Can you imagine two days with no mobile phone? Sounds hard, right? Well imagine two whole weeks with no mobile phone. You could call this a social experiment, but reality is my HTC One M8
Can you imagine two days with no mobile phone? Sounds hard, right? Well imagine two whole weeks with no mobile phone. You could call this a social experiment, but reality is my HTC One M8 phone broke back in the first week of January and ever since I have had no mobile phone.
I won’t lie, the first few days were tough, as someone who is pretty attached to their mobile all day, it was tough to get out of the habit of reaching for it, to check emails, ring someone, find your calender and even look at the time. I was thoroughly miserable the first few days, I felt like I was missing something. My mobile really is my comfort blanket to be honest, if I am in an uncomfortable situation I can use to busy myself or hide. I see it as my lifeline to my babies, my eldest obviously has a mobile phone and can call me if things get too tough for him, the childminders use it to ring me if my baby is poorly, the same with the kids school. I gave everyone the landline, but how restrictive is a landline when you have been used to a mobile phone for so long.
So here I am two weeks on with no mobile phone, I am sat in Costa and I feel a certain sense of calm. I cannot check the time, I cannot check my emails, I cannot be contacted by anyone. I have a newspaper for company, and I am not even missing being distracted by my phone.
Now I always see articles about how putting down your mobile phone is good, how you miss the world passing you by and that you are missing out on precious time with your children. Have I spent more time with my children? No is the simple answer, I always spent quality time with my children. I have missed being able to grab photos of the kids with my mobile though, and the fact that my mobile has been wiped of all my photos in repair, so I have lost thousands of pictures which feels awful. But I have embraced my phoneless time by using my new DSLR to get some cracking shots. Swings and roundabouts!
I thought I would struggle with no mobile phone for a few days, and I did. But then the struggle disappeared, and a new sense of daily life was restored, just without a mobile phone in it. I can categorically say that by going from mobile addicted to no mobile phone is entirely possible, it’s not great but it is possible.
I once spent six months without a phone in Argentina. Most of all, I loved the fact people could not reach me all the time. When I eventually got myself a phone and people started calling me, I felt like my privacy was constantly being violated. I got used to it within days. It was a good experiment though.