do that today and people's faces look like they
think you're going to molest them.
So here's the thing, I've been through crap in my life, I've been deployed to some really
tough places, I know I can handle life without a phone no problem. I even enjoy camping and
getting away from everything a few times a year. But just because I'm capable of doing
that, doesn't mean that I don't want to enjoy maximum convenience and comfort when I can
have it. That's the thing that pisses me off about people bemoaning us 'first worlders'
and our technology- we could easily live without it, but there's nothing wrong with enjoying
it if you do have it. One of my absolute pet peeves is when people post stupid memes on
facebook saying how everybody is too busy staring into their phones to talk in public
anymore. That is 100% BS, because if you look at photos from the past of people riding trains
or being in public, you see everyone is reading a newspaper, sleeping, or just ignoring each
other. People love to pretend like phones have somehow disconnected us from each other,
as if in the past our every day lives were filled with passionate public discourses and
our crowded subways were modern Greek forums where everyday commuters discussed the finer
points of art and philosophy with complete strangers.
Nonsense. We tried to avoid talking to each other just as hard as we do today, because
people are terrible. It's just easier to do it now, and more enjoyable. Besides, everyone
busy messing with their phone instead of talking to random strangers is actually engaging with
people from all around the world over the internet, or speaking with their best friends
via text messages. So if anything we have become even more engaged in social situations
where we have historically always ignored the crap out of everybody, just not with people
around us. Which again, we always ignored as hard as we could.
Anyways, life without a cell phone is boring and full of drudgery. It's also very unproductive,
there was a ton of work I didn't do because I didn't have my phone on me during the million
lost minutes spent waiting places with nothing to do. I didn't find any spiritual enlightenment
in the silence, no life-affirming truth about the nature of humanity or any other feel-good
crap- I only found boredom.
So once you’re back to using your phone like a normal, regularly functioning human
being, why don’t you do something fun? Like build a website using Wix! You can build an
incredible site in no time by using one of their hundreds of fully customizable templates,
or bring your own vision to life with their full suite of robust design tools. And with
24/7 tech support for their subscription services and an extensive knowledge base, you can be
sure that your site will look great on any device, including that phone that you’re
now allowed to use. Try out Wix today by visiting the link in the description or going to wix.com/go/infographics2019.
Think you could last a week without your phone? How about longer? Also, check out our other
video, I didn’t wear underwear for a month! Thanks for watching and we’ll see you next
time!