Dumbphone owners have lost their minds

My friend Laila He is the cruelest person I know.

She refuses to kill insects and mice. She once made me try homemade wine (disastrous). A few years ago, she left her food justice nonprofit job to live in a tent, and then went to grad school and moved into the attic, where her roommates were squirrels. Despite her will, I owned an iPhone for a while. She had no choice: the university director explicitly told her that she could not perform her student duties without a choice. Two-factor authentication and all that.

But Laila Laila, so after graduation, she gifted herself a stupid phone. And boy was that phone stupid. Designed for those weaning themselves off the real thing, it’s connected to Wi-Fi but not the Internet, and it certainly doesn’t accommodate apps. Laila now travels around the world without a smartphone. “I think the main reason I got rid of it was because I felt like my mind was being consumed,” she told me recently.

Most of my classmates in their twenties want to be as stupid as Layla. I am aware of and empathize with this impulse: I waste hours a day, and lose hours of sleep, due to the tyranny of fascia. I’m trapped in a shame spiral because I’ve spent so much of my precious life watching videos of complete strangers until my eyes hurt and my head hurts. Ideologically, I like the sound of withholding personal data from companies, and not succumbing to ads every time I open my home screen.

But I didn’t leave, and the reason is simple: I’m terrified! Getting rid of my smartphone would be completely overwhelming. That would greatly reduce my overall efficiency. It’s so embarrassing, it makes me feel like a giant baby, but I’m pretty sure my smartphone is part of me. I mean that literally: the panic I feel when I lose sight of it is a visceral, existential feeling, as if parts of my physical body are missing.

This idea is neither crazy nor original. In 1998, Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduced the “extended mind hypothesis”, the idea that external tools can extend the biological brain, in a non-physical way. Want to check the Notes app for your grocery list? Do you use Google Maps to get to a friend’s house? It’s not just your phone at work, it’s not just your biological brain, it’s a single cognitive system made up of both. Since I was 14, when I got my first iPhone, my mind has welcomed Apple’s increasingly powerful operating systems and, over the years, I’ve integrated with them. My phone and I are now completely intertwined.

But is untangling a worthwhile endeavor? Is this possible, as smartphone users believe?

In 1985, The late psychologist Daniel Wegener published a theory about intimate human relationships called transactive memory. He argued that long-term couples store information in each other and that their collective group functions as a shared memory card, a single system for acquiring, retaining, and using knowledge that is greater than the sum of its individual organ systems. This applies strangely—perhaps insultingly—to my relationship with my iPhone.

At the end of my senior year of high school, I went to the Apple Store to replace my worn-out device with a new and improved one. In classic irresponsible teenage fashion, I hadn’t backed up my data from recent months, so my photos from that school year disappeared. It turns out that my memories of that time disappeared with it — a road trip through the South, or a dramatic breakup with a friend. I knew, intellectually, that these things had happened. But I had no real feeling for them, and no specific images to jog my memory.