What I Learned During a Week in Taiwan without My Phone

Not just a Phone...

The other day, my smartphone usb/charger port decided that instead of letting electrons go in, it was going to let smoke come out. The next day, the company came and picked it up. A couple days later, I had to make a trip down to another city for my organization's annual Thanksgiving retreat. It was a week before I had a working phone again.

Now if, perchance, you belong to a generation older than the millennials, you may be thinking something like "Whatever, a week is not very long," or "we used to live our whole lives without cellphones," or even "you kids these days are so fragile; take away your fancy phones and you have a nervous breakdown." (if you said that last one, I hope you wear tweed and smoke a pipe, they make statements like that not only acceptable but cool)

Perhaps all of those are right. But first let me rephrase the blog title:


What I learned during a week without my...
Alarm clock,
Wristwatch,
Notebook/scratchpad,
Bible*,
Nearly all the books I own in Taiwan,
E-reader,
Internet (including personal email, work email, search engines, news, online encyclopedias, etc),
Text messaging,
Digital camera,
Video camera,
Chinese dictionary,
Magic Chinese dictionary that knew the characters when I sketched them with my finger,
Magic Chinese dictionary that knew the characters after it looked at them through my camera,
Calendar,
Planner,
Reminder notes,
Telephone,
Video phone,
Local calling,
International calling (and it was Thanksgiving)*,
Address book,
Contact list,
Maps,
GPS/navigator,
Train and bus schedules,
3G internet,
Music,
Music library,
Music player,
Portable speaker,
TV,
Movie library,
Flashlight,
Weather forecasting,
Radio,
Emergency Alert System,
Digital storage device,
Various... (Games, Language Learning Tools, Sound recording, Photo and Video editing tools, handwarmer, etc.)

(*- In case you're worried, yes I do have other Bibles, not just the one on my phone. Also, I borrowed someone's phone to skype-call my family on Thanksgiving. And, we had a great time at Thanksgiving retreat. Wish I could post some pictures, but, no phone, so...)

That list should be an eye-opener. It was for me. Now, I had noticed that as each phone over the past decade got smarter, it was more capable and could handle more different things in my life. What I hadn't especially done is considered things from the opposite point of view: just how many eggs I was putting into one basket, technologically speaking? I consider that the first thing I learned. Here's the list of things:

What I learned during my week in Taiwan without a phone:

1. I am not redundant enough yet

Living in a Chinese-speaking country is fascinating in various ways, and I'm very grateful for the chance to have already learned enough Chinese to get around. At the same time, it adds a couple layers of difficulty to everything. I can't simply breeze into a store and query them about their products, for example. I either have to do a lot of online research first (a good idea anyway), or think about my vocabulary, what I know how to ask about, and maybe memorize some new words in order to have that discussion. That adds a layer of unwillingness to go shopping even beyond my male dislike of shopping to begin with. I want to know what I'm getting, go in and buy it, and leave. In Taiwan, something that simple can range from equally simple to rather complicated, depending on what I'm trying to buy. (and I'm not even talking about cars or furniture) This means that if I had something that met a need, like google maps on my phone, I didn't go looking for a place that sold maps to buy lots of paper maps too.

Redundancy got a bad rap in the 20th century. We were all about efficiency, not wasting anything, maximum productivity, etc. But efficiency has a downside: it's fragile. It doesn't leave room for error. Why should I have both a wristwatch and a phone that tells the time? Because it's important enough in modern daily life to know what time it is (to the minute, in this city with subways and trains where I don't have a car) that I need a backup in case one isn't working. It's true that I had saved money by not buying a wristwatch when I had always had a phone with the time on me, but in the end I found that the watch would be a good investment, like buying candles in case of a power outage. If the power never goes out, you can have a nice candlelit dinner anyway.

So now, smartphone restored, I have a much better sense of which few sensible purchases could make my Taiwan life much less prone to paralysis should my phone feel inclined to blow smoke rings again. (I will be careful not to download The Hobbit)

2. My smartphone is the cause of a lot of stress in my life, but I can reduce that

By about day 3, when the twitching had subsided (just kidding... mostly), I suddenly felt a wave of calm descend. The ability to communicate with anyone around the world more or less instantly is nigh-miraculous, and we don't marvel at it enough, I think, but it also means that I'm basically on call 24 hours a day. The knowledge that no one could reach me, even if I wanted them to, caused something inside my brain, some kind of unconscious awareness or connectedness, which apparently had been getting pretty exhausted, to utter a grateful sigh and take a nap. I slept really well those nights, and the effect has most continued even with the smartphone back now.

Related back to the first point, I think I can partially remedy my recurrent insomnia by taking steps to make my bedroom entirely smartphone free (it was already laptop free): keeping a physical Bible and notebook in there so I don't need my phone for either purpose, using my bluetooth speaker instead of the phone and headphones for music, etc.

