Will 2025 be the year we break up with our phones?
Downsizing my digital life
Really Good Tomatoes asks irreverent questions and offers hopeful answers. It’s a newsletter about culture, behaviour, food, art, relationships, pleasure, politics, work, environment, identity, and society. For people who refuse to be fobbed off with crap tomatoes.
I finally deleted my Twitter account today. I know it’s called X but I don’t care. It no longer exists for me. I have no grief for X. The life I shall be celebrating is that of Twitter, a social media platform that I did, occasionally, have fun on.
Social media hasn’t felt fun for a long time. If I had to pinpoint the last time I felt like I was genuinely having a nice time on social media, I’d probably put it at around 2019. There are a few obvious reasons for this. Firstly, of course, the pandemic. I’ve written before about how the digitalisation of life contributed to my growing hatred of texting, and I think it did similar things to my relationship with social media. The second obvious reason is the way social media platforms have changed over the last few years: Twitter being bought by Elon Musk, the rise of Tik Tok, Instagram moving towards a video-first model. Naturally, I adapted and for a while I survived but it quickly became clear to me that I was not thriving.
We know – we know – that these platforms are not making us happy. We know they’re not enhancing our lives. But we're still bought into the idea that if we can just find the right angle, or the way to engage with them, they eventually will.
This is a lie. Or if it’s not a lie as such, then it is something that is unlikely to become true for the vast majority of us. The amount of time, attention, and creative energy to build a “successful” (whatever that means) social media presence, is enormous. To give that much of myself, speculatively, without anything to actually show for it, is simply not an option for me. And not because I don’t believe in getting out what you put in. On the contrary. I am, as you know, very happy to do unpaid or badly-paid speculative labour when the fruits of that labour are something real and meaningful in and of themselves. But I will not give my energy, my ideas, my attention to the pursuit of some vague promise of future opportunity, future happiness, future clout. I will not do it. I refuse. Instagram, I wrote back in July, can’t have me. So last month I deleted that as well.
So what’s left? I am half-arsedly on Bluesky. I am irreverently on LinkedIn. People keep telling me I just need to do what needs to be done on LinkedIn. You don’t have to post endlessly, just occasionally, earnestly, and smartly. Play the game, Franki. Fake it til you make it. But I can’t. I just can’t. So I itemised every single piece of freelance work from the last ten years (so you can actually see how much I’ve done!) and then changed my job title to ‘Macrodata refinement’.
And I’m also here. But, crucially, none of these apps are on my phone. Because the aim of this downsizing exercise is not to be entirely offline and unreachable, but to put my goddamn phone down and live my goddamn life. There are some obvious reasons, as I said, why leaving certain social media platforms has become more desirable, but for me it’s bigger than that.
Some other things that have happened in the last five years: I had my second child. I lost my father-in-law. The bottom fell out of the UK media industry. I turned 40.
There’s probably a more poetic way I could express what I’m about to say but I don’t have it in me today so I’m just going to put it like this: I’m exhausted, the thing I’ve spent my entire working life striving towards basically doesn’t exist any more, life is short.
I’ve been thinking about breaking up with my phone for a long time. On maternity leave in 2022, I felt acutely aware of how little my online connections did to actually alleviate my suffering (And yes, I am going to use the word ‘suffering’ because that’s how being alone for hours and hours and hours, weeks and weeks and weeks, being sleep-deprived, being needed 24/7, never being able to switch off from the responsibility, felt to me. If you feel differently, I’m happy for you.). The only thing that made any dent in how hard things felt was actually, physically, seeing people. Being in the same room. Talking out loud to a human I could feasibly touch. Not long after I came back to work, I started googling dumb phones. I’ve googled “best dumb phones” approximately once every three months for the past year and a half.
Publicly, the first whisper of a potential rupture was probably when I wrote about falling out of love with texting. And again last summer when I wrote about being punk on socials. But the tipping point came just before Christmas when I had my reckoning with a smart calendar. My busyness isn’t a conceit, I really am trying to pack in a lot. If I want to get even half of it done well, in a way that feels meaningful, enriching, I’m going to have to drop some balls. Moreover, the overwhelm I feel is not a personal failing, it is the symptom of an overstimulated life. Something’s gotta give.
I have so much I want to do and pursue and experience and enjoy, there are only so many hours in the day, and only so many days in a lifetime. What the everloving fuck am I doing on my phone?
I am far from being the only person thinking, talking about, and working on this at the moment. Per the headline of this newsletter, I really feel like there’s a change afoot in 2025.
When Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation came out last year, it confirmed what a lot of us had long, in extremely 2020s parlance, felt to be true. Smartphones are absolutely deleterious to our health and wellbeing. Not everyone felt this way, of course. Predictably there was a lot of backlash from people who really didn’t want their bad habits examined too closely, their parenting crutches criticised. People doubled down: Claims wildly exaggerated. Judgemental, woke, smug, classist. It surely can’t be that bad.
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I personally think it is that bad. I’ve always thought that. But for a long time I was prepared to sacrifice some of my mental health in return for the illusion of connection, constant access to information and ideas, and the promise that having a strong online presence would elevate my career. While I knew it didn’t make me feel very good, I believed that it was nevertheless improving my life.
I don’t think that’s where we are any more. As we edge into 2025, I’m noticing more and more people on Substack, but also in the media more broadly, talking about how life is just less good when you’re on your phone.
People have been talking for a long time about how phones are ruining gigs and club nights. Speaking a couple of weeks ago on BBC 6Music, DJ Jaguar talked about the increasing number of events and venues which are operating no-phones policies so that people will actually be present in the music and in the experience. This, to me, encapsulates the vibe shift. It’s no longer just vaguely about “mental health”. People are realising that they are shitting in their own beds; that by having their phone out, or by allowing themselves to be constantly drawn back to it, they are actively diminishing the experience of being alive, whether it’s out dancing or at home on the sofa.
