July 9, 2026, 7:01 a.m. ET
Two years, three months and seven days.
I’m 24, and that’s the amount of my life I’ve already spent on my phone, according to a screen time calculator.
The statistic is sobering.
I’m a youth mental health reporter at USA TODAY, and I’ve spent the last year and a half tracking the low-tech movement. I’ve written about college students embracing flip phones and pay phones, parents turning back the clock to 1995 with retro landlines and influencers who post attention span rehab videos. I’ve talked about screen time with everyone from Jonathan Haidt to Tom Brady.
And yet, as I spent hours asking experts for advice about how to curb tech addictions, my own dependence became more apparent.
I tried screen restriction apps that sent check-in nudges after I hit my daily limit and made me complete a 30-second word scramble before allowing me back on Instagram. One rewarded me with raindrops to water a virtual plant for staying off my phone. I even used a Brick device that physically blocked apps off my phone.
But I still felt dependent. On my worst days, my screen time was upwards of eight hours. TLDR: I couldn’t app-store my way out of this.
Two years ago, I didn’t even know what a “dumb phone” was. But after reporting on Gen Z’s analog revival, I was curious what it would be like to navigate relationships, find my way around and experience my day-to-day life in New York City, all without a smartphone.
So, in a move that was as much an act of journalistic curiosity as it was a personal intervention, I decided to give up my iPhone 17. On June 1, I willingly surrendered the most expensive thing I own and buried it in a deskside drawer, not to be seen again for a month — mostly.
Gen Z’s analog revolution
When I first unboxed the device I’d be spending the next month with, I immediately noticed just how small it was. The Light Phone II is just larger than a hotel key card and weighs about as much as a Hershey’s chocolate bar.
I inserted a SIM card into my new phone and manually uploaded my contacts. Then, using the Light Phone dashboard, I selected the only tools I’d use for the next month: calls, texts, calendar, notes, music, calculator, alarm, timer and directions, though there were also options for podcasts and a mobile hotspot. I opted to create a new number specifically for my dumb phone.
When I tried sending a text message on the phone’s small e-ink screen, “I’d like to go to breakfast” turned into a string of unintelligible phrases. The device’s best attempt at spell check was no match for my butter fingers.
“Oh brother, who invited the Light Phone?” one friend remarked when my arrival to the group chat instantly turned everyone’s texts green. He was joking, but I soon learned that my new piece of technology would require those around me to accommodate my lifestyle.
The Light Phone falls under the umbrella category of dumb phones, which refer to devices without “smart” features — primarily just call and text without nonessential apps.
In the first days of using my phone, settling on a date for a group outing to a play became an exercise in patience. I couldn’t view other texts as I typed mine, and by the time I painstakingly responded with my availability, sans spelling issues, the conversation had already moved on.
During this month, I got lost many, many times. At one point, I took the wrong subway line and ended up at the wrong station entirely.
I missed a last-minute reservation at restaurant hot spot 4 Charles Prime Rib because the text went to my smartphone. And when the Knicks won the NBA finals, I couldn’t record the moment.
So, I started typing slower, and the voice-to-text function (which was surprisingly accurate) became my saving grace. I allowed extra time for the subway, and wrote my directions down by hand as back up. I asked my friends to call me to relay our plans instead of texting me. And I learned to appreciate that my limited technology forced me to be in the moment.
The longer I lived without a smartphone, the more I realized that the inconveniences were part of the process. Things went slower, but that was the point, and it’s the reason dumb phones are having a moment.
The conversation about young people’s screen addiction has become more mainstream in a post-COVID world, brought on by books like Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation,” school-wide phone bans and the U.S. surgeon general’s office warnings about loneliness and screen time.
Simultaneously, Gen Z is increasingly nostalgic. They’re struggling with decreasing social infrastructures and are disillusioned with the state of their finances, a growing political divide and a job market overshadowed by AI.
Influencers in their 20s and 30s are leading revivals of hobbies like needlepoint, painting and woodwork on TikTok. Walkman sales are up 111% and instant film cameras 157%, according to Afterpay’s Spring/Summer 2026 Trends Report. Eventbrite in June declared it “The Offline Summer,” finding that local gatherings like picnics, block parties and potlucks are experiencing a spike, led by Gen Z.
Traffic on the website Dumbphone Finder jumped 12-fold from 2022 to 2025, according to the site’s founder, Jose Briones. When Briones started the site in 2019, it listed 45 phones. Today, there are 91. The r/dumbphones subreddit, where Briones is also a moderator, has 184,000 weekly visitors.
Gen Z’s presence in this movement is perhaps best illustrated by dumb.co. The flip phone’s average user is 24, according to Afreka Ebanks, director of brand and communications. The startup grew out of Month Offline, a D.C.-based cohort program where participants try out a dumb phone for 30 days. The program has a waitlist for participants, and the company’s flip phones were on backorder when I looked into getting one earlier this year.