3. Speaking of music - I listen to too much music

I don't think my generation, having never lacked portable music literally from birth (the Sony Walkman came out in 1980, usually the earliest chosen starting birth year for the millennial cohort), is even cognizant of this possibility. But when my brain is full of music, it goes into a certain mode (of many wonderful different flavors, depending on the genre and even certain specific songs), which overlays itself on the rest of my perceptions. It would be like spending most of every day with various kinds of strong-flavored gum in your mouth.

Being musically-oriented and very abstractly-minded, I take advantage of this, choosing music that fits the day and weather and ambiance of wherever I happen to be. Cold night and mostly empty streets? I have albums saved for that. Downtown and full of energy? I have them for that. Warm sunshine on a country train platform? That too. But this portable music enabled "reality enhancement" means I don't observe what is going on around me in the same way; it's like putting an instagram filter on it, and the popularity of the nofilter hashtag demonstrates that people still value unaltered beauty.

I also tend not to think the same kind of thoughts, and some thoughts only come with the comparative silence of only background noise (usually not at all silent in a Taiwanese city). There is also a kind of mental fortitude which comes with not relying on music to make boring waits and tasks go faster. It's not fun, it may not even be necessary, but it seems worth cultivating.

4. Reliance on technology diminishes life by removing uncertainty

That might sound weird. What I mean is, for example, back before you could -know- where someone was, you had to trust they were going to be there. Sometimes they weren't, then it was problematic, and cellphones are great for resolving that kind of situation. But go back just a couple decades, let alone previous centuries, and it was quite common to make an agreement to meet someone somewhere, then not be able to contact them until that time.

I did that in a small way this past weekend, taking the train down to Taichung and then up to the little station near our Thanksgiving retreat location. "Ah, you made it," someone said when I arrived, and I realized I hadn't heard that phrase in a long time, because now that everyone has cellphones there usually isn't any question about whether we will make it or not, and if there's a question one has half a dozen different channels of communication with which to ask. (And "I don't know, he's not answering his phone," is not the same situation as not having any phone to answer.)

So imagine telling someone "I'll see you next year when I'm back in these parts" and then having no way, short of perhaps mailing a physical letter, of knowing where that person was in the mean time. It was a different world, one in which two lovers trying to reunite could miss each other by 30 seconds and maybe thus never see each other again. Which makes cellphones seem like a really great thing. Except now, they'd just text... "im here, dont see u? :(" "lol me 2 in the bathroom wait a min"
For every gain, there is a loss...

5. I don't know how to not do anything

I was never very good at this, actually. My brain has always wanted something to engage it. Smartphones came along and did so very thoroughly, and with much freedom, so that I can turn a 10min subway ride into a mini language-learning session, or another chapter of the latest novel I'm working through.

Not having my phone for a week meant standing or sitting there, staring into space, or looking awkwardly at all the other people staring at their phones. Phones are what you do when you're waiting, now, that's pretty clear. (at least in Taiwan, where a really high percentage of the population have mobile phones)

I should mention at this point, I do tire of those people who want to joyfully smack all the phones out of everyone's hands and get back to the supposed good old days when everyone riding mass transit or standing in line happily engaged in witty banter and were the models of cheerful and socially outgoing people, like those lard commercials from the 50's, not like the downward-staring-drones of today. I am informed, by sources I trust, that the past was not actually like this. People just read, or stared into space, or were bored. Sometimes they talked to each other. Lots and lots of them smoked to pass time, or read newspapers.
Shall I go back in time to smack the cigarettes and newspapers from their hands and encourage them to socialize?

Conclusion

In the end, I can't say whether a lot of these things are good or bad; they are how life is, now. Phones are everywhere. One thinks perhaps they will become smartwatches, but that will require some display innovation to let one practically read or surf the web or check email. Then they'll shrink out of sight and we'll have some new way of interacting with technology that doesn't involve staring at one small screen all the time but is even more mentally absorbing, and certain people and elements of society will warn us that this self-imposed isolation will be our doom, and long for the good old days when the tech was in the palm of our hands and could be sat aside, not inside our heads 24/7.

In the mean time, I don't think smartphones are evil. I'm not going on a smartphone fast; that would make my ministry impractical in the mean time (working with Taiwanese students without a smartphone is like cooking without anything that can stir), and this week of no phone suggests that actually in the end, it would be more inconvenient for everyone else than it would be relaxing for me.

That's not to say I won't be changing a few things, though. They're incredibly powerful tools, affect our lives in increasingly influential ways, both obvious and subtle, and from now on I will be a little more intentional in how I use, and refrain from using, mine. And that is the best advice I can give you as well.