Writing in
about what she called, the “social media sea change” Anne Helen Peterson described the slow drip of steady realisations about our relationships with our phones, the way that she’s put the puzzle pieces together not in one big flash of inspiration, but gradually, almost imperceptibly.“After years of people yelling at me in books, think pieces, and tweets (lol) to “break up with my phone,” “delete your social media accounts,” and “fuck Mark Zuckerberg,” turns out the thing that I needed was a whole conglomeration of quiet arguments and technological shifts that made my phone and the social media accounts on it feel less precious. Put differently, I haven’t come to value it less; instead, it’s become less valuable.”
I’d add to this that, for me, *other things* have become more valuable. My priorities have shifted alongside the technology. It’s now far more important to me to be deeply present in my relationships, in my work, in my creative practice, than it is to be part of digital culture. But I also agree that this digital lifestyle has ceased to serve me. And that’s why I’m able to break up with it. Previously I could argue to myself that the pros outweighed the cons but I can no longer do that. In fact, I don’t even know what the pros are supposed to be any more.
Every couple of years I read a book that radically changes my life, one that I can’t stop talking about to people. Not necessarily because it requires me to behave or even think particularly differently, but because it articulates perfectly something I’ve been grappling with, stewing on, grasping for. Last year, this book was How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. This book spoke to me on a level I wasn’t even aware I needed to be spoken to on. It is the single most powerful (Angry! Poignant! Beautiful! Uplifting!) argument I’ve read for drastically downsizing your digital life and I thoroughly recommend it. If you’re still in that place, illustrated beautifully in the above cartoon by Carson Ellis in her newsletter
, of weighing up, over and over again without conclusion, the conflict of knowing you don’t really want to be online but feeling you have to be, this book might be how you cross the Rubicon.It’s one thing to resolve to quit, it’s another thing to actually do it. In November, around the time I had my scheduling epiphany, I started subscribing to
, a newsletter making the case for a digital downsize and offering tips and thoughts on how to go about it. There’s acres of advice in there and I cannot say what might or might not resonate with you, but the most useful thing I’ve taken away came from this essay on how your phone is a tool. See, despite my regular reading of dumbphone reviews, I couldn’t get away from the fact that in 2025 I do actually need a smartphone. Forget CityMapper, Spotify, and Deliveroo (all of which you could technically class as non-essentials but which make my life so much easier and more pleasant that it would be counterproductive to do away with them), I can barely make an online purchase without having to authorise it with my banking app. How would I even go to a gig (phone-free or otherwise) nowadays without the Dice app or Eventbrite? How would I travel without Trainline, or fly without the Easyjet app? How the hell, and you may detect the note of rising panic in my voice, would I park?There are instances where I could have the tickets emailed and print them off, but there comes a point where you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face. No, a smartphone is useful and necessary for a lot of things. The key is putting it down once you’re done using it. And that’s what I’m working on now. My social media apps are long gone. I’m finally starting to get my WhatsApp overwhelm under control. And I’m enjoying the quiet, I really am. But it’s not easy. My phone and I have been together a long time. Like any painful break up, it takes a great deal of self-love and, if I’m honest, a greater deal of bloody-mindedness.
While I continue to grapple with issues such as what level of text communication feels okay and why? I am taking heart in the progress I have made. Picking up my kids, transporting them home, making them tea, giving them baths, reading to them, putting them to bed – a three hour portion of my day that can often feel like drudgery laced with unreasonable demands and resistance – feels so much richer, so much more rewarding, when I’m not also contending with the pull of my phone. Sitting down to write, I get more quickly into my flow when my head is not buzzing with other people’s content. Out for an evening, on a date or with a friend, nothing gives me greater joy, on the way home, than to dig my phone out of my bag and realise absolutely nothing has happened in the last four hours. No notifications, no suggestions, nothing to see. My life, it turns out, is the main event.
One immediate, joyful, and tangible benefit of being less on my phone: I’m reading more! Two books I loved in January were The Lying Life Of Adults by Elena Ferrante and Temporary by Hilary Leichter.
I confess, I struggled with My Brilliant Friend (the first in her so-called Neopolitan quartet) and haven’t read any Elena Ferrante since, but this was a joy from start to finish. I adored the narrator. I found her world and indeed her worldview entirely believable, yet captivating. Gorgeous. Has definitely convinced me to give her another go.
This was recommended to me by One Of The Very Few People On The Planet From Whom I Will Accept Book Recommendations and wow, what a trip. It is absolutely bonkers in the best way possible. Poignant, hilarious, relatable, weird as fuck. Sometimes you read a book and it feels like the kind of thing you’d love to write yourself. Other times you read a book and think, I am literally never going to come up with anything as offbeat and creative as that so I may as well go back to bed. Adored.
This morning I saw someone on LinkedIn praising the new YouTube and Tik Tok creator, A Mug Of Life, whose videos of shared cups of tea with strangers on park benches have been going viral. “This is what we need to be seeing on Tik Tok,” the person wrote, “Unscripted. Real People.”
I’m desperately trying to write a follow up sentence to this but I can’t because every time I try I just start screaming.
YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE IS UNSCRIPTED AND STARS REAL PEOPLE???? Your life. Your actual fucking life.
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Don’t settle for ersatz tomatoes,
Do REAL PEOPLE randomly have tea with strangers in public?
Do they record it?
I was just going to come and say 'fuck yeah' and thank you for the read of something resonant, but then, that bit. Anyway. Fuck yeah, and thank you.