The cost of analog living
Dumbphone: $40. Phone plan: $10. Digital minimalism: priceless?
Digital downgrading is not a luxury lifestyle choice. A new iPhone 16 costs at least £799; a Nokia 110, £19.99. You would have to tie yourself into some pretty tight discursive knots to decide the brick phone is bourgeois.
And yet.
A list of things I’ve purchased in my efforts to limit my screen time:
An ancient Nokia of questionable provenance, purchased from a phone-slash-vape shop. It didn’t work. £20.
A Nokia 2780, which did. $43.70.
US Mobile’s cheapest phone plan. $10 per month.
Lycamobile’s cheapest phone plan. £5 per month.
A Nokia 110, after losing my Nokia 2780. £19.99.
Sealing wax. £15.
Book of international stamps. (Fucking hell!) £80.
Fountain pen accessories. £21.50.
Moleskine notebook. £18.50.
Rhodia notebook. £15.
Muji notebook. £1.70.
Jesus-Christ Ne Deçoit Pas by Jess Sah Bi, via Bandcamp. $7.10.
The Basement Tapes on vinyl. £20.
Books, books, books! ~£53.
There are more analog objects I saw, wanted, and didn’t buy. The £129 we are rewind cassette player. The Freewrite Traveler, a £495 E Ink word processor. I wouldn’t kick a Light Phone out of bed. (The latest model is $699 on pre-order.)
Of the purchases and non-purchases on this list, only two were really necessary: one phone and one phone plan. Others were mistakes: the additional phones. Most were — okay, fine — luxuries. No one needs sealing wax.
My childhood was full of glass jars: filled with water, filled with wine, flaky with old Ragu labels. They became trendy. Suddenly, you could buy them — gilded in rose gold or cast with a handle — at Target. Tarjay.
There was the object — the glass jar — and there was what the object represented — authenticity, simplicity, Americana, etc. People pay a lot of money for adjectives.
Of course, I could write a different list — I mean, I couldn’t; maybe my FBI agent could — of all the things I would have bought, had I kept using my smartphone.
An athleisure set? (I haven’t bought a single piece of clothing since March.)
A new smartphone? (My back-up iPhone SE is on its last legs. Would I have bought a new-used one, or sprung for something sleeker on credit?)
All of the analog luxuries I listed and then some? (I first saw the Freewrite in a targeted online advertisement.)
It seems silly to dwell on the cost of analog living without comparing it to the cost of digital living. To spend time online is often to enter into a transaction: you offer information, you receive entertainment; you agree, also, to receive advertisements. Occasionally, you make purchases. This is how social media companies keep the lights on.
How much money am I saving by refusing to participate?
A dumbphone is like a glass jar. You can spend next to nothing on an old, repurposed object. You can seek out a twee version of the same thing and spend much more. The function is the same, regardless of the meaning you make.
I don’t regret the pen pal club membership or the fancy stationery or even the sealing wax, by the way. My pen pal and I send letters back and forth. I worried the sealing wax was too cute, until I received her wax-sealed reply in the mail. Inside our envelopes, there are pages and pages of words no one but the two of us will ever see.