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Logan Lane, College second-year, has been without a smartphone for five years. When I met with her, she had just gotten rid of her flip phone entirely.
For Lane, the decision to get rid of her smartphone came about during the pandemic. After feeling especially dependent on her phone during lockdown, it became apparent to Lane just how much time she was losing to her technology.
“I basically came to a breaking point where I was … so deeply addicted to my technology … and I wanted to be doing all this other stuff in my time that I wasn’t doing,” she said.
Lane put her phone in a drawer and tried to see how long she could go without it. It turned out, a while.
The first thing that Lane noticed was how much time she got back. She was able to start reading again, writing, and doing other things that made her happy. She kept this up for nine months, phone locked away, and when school resumed in person, she didn’t want to stop. Taking the train and making plans without a phone were things that Lane enjoyed doing.
“It kind of required all these little systems and planning ahead and making maps and stuff. And that was hard … and it [was] a little time consuming, but … I just felt like the time I was getting back was so much more valuable,” Lane said.
Once Lane had settled in to not using her smartphone, she felt a yearning to meet other people that were doing the same. Lane explained that a lot of isolation came from getting off of social media, and she lost friends because she was hard to reach online. She thought about starting a club at her high school but she wasn’t sure that anyone would be interested in joining. Lane had yet to meet anyone that had a flip phone.
A little while later, Lane went to a show in Brooklyn and met another girl with a flip phone.
“She was reading all the same books that I was reading,” Lane said. “She had just gotten a flip phone. She was super passionate about it, and she also felt like there was this lack of socialization if you weren’t online, like you were kind of excluded from things.”
The two started meeting once a week at a public library. The same time and the same day — no texting required. For the first few weeks it was just Lane and her friend, but they quickly started attracting other kids who had heard about their club. As the club grew, some of the new members got rid of their smartphones and replaced them with flip phones, while others used the meeting time as a space to unplug. They would read together, build fires, and hang out in hammocks. When Lane graduated high school, she left the club to her friend Jameson.
This is not the first time Lane has gained attention for her life without a smartphone. The group she started at her high school made national headlines in The New York Times.
“That was really cool, but it also became the only thing I was known for,” Lane said.
When Lane got to Oberlin, she wasn’t in a rush to start her club up again.
“I mean, I genuinely … have never been in a school environment where more people have had flip phones,” said Lane.
Lane didn’t feel the sense of urgency she had in high school to find a community that was interested in being offline. So it wasn’t until her second year at Oberlin that Lane decided to start an Oberlin chapter of the Luddite
Club. It started small — about three people would meet at Harkness House once a week. But once people began to understand that a flip phone was not a requirement to join, the club started to grow.
“This semester we’ve gotten more people to come,” Lane said. “We put up posters and have been having an awesome time.”
The group’s meetings take a lot of different forms but are always centered around offline connection.
“We do various things when we go on walks, we just … talk, we read passages that we’ve been enjoying recently, we read our writing, … write letters sometimes,” Lane said. “Mostly we’re just getting to know each other.”
One of the reasons I was interested in speaking with Lane was because about a month ago, I was convinced I was going to get rid of my iPhone. I had just dropped it, and it decided to die on me. Fed up with the fact that I was encouraged to buy a new phone rather than fix the one I already had, I figured I would go phoneless in protest. This lasted about two weeks.
But I really liked those two weeks, and I would have kept going if I hadn’t started to feel limited by not having a phone. Not having a phone made me realize how many things I used it for, beyond social media and communication. I don’t own a watch, an alarm clock, or a camera. I started to miss being able to listen to music when I was out, and I had a hard time driving without directions.
I was expecting to miss social media and texting, the things that took up the majority of my screen time, but I really enjoyed not having them. I liked not using them. Now that I have a smartphone again, I’ve gone back to spending hours on social media and other apps that I don’t want to be spending my time on, even though I consciously understand that I don’t want to.
“I think there’s totally a world where … you can have … a productive relationship to your technology,” Lane said. “Sadly, a lot of us are not living that. … Whatever your screen time is, that’s the hours that you get back. I try not to think of it as like a productivity thing because … let’s say your time is six hours, those are six more hours you could just be in the world. … You don’t have to be working all the time for that to be productive or for that to be beneficial to you.”
In addition to feeling more present, getting rid of her phone and getting off of social media has helped Lane understand herself better.
“When I got rid of my phone, I started to cultivate who I actually was, not just because of the time that I was now basically back in my body, but also the time that I wasn’t dedicating to … creating this figure online,” Lane said.
This idea stuck with me, that we are all spending so much of our time creating an alternate digital version of ourselves. Lane described it as a doppelganger of herself. I’d heard comparisons like these by adults, but it was refreshing to have this conversation with someone my age.
If you’re interested in continuing these conversations and connecting with people, not technology, Oberlin’s Luddite Club meets Mondays at 8 p.m. at Harkness.
“Anyone is welcome. No flip phone required,” Lane said. “We don’t hate your phone, you do.”