There was no way around that: Charlie Fisher got hooked on his smartphone. He scrolled through the first one on Tiktok and Instagram in the morning, picked up it to answer text messages between classes, and relied on as a crutch in a social environment. It was a “pattern that never ended.”
“It was basically just creating this pattern that I was worried about, so I didn’t like opening my phone and opening it, which made me even more worried,” Fisher says.
He would have been shocked if he told him he didn’t live with a smartphone a few years ago, but at 20 he says his life is good for it. He is part of the move by college students who are now swapping smartphones with what is now considered a flip phone, a trendy hardware.
Grown up in a “social wasteland”
Fisher grew up playing around his culprit with a basketball and a nerf gun with a group of neighboring children. But when they all downloaded Snapchat, it changed the way they interacted – they no longer had to ask them to knock on each other’s doors and play, and the hangouts began to include screens.
By the time he entered high school, everyone in his classroom had a phone.
He is not alone. According to 2024 data from the Pew Research Center, almost half of teens say they are always online. And 48% of teenagers ages 13 to 17 say that social media is having a negative impact on the age of their children.
“It got me to the point where I didn’t even know what was there,” Fisher says. “Someone said a flip phone. I said, “Wait, can you do that?”
He bought a $20 Nokia Flip phone from Walmart and planned for $6 per month. For a year he pulled the trigger and waffled between his smartphone and flip phone until he completely dumped his phone in March.
Seán Killingsworth, 22, has long noticed that his peers’ interactions are influenced by a smartphone in his pocket. He recalls the “social wasteland” of “zombies” that could not be used for social connections.
He got a flip phone in his sophomore year of high school. Whenever a new friend asks for his snapchat, the conversation quickly becomes a nasty halt after explaining that he has a flip phone. When he tried to call people – texting the keyboard of his flip phone was boring – it was either inducing his peers or uncomfortable anxiety.
“I have hit many barriers just trying to make friends because of the mode of communication I chose to use,” Killingsworth says.
When he enrolled in Rollins College school, he wanted to make things different, so he started hosting casual get with friends without a phone. Eventually, it turned into the first chapter of the reconnection movement, which spread to the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida. Another chapter concerns taps, which will be released at Simpson College in Iowa this fall.
The event will include activities such as painting, playing outdoor sports, or hosting easygoing “dodgy discussions” where students discuss topics such as the mountains and the beaches. But often, events at hand transform into the afternoon, and everyone just hangs out.
“It’s a way to connect with a group of people for no reason and wander around to hang out purely, and see and experience what is possible,” Killinglingsworth says. “That doesn’t really happen anymore, because everything is so promoted and planned by technology.”
How smartphones affect the younger brain
According to Kaitlyn Regehr, author of Smartphone Nation, Addiction spans devices and platforms, and is most heavily linked to algorithms that feed curated content to users.
The combination of factors (refresh screen, device color saturation, notifications, prompt system) affects how addiction works.
Children’s psychiatrist and Professor Yang Pon-Sing of Yale School of Medicine say that smartphones affect productivity and prioritization, exhaust the brain’s cognitive perseverance, deplete the thresholds to tolerate frustration, and rewire the brain’s joy pathways and dopamine release.
“Your dopamine system is set up to trigger a dopamine release and a pleasant release over time, beyond multiple events. You actually need this phone.
Ponshin says it is a central time when young people begin to develop their identities and decide who they have a relationship with the larger peer group. The hormonal and biology changes experienced by young people make them more adaptable to social comparisons. Social media presence can increase as teens compare their followers and people they like with those around them.
“The natural state of adolescence is that you tend to feel left behind, you tend to feel blue, and sometimes you tend to feel social anxiety. It’s worsened by social media, not by social media,” says Regehr.
“I’ve seen more of the things I used to be a kid.”
He says he’s back to his old hobby since Fisher got his flip phone. He was a musician and spent more time playing harmonica, mandolin, banjo and guitar. He missed the screen details when he saw the film, but when he saw the 2005 action film Sahara during his vacation this week, he clearly remembered the details that followed.
“I’ve seen more of the kind of things I was a kid,” says Fisher. “You really see things about how they are in the physical world, and your feelings are really attached to it.”
For junior Logan Lane of Incoming Calls, the unexpected advantage of throwing her phone away was developing her fashion sense. The 20-year-old became famous after his 2022 New York Times profile featured the Loudite Club, which he founded for high school students in Brooklyn.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, her outfit has been heavily affected by her Tiktok for your page. But sitting in front of a trendy coffee shop around Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill, she wore clothes that reflected her personal style. It’s a pack of one of my mother’s striped button-downs, a rag-tie necklace and striped navy socks.
Through the reconnection movement, Killlingsworth saw his companions get out of their shells. The first meeting started a bit troubling. After all, students were not used to going without a phone. However, 15 minutes after the event, he says that even the most socially unsettled participants were having an energetic conversation
“You’ll be amazed at how many others feel about social media exactly the same as you,” says Killingsworth.
Killingworth admits that not everyone is switching, as most of the club members don’t have flip phones.
Sammy Palazzolo is a content creator using part-time flip phones, and can’t imagine he’s not getting access to Tiktok, regularly posting advice and storytime videos to his 490,000 followers. But at night, she carries a flip phone.
She and two friends bought the phone in their freshman year after all the negative experiences they were tied to their phones while out and found out they were tied to their phones. Palazzolo recalls that she woke up one morning with “major anxiety” after realising that she accidentally posted a video on an Instagram story.
“These should be the best moments of our lives, but you look around and people are scrolling,” says Palazzolo.
It didn’t just make her more aware of using the phone. Carrying flip phones was trendy and I was making better photos at night.
“It really captured the atmosphere of the night better. It’s blurry and it’s like a vintage feel,” says Palazzolo.
How to detox
Fisher warns that becoming a cold turkey can be a shock to the system. Instead, he recommends anyone trying to make changes, detoxifying social media, slowly weaning their smartphones, and adjusting them to not have services like Google Maps.
There is a learning curve. Send text messages to your T9 keyboard, navigate your dates without accessing the app, and manage your latest job requests without constant access to Microsoft teams and Slack. Lane began drawing maps with her hand to track directions to the party. Fisher is a music engineer and missed out on having a music app, so he burned his CD collection to his iPod.
But ultimately, young people who abandoned their smartphones say it’s difficult for those around them to adjust.
For those who are not ready to jump, Regehr recommends keep a note of what you did with your phone and how long you were going on with it, and how long you felt afterwards.
Turning your phone in grayscale mode, turning off notifications, and setting app time limits can provide short-term relief. She also suggests trying out Digital Spring Clean or not making a fuss.
This may mean creating another work-related social account if you are looking at work content after business hours or unbranding a swimwear brand that doesn’t feel good. Regehr calls this active decision-making process an algorithm resistance. This is curating a digital diet where users are at the helm rather than algorithms.
“Don’t decide what you want to see more and what you want to see much,” says Reghr. “You actively search for what you want, you want to be part of your digital diet and quickly move what you don’t.”
Rachel Hale’s role in covering youth mental health at USA Today is supported by a partnership with Pivotal Ventures and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editor input. Contact her at rhale@usatoday.com @RachelLeighhale x.