Roger’s $0.02 - Phone Withdrawal (Patreon)

Over the weekend I broke my phone. Not like cracked the screen or screwed up a setting and now it runs funny. Nope. I accidentally threw up in the air as I tried to throw my clean laundry on the bed for folding. Up it flew and down it came on a corner a quick bounce up and flat. As I raced to see the level of damage my actions caused I noticed the screen was black with a sliver of flashing magenta color at the right bottom color. It was gone. No screen activity and no way to interface with the phone. Although it seemed like a minor inconvenience as I ordered a Pixel 6a on Amazon I didn’t realize what a weekend without a phone would be like.

From a practical standpoint being without my phone didn’t change my routine. I ran all my typical weekend errands without a problem. However, I had that nagging feeling I was missing something. An email, a call, a text, or an important social media post. I wasn’t missing out on something but the fear of potentially missing out on something important tugged at my anxiety and OCD. I felt very detached and incomplete all weekend. Then it hit me. I was experiencing a very light form of withdrawal. Having trained myself and grown accustomed to having a personal communication relay where all non-direct communications are passed through, not having it alongside me was a very surreal experience. In a way, it reminded me of what happened when I didn’t have TV for a half-year in college. TV was how I would bookend my days. I watched the weather in the morning and primetime shows in the evening on certain days. It’s how I knew it was Wednesday because the "Drew Carey Show" was on. It was the immutable framework my student routine was built around. Without it, I felt a little adrift. Unsure of where I was supposed to be and what I needed to be doing. It was a little like not having a calendar to jot down important appointments and events. In the same way, the phone became a sort of compass for my life. It didn’t determine the direction of my activities but it did orient me and oddly contextualized all the things I needed to do.

Thankfully my new phone made it into my hands Monday evening. Unfortunately, I could not do the standard phone-to-phone data transfer I typically do because my old phone’s screen was inoperative. No way to see or control the phone. Thankfully despite that, the app SMS Backup & Restore and Android OS still managed to do one last set of backups to my Google Drive. When I restored the backups to my new phone almost everything was set. All the apps I had installed, my call logs, and SMS messages complete with any MMS pictures were waiting for me on my new Pixel 6a. Even my Google Authenticator was restored with all 2FA applications I set up from my previous phone intact. It made the whole migration process a lot easier than I expected it to. In fact, the only real hassle was re-logging into all my accounts.

Overall the experience taught me several valuable lessons. One. Make sure to back up your phone; photos, messages, data all of it. Two. Respect your phone. Don’t put it in precarious situations because you’re lazy and can’t put it down on a table or other flat surface. Three I unwittingly made my phone an irreplaceable extension of my life. That’s something I hope to remedy over the coming months.