I was lost – no, actually, literally lost – without my smartphone

Forced to live a month with only a dumbphone, Naomi Arnold must access parts of her brain that have atrophied in order to survive the mean streets of Akaroa.

Look, I didn’t ask for this. I like my iPhone, but I dropped my friend and shattered her back. The repair was meant to take a week. It’s taken, like, nearly four. I’ve had to use a $59 Mobiwire Go instead, with hard buttons and only talk and, frankly, brutal text. My thumbpads are aching as I type this.

I have spent nearly a month disconnected, bored, unsure how to get places, unable to access my bank account, forced to hold conversations with other humans, plan ahead and be more organised, left adrift in the evenings with nothing to do but read books and engage with my loved ones and go to bed early and get a full night’s sleep. It’s been hell.

It began when I turned my iPhone off in the early afternoon of Friday, June 5, when I arrived at Maruia River Retreat to hold a four-day reading, writing, and yoga course with owners Cristina and Lasse Holopainen. Both times we’ve run these retreats, I’ve suggested the attendees turn off their phones to see if it makes a difference to their creativity and brain space.

It goes as you’d expect. Both times I felt a note of anxiety as I stood in my room and prepared to hold down the phone’s side switch. Surely I had something left to do on it? Someone was probably texting? Or I should be? But both times I turned it off and put it on my bedside table, where it sat as mute and as black as a well until I shoved it into my suitcase pocket and zipped it shut. Both times the stab of unease faded within half an hour and I went on with my life.

It was nice. It was great to be disconnected. I have spent plenty of time with my phone off or on flight mode when tramping or when I walked Te Araroa in 2024, going days without using it except to take photos and check the map.

This was no different. I wrote in my journal a lot, held our classes, walked, and read a lot. I discovered I slept a lot, too. I’d recently been complaining in the group chat about the curse of perimenopause wakefulness; I was dismayed to find out it was actually the goddamn phone and I could only blame myself.

So that was all fine. It was when I drove from Maruia to Christchurch, wiped my phone, and dropped it in for repair that I realised how many different parts of my brain a smartphone had been replacing for 14 years, and how much those parts had atrophied in the meantime.

I had not only forgotten my mental map of the city, but had not realised I’d require one. I drove around in the vague direction of streets I needed until I ran into them. I parked in one of two Lichfield St parking buildings and couldn’t find my way back to the right one.

I had to find out how to get to the entire village of Akaroa, so I pulled over and concentrated on pulling up my memory of Christchurch’s streets and suburbs, and felt the old sensation of mentally rising up and above the city and having it bloom to life below me. I hadn’t needed to do this for years, and, frankly, I was grateful I still could. I drove in the general direction of Akaroa until I saw a road sign and could relax.

But when I got there I realised my friend’s address was in WhatsApp, so I hadn’t written it down. I recalled she’d said the street was near the movie theatre. I drove until I found the theatre, then drove until I found the street, but was defeated on the house number. I finally looked up her contact on my laptop and texted her from the dumbphone, but she didn’t reply.

I thought about standing in the street and yelling, but instead I drove up and down it until I thought I recognised the house from the photo my friend had sent. I knocked on the door, and indeed it was.

She’d immediately replied to me via iMessage and hadn’t realised I didn’t get it. Don’t ask me why I didn’t call instead of texting. I think I forgot I could.

The entire month was like this. I couldn’t log into my bank because I needed the authentication app. I couldn’t track my work expenses via my accounting app. I missed a flight and had to pay $100 to rebook because I forgot I couldn’t stroll on board with just my phone and had to run off to print a boarding pass, which failed, and the Air New Zealand lady was profoundly unmoved when I pointed out I could see people still walking to the plane through the window behind her.

I have had to map out my destination on my laptop’s maps app ahead of time. I have had to plan timings before I leave the house. I used a notebook. I fell out of group chats. I had to rediscover intrinsic motivation for exercise. I missed invites. I have been bored waiting for fish‘n’chips. I couldn’t use public transport except by knowing the routes ahead of time and peering at the tiny rows of times on the info board.

This is, in fact, how many people still navigate the world. And in a society now built on smartphones, let me tell you, it’s not easy out there.

This week I visited a friend and got my repaired iPhone sent to his house because it still hadn’t made it to mine. When I landed I hopped in the front seat of his car, and he handed me a cardboard courier package. “This came for you this morning.”

I shrieked and ripped into it, then carefully unwrapped my fresh new phone. She was so smooth and heavy. I held her repaired edges and pressed the side button, and the new screen burst into full life and colour. It slid under my fingers like something intergalactic.

He said, “Can you be trusted not to use it until you get a case?”

“Of course,” I said, “I just want to see what they’ve done.”

I turned it off again and put it back in its bubble wrap and into its box and laid the package down in the footwell. He drove off.

“Can you order us a pizza?” he said, and I picked up his phone and tapped the glass. The colours glowed. How beautiful it was. A text appeared on the screen. Look how easily you could connect with friends! He asked me to enter a reminder for him. Look how it could optimise life! Help with a recipe or car repair! Play a song! Ease the messy edges of things with a mildly pleasurable distraction. Like right now, in fact, while riding in this passenger seat.

The pizza place wasn’t yet open, so I couldn’t ring them. I put his phone back on its holder and looked out the window. I was aware of my own iPhone in the shadows at my feet, off and entombed in her plastic and cardboard. Her cool and silky screen silent and waiting.