“When I think about Gen Z, I think about a generation of people who are the first to grow up in a world with smartphones,” says Ebanks. “I think the core of it is, we crave real connection to each other.”
As much as I wanted to escape my smartphone, I couldn’t
I went all of 30 minutes before reaching into the drawer where my iPhone was stored.
In order to log into my work email, I needed two-factor authentication with a smart device — or to buy a physical passkey.
This experience repeated throughout the month. I needed to bring my smartphone to show an usher my Broadway show ticket, and again at a restaurant where I was directed to view the menu, order and pay my tab all by QR code.
Here is a non-comprehensive list of tools I realized I needed to purchase or acquire: Security key. Camera. Printer. Photo album. Credit card. Courage to explain to the server I can’t dine at a restaurant without a physical menu. Meteorologist. Bus map. Tape recorder. A crystal ball to anticipate subway delays.
And while the Light Phone sufficed for personal use, it struggled to keep up with my job. The speaker volume wasn’t loud enough to set the phone down during interviews, there was no voice recorder and the texting interface was unrealistic for quickly communicating with sources.
The Light Phone III, which dropped in March, addressed many of these concerns. It has a camera and bigger typeface display, among other advancements. (I opted for the Light Phone II for this experiment because the Light Phone III was on backorder and more than twice as expensive at $699.)
Even as I adjusted to the newfound joys of being unplugged, I was disillusioned with how much my dumb phone still required a smartphone as backup. And even as my phone-based screen time decreased, my computer time skyrocketed.
At the midway point of my experiment, I decided I needed an attitude adjustment. I had been treating the project like a restrictive diet, locking away the junk food instead of changing my relationship with it.
So in the second half of the month, I leaned into the digital equivalent of intuitive eating.
I treated mistakes and discomfort as an inevitable part of the process and kept a media-diet journal to keep track of my thoughts. Practicing mindfulness helped me figure out why I was often scrolling on my phone in the first place.
Sometimes, this even meant intentionally choosing to go online. Following the Knicks’ playoff run on social media brought me joy and made me feel connected to the city around me.
What using a dumb phone taught me about my relationship with technology
On day 24 of my experiment, I found myself sitting on the floor of a house in Fort Greene during a phone-free night, reading an analog clock for the first time in years.
The host, Dan Fox, who works in marketing for Light Phone, banged a drum, signaling it was time to put away our phones. We dropped them into a metal colander, not to be seen again until the end of the evening.
I had been feeling anxious, but here, those feelings dissipated. Not everyone there had a dumb phone (in fact, most didn’t), but they were all committed to two hours of phone-free time. For those two hours, I journaled, crafted and read, without the influence of the outside world, and for the first time in my experiment, I didn’t feel like I missed out on anything else.
In the weeks leading up to and during my experiment, I integrated myself into the low-tech community. I grooved at a phone-free party in East Williamsburg, practiced mindfulness during a rainy Prospect Park sidewalk study with the Strother School of Radical Attention and discussed the philosophical meaning of space and time during the week-long Summer of Ludd festival in Tompkins Square Park.
The hardest part of going without my smartphone wasn’t curbing my own addiction, it was getting other people to adjust to my alternative lifestyle.
It’s only natural that people who are trying to break up with technology gravitate toward each other. These spaces also gave me room to reflect on my progress.
At the start of the experiment, my attention felt constantly fragmented. When I was with people, I was physically there, but my mind was always bracing for the next notification, and I would often forget my train of thought mid-sentence.
TikTok made me happy in the moment, but the next morning, I couldn’t recall one video I had watched. When I traded short-form content for episodes of “How I Met Your Mother” and Threads for long-form magazine articles, I noticed that my reading comprehension improved, and with it, my days started and ended with a sense of calm.
There were some things I truly missed about my smartphone, like the ability to take and send photos, and the way group chats allowed me to stay in touch with wider circles of friends.
The takeaway from my experiment wasn’t that everyone should get a dumb phone, it was that we might all benefit from a bit more balance when it comes to technology.
At the end of a July 1 phone-free night in Fort Greene, some participants groan as Fox hands back our devices.
I’ve attended the analog night a handful of times, and in the past, the tranquility would break the moment I saw missed notifications flood my screen. Earlier that morning, my Light Phone’s cellular plan had run out, so I’d brought my smartphone instead.
But this time, when Fox tells us to turn our phones back on, I leave mine powered off in my bag.
So for a little while longer, I’m totally unplugged. And I savor the subway ride home.
Rachel Hale’s role covering Youth Mental Health at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
Reach her at rhale@usatoday.com and@rachelleighhale on X.
