As an organized and busy school student I made good use of my cell-phone. Since my phone was not under contract I was on T-Mobile’s $50 monthly “unlimited everything” plan. My phone wasn’t built for T-Mobile data and so I used very little of my Edge-speeds; however, I used well over a thousand minutes per month in talk and comfortably over 2000 texts per month. By no means am I using teenage-girl levels, but I felt good about maximizing my service for the price I was paying.
However, I’ve now discontinued my cell service completely.
I am off the network. There are several reasons for this. When we recently had a change in our home phone/internet setup and I was looking at options to stay in contact with my wife, we evaluated a lot of prices. The $50 I save without my phone will pay for the home phone and internet we decided upon, and this is useful. Additionally, as a student I constantly live in wi-fi service at school so can use a virtual solution (in this case, Google Voice) to continue texting and even place and receive calls. It’s no cell phone, but it offers a limited version of many of the same benefits. But neither of these are the real reason.
Have you ever noticed the cognitive toll that being “on the network” takes on you? There is a constant awareness, almost like a buzzing in my mind, that my phone is on and I could be notified of a call, voice mail, text message, or email at any moment. This is compounded by my constant semi-conscious asking of myself, “should I be calling someone right now? Should I expect to be interrupted in the next little while? Who should I text that joke/observation to?” Twitter, Google Plus/Facebook, and my ongoing conversations are constantly calling to me, and the result is a new, shallower definition of focus. As I’ve accounted for my time and taken stock of my daily accomplishments, the extent of this dissipation has been clear to me and I’ve wondered how much better my mind would work if I didn’t have it constantly multi-tasking. This is the real reason I’ve disconnected.
Very often the technology that we have created to help us work smarter has resulted in us becoming dependent, using it as a crutch. Our mental muscles atrophy as a result. It works like a self-defeating reflex, and seems to come with being human. The test, then, is to see if that tendency can be reversed. Someday I will definitely need to have a cell-phone again; but when that day comes, I’ll know exactly what I do and do not need. In the mean time, I’ll keep you posted with how it’s going.