My friend Lilah is the crunchiest person I know. She won’t kill bugs or rats, and once insisted I try her homemade wine (which was a disaster). A few years back, she left her job at a food justice nonprofit to live in a yurt. Then she went to graduate school and ended up living in an attic where squirrels were her roommates. At one point, she owned an iPhone, but only because a university admin told her she couldn’t fulfill her student duties without one due to two-factor authentication. True to her nature, once she graduated, she treated herself to a dumbphone. And it really was dumb—designed for people trying to cut back on smartphones, it connected to Wi-Fi but had no internet and didn’t support apps. Now, she moves through life without a smartphone. “I think my main reason for getting rid of it was that I felt like my brain was being consumed,” she told me recently.
A lot of my friends in their twenties want to go dumb like Lilah. I totally get it; I waste hours each day scrolling mindlessly and lose sleep over the endless cycle. I feel ashamed for spending my valuable time watching videos of people I don’t know until my eyes sting and my head pounds. Plus, I’m all for keeping my personal data away from big corporations and resisting ads every time I unlock my home screen.
But I can’t make the leap to going dumb myself, and the reason is straightforward: It scares me! Letting go of my smartphone would leave me feeling completely lost. I’d feel so much less capable. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I truly view my smartphone as a part of me. When I misplace it, the panic that sets in is raw and existential—as if a part of my body is missing.
This isn’t a wild thought; it’s well-established. Back in 1998, Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduced the “extended mind hypothesis,” proposing that external tools can become extensions of our biological brain in meaningful ways. Checking your Notes app for a grocery list? Using Google Maps to find a friend’s house? That’s not just your phone at work; it’s also part of your brain, creating a single cognitive system.
Since getting my first iPhone at 14, my mind has woven itself together with Apple’s increasingly powerful systems. My phone and I are tightly linked.
But is it even valuable to break that link? Is it, as dumbphone users seem to think, even feasible? Back in 1985, psychologist Daniel Wegner published a theory on intimate relationships called transactive memory. He claimed that long-term couples store information in each other, essentially creating a shared “memory bank” that functions as a joint knowledge system greater than its individual parts. This theory is eerily—maybe embarrassingly—applicable to my bond with my iPhone.
At the end of my senior year in high school, I went to the Apple store to upgrade my old device. In typical teenage fashion, I hadn’t backed up my data, leading to the loss of my photos from that school year. Suddenly, my memories from that time—the road trip through the South, a friend’s dramatic breakup—seemed to vanish. I knew these events happened, but without the images to trigger my memories, I felt a profound disconnect from them.
