Three hours without my phone

My phone is currently being repaired, and so I don’t have a mobile device for around three and a half hours. That’s a scary amount of time without headphones and without any communication with the rest of the world. Leaving the Apple store, I already felt the urge to grab my phone from my pocket, like a ghost was there, reaching for it even though the phone was with another person. Walking around downtown, I feel the urge to take pictures, but I cannot because I lack the means. 

If you think about it, it is sort of exhilarating to live briefly as if we were in the 90s. I’m already super productive with my Freewrite, having written two to three long journal posts since I turned my phone off. It’s funny how much of our time nowadays is preoccupied by these seemingly empty ways of interacting with other human beings. We can’t help but compare ourselves to each other in this curated social media format, and it’s rare for anyone not to feel a slight cut every time we see something there that we think we’re missing out on. 

There’s been a recent large-scale study at Stanford that examined the effects of turning off social media for a month, and 10,000 participants showed noticeable improvements in mental health. I wonder if I should get off the grid for a bit. I think it will surely move me toward a more productive way of living. At the end of the day, choosing to shun modern convenience from one’s life is really an exercise in discipline more than anything else.