obligatory one month without social media on my phone substack essay (contrarian edition)

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obligatory one month without social media on my phone substack essay (contrarian edition)<br>it didn't change my life

kate wagner<br>Jul 27, 2026

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OBLIGATORY TWEE PHONE Illustration by Rizki Kurniawan on Unsplash<br>Over one, possibly two months ago today (I lowkey lost track of time) I deleted ‘the socials’ off my phone. (Disclosure: I kept Instagram only because my friends insist on using it as a messaging app.) From that unmarked day forward, my social media use became explicitly fixed in time (brutal and uncompromising filters) and space (on my desktop computer in my house.) I did this without making a grand announcement (e.g. “friends, life’s been rough lately and I’m gonna need to be away from the internet for a while, so don’t worry about me…”) or without hand-wringing about whether I should identify as an addict (sorry but I don’t think it’s the same.)<br>I also failed to prepare some preface on here about how we’re all addicted to dopamine and need to take back our attention from big tech or whatever. I honestly hesitated even writing this essay in the first place because alongside "24 year olds applying Susan Sontag to their situationships,” and “disgruntled writers disappointed with their careers railing against MFA degrees,” the “I gave up my phone and became a genius” essay is a load bearing pillar of the substack newsletter as, like, a genre of writing. To name just one example, I’m sure you’ve all encountered that one essay on here that somehow never stops circulating where the author bloviates in the second person for thousands of words about how we are nothing but desperate little bug men whose vital life forces are being sucked out of us minute by minute by The Screen.<br>Then there’s the whole phenomenon of being an ‘anti-phone influencer,’ which of course requires being more on your phone than the majority of people. But it’s not just Substack. Seemingly every month, even The New Yorker, with its “Infinite Scroll” column publishes some lame, maudlin take or another about how phones are bad for art or literature or for ourselves and about why it’s imperative and life-changing to get off them. It’s not that the basic ideas presented there are incorrect — far from it — it’s that every single one of these essays is exactly the same.<br>I’m going to boldly go on the record here and say that I think the majority of this content has become so grossly exaggerated and emotionally overwrought that it may even actively deter people from logging off. (This does not mean I’m going to say that being on your phone is good, actually. Being on your phone is, in fact, bad for your brain and for society.) It also doesn’t take a phone-free genius to realize that such histrionics exist for a reason: many analog warriors have something to sell, like a newsletter or a book1 or a dumb phone that’s as expensive as a smart phone, as though most of this is the device’s problem rather than the user’s (once you delete the social media apps themselves, the iPhone is not that enticing), or an online webinar teaching you how to be present in the world as though you were born with the right sensory parts but are unfortunately too stupid to use them.<br>Meanwhile, the purported benefits of a phone-free life — while there are many — are almost comically exaggerated. Quit your phone and you will read the complete works of Dostoyevsky in a month! Quit your phone and “be in the world” and you will meet the love of your life! Quit your phone and become a humble skilled craftsman in a cozy woodland cottage and you will resist capitalism! Quit your phone and change the nature of time and the universe!<br>What amazes me so much about these notions is how similar they are to discourses from the beginning of modernity, when our perception of time, disconnected from the rhythms of the world, became abstracted, seen as a meaningless container shuttling from moment to moment leaving it up to us to give that moment meaning. Walter Benjamin called this fixture of modern life homogenous, empty time and believed it to be a real sickness inhibitive of social progress, though these days it’s nothing special. Updated challenges to this phenomenology of time are always welcome, however the phone essay is not that girl. The phone essay explains to us: Today we find ourselves stuck in the cafeteria of ultramechanized capitalism where the sushi of time goes round and round on the carousel. How tragic that we don’t pick a plate and eat it because we’re on our damn phones!!!! Or something!<br>The other common way of thinking about phone time is couched in the language of time productivity. (AKA a midwit version of EP Thompson time, if we’re keeping track of our Marxists.) By this account, we are wasting our time, time that could be literally productive in the Marxian sense of selling our labor power or in the Marxian sense of...