I didn't even make it a week

The moment I inserted the physical SIM card into the Light Phone at the T-Mobile store, I felt like Gob Bluth.

I legitimately started having a panic attack. Am I making a huge mistake?

As we were walking out of the store, my son says, “Dad, can we listen to the Bubble Guppies soundtrack on the ride home?”

Of course, I didn’t download the Bubble Guppies soundtrack to my Light Phone, so in an effort to spare some tears during the car ride back, I turned on the Light Phone’s hotspot and connected it to my iPhone.

I couldn’t even make it out of the mall before retreating to the comfort of my iPhone.

But I soldiered on. After downloading the soundtrack through Apple Music, I turned off the hotspot and kept it off the rest of the day.

That night, my daughter had a soccer game. She’s been playing since kindergarten, and up until this season, games consisted of gigantic clumps of children winding up and taking massive shots at each other’s shins. Entertaining, for sure, but not exactly soccer.

This season, on the other hand, feels like a light bulb has illuminated; all of the girls seem to understand the game better and are eager to improve.

I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence, but I was completely captivated by her soccer game that day. In fact, when the whistle blew to indicate the end of the game, I was legitimately upset. I wanted them to play for another half hour.

The Light Phone itself is purposefully built to be used as little as possible, and only to accomplish specific tasks that enable you to participate in society.

With that being said, I would like to present to you:

An abbreviated list of additional problems I experienced with the Light Phone

Voicemail

You remember life before visual voicemail? Yeah, the days where you had to call yourself to listen to your messages?

That’s the experience on the Light Phone.

There’s an annoying icon that shows up in the top corner of the phone indicating that there’s a new voicemail for you. Even after switching the SIM card back to my iPhone, the icon is still there because I am too lazy to listen to hundreds of voicemails that visual voicemail had managed for years.

Music

I finally completed my iPod restoration project. My fifth generation iPod Video now boasts a massive 512GB of space, a battery that lasts multiple days, and uses the open source Rockbox alternative to the default iOS operating system.

But I’m still not ready to use it as my main music driver yet.

One significant problem is that the iPod uses USB 1.0, which has quite slow transfer speeds compared to a more modern USB 3.0 connection. Rockbox also requires your drive to be formatted with FAT32, a file system that Apple seems hell bent on not supporting properly.

Beyond the technical limitations, there’s also the issue of metadata. I’ve used Plex to manage my music collection for years and have spent literal days carefully adding metadata to the tracks.

It turns out that Plex stores all that metadata in its own database rather than embedded in the ID3 tags of the MP3s themselves. This means that all that data doesn’t move over to the iPod.

Lastly, there’s the issue of headphones. I have a pair of studio monitor headphones for recording and editing podcasts, but they’re not exactly “portable”. It’s hard to give up my wireless Powerbeats Pro headphones.

Directions

The Light Phone does have a directions app. The three times I tried using it, the app completely froze shortly after beginning the drive.

The processing power on the Light Phone 2 must not be strong enough to handle real time directions. Which is fine. There’s always printing off MapQuest directions, eh?

Digital Payments

I didn’t give up my Apple Watch during this experiment, and I’m glad I didn’t, because I use Apple Pay almost exclusively these days.

The Light Phone doesn’t have any sort of NFC-powered payment solution, so if you are someone who uses chips instead of your card at checkout places, you would be in trouble.

Also, I didn’t personally experience this, but I know a few folks who have also shed the iPhone who came back because they had an app which their landlord or parking ramp required them to use.

I could go into a whole commentary of how disappointing it is that the digital revolution is locking people out of participating in society by requiring them to use expensive smartphones to access services, but I’m already close to 2,000 words here and I want to save my good soap box rants for later.

Messaging

There is a lot of talk around Apple and iMessage and the “blue bubble” lock-in effect, but one area I think anti-trust regulators should investigate more is just how difficult it is to remove your cell phone from the iMessage infrastructure.

My wife couldn’t figure out how to message me for the entire week because my contact in her phone is tied to iMessage rather than my cell phone.

When iMessage first came out, Apple pulled a really neat technical trick to effectively mask away the SMS protocol that we all used to use to “text” each other.

But that trick seems to be a one-way street. Most of my contacts that use Apple devices reported being unable to get in touch with me this past week, with Messages saying “message failed” rather than reverting to sending the message again over SMS.

In addition to message delivery issues, the keyboard on the Light Phone suuuuucccccckkkkkks. I wish I could just use T9 again, like we did in the mid 2000s. You remember having to press the “2” key three times to make the letter C? Yeah, I’d rather go back to that because at least that was responsive to my taps.

Why this experiment wasn’t a failure

Those who read my blog know that I’m a pretty big Cal Newport fan. His book “Digital Minimalism” calls for a month-long period of reflection called “Digital Declutter.”

The key steps in the 30 day period are to:

1. Abstain from using any apps, websites, or digital tools that aren’t crucial for work or daily activities.

2. Use the time freed up to engage in activities that you find fulfilling.

3. After the fast, thoughtfully reintroduce only those digital tools that serve a specific, positive purpose in your life (and set boundaries to maintain control over their use).

After only a few days of it being less convenient to reach for a game of Dr. Mario or LinkedIn, I was amazed at how much better I felt.

It felt like I had my head above the clouds for the first time in ages.

I read through three books in the past couple weeks. I started playing the guitar more often. I got a new computer that absolutely screams with speed (which I’ve been putting to good use with learning how to run large language models on my machine rather than off of a website).

Beyond that, though, I was present. Present in a way that I don’t think I’ve been since before I got an iPhone.

During the week on my Light Phone, my kids both had summer camp at the science museum… except I scheduled one of them for a morning class and one for an afternoon class. This meant I got to make the 60 minute round trip drive twice a day. 🤦‍♂️

On the last day, I decided instead to bring both of them in the morning, and while one was in camp, I took the other one through exhibits.

We had a blast! My son spent two hours racing in a simulator against different professional athletes. My daughter and I learned about the lifecycle of stars on an IMAX screen. And unlike trips in the past, I wasn’t spending my time refreshing my inbox every ten minutes in search of a dopamine hit.

Another example of being present: last weekend, which was two weeks after my experiment started, my wife and I had a date night where we went downtown to see Green Day at Target Field. Besides an obligatory selfie and a couple shots of the stage from our seat, as well as scheduling the Lyft ride home, I didn’t pull my phone out of my pocket once.

And to me, that’s success.

For the first few years that my wife and I handed out candy on Halloween, I would easily consume 10% of the bag during the evening. The next day, I’d always feel like crap. My teeth would be sticky, my stomach churning.

As I’m getting older, my tastes are changing. I still love chocolate, don’t get me wrong. I’ll pound a Krakel or a Mr. Goodbar when my kids snag some while trick or treating. But the joy I get out of mindlessly pounding pounds of mediocre chocolate is gone.

Growing up means realizing that you get to make choices. Just because it’s Halloween doesn’t mean I have to eat twenty pieces of candy.

Just because I have access to endless amounts of entertainment doesn’t mean I have to consume it.

The other day, I was sitting in a McDonald’s play place with my kids and my nephew and niece. Every other parent there was sitting on their phone, no doubt trying to enjoy a short reprieve from their responsibilities as a parent.

The urge to pull out my phone was strong, believe me. But instead, I just watched all the kids play together. I felt content, proud of my choice, curious about what’s happening in the world around me.

I get the same feeling when I opt for an apple at night instead of a fistful of boring candy that my kids scooped up from a parade.

And I think the desire to chase that feeling is the biggest gift I received from my experiment with the Light Phone.

Thanks again for following along with Monkey Wrench! I’m still in search of a regular posting routine and format and whatnot, so please send feedback about what you thought about this newsletter. There’s only 86 of you subscribed at the moment (I lost one reader from my last issue 😂), and your thoughts really mean the world to me.

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Finally, a quick update on my job hunt: I’ve been doing independent consulting for the past few months, and it’s going pretty well, but I’m still looking for a full time gig to settle into for a while. If you know of any cool-sounding, funded startups that could use a nerd like me, send them my way. I’ll keep looking, too.

Until next time, take care, y’all!