Gen Z is obsessed with smartphones. I traded mine for something stupid.
USA TODAY reporter Rachel Hale replaced her smartphone with an ultra-minimal dumb phone for a month. The situation is as follows.
2 years, 3 months and 7 days.
I’m 24 years old, and according to the screen time calculator, that’s the amount of time I’ve already spent on my phone in my entire life.
This statistic is sobering.
I’m USA TODAY’s youth mental health reporter, and I’ve been tracking the low-tech movement for the past year and a half. I’ve written about college students who love flip phones and payphones, parents who turn back the clock to 1995 and use retro landlines, and influencers who post attention span rehabilitation videos. I’ve talked to everyone from Jonathan Hight to Tom Brady about screen time.
Yet, as I spent hours seeking advice from experts on how to curb my technology addiction, my own addiction became more apparent.
I tried a screen restriction app that sends you a check-in nudge after you reach your daily limit and allows you to complete a 30-second word scramble before returning to Instagram. One of them gifted me with raindrops to water my virtual plants when I wasn’t using my phone. I also used a Brick device, which physically blocks apps from my phone.
But I still felt dependent. On my worst days, my screen time amounted to more than eight hours. TLDR: I couldn’t get out of this situation with the app store.
Two years ago, I didn’t even know what a “dumb phone” was. But after reporting on Gen Z’s analog resurgence, I became curious about what it would be like to navigate relationships, find my way, and experience everyday life in New York City without a smartphone.
So, in an act of both personal intervention and journalistic curiosity, I decided to part with my iPhone 17. On June 1st, I willingly parted with the most expensive thing I owned, buried it in a drawer next to my desk, and pretty much never saw it again for the next month.
Generation Z analog revolution
When I first unboxed the device I would be spending the next month with, I immediately noticed how small it was. The Light Phone II is larger than a hotel key card and weighs about the same as a Hershey’s chocolate bar.
I inserted a SIM card into my new phone and manually uploaded my contacts. I then used the Light Phone dashboard to select only the tools I would use for the next month: calls, texts, calendar, notes, music, calculator, alarm, timer, and directions. However, there were also options for podcasts and mobile hotspots. I decided to create a new number specifically for my dumb phone.
When I tried to send a text message on my phone’s tiny electronic ink screen, the words “I’d like to go to breakfast” turned into a string of incomprehensible phrases. The device’s best attempts at spell checking were no match for my butter fingers.
“Brother, who invited Litephone?” one friend said when I arrived in the group chat and immediately everyone’s text turned green. He was joking, but I quickly realized that in order to use my new technology, people around me would need to adapt to my lifestyle.
Lightphones fall into the umbrella category of dumbphones. A dumb phone refers to a device that does not have “smart” features. Mainly, you just want to make calls and text messages without using any unnecessary apps.
During the first few days of using my cell phone, scheduling a group outing was an exercise in patience. I couldn’t see any other text while typing my own. Other than the spelling issue, by the time I took the time to respond, the conversation was already moving forward.
During this past month, I got lost many times. At one point, I took the wrong subway line and ended up at a completely different station.
I missed my last-minute reservation for Restaurant Popularity 4 Charles Prime Rib because it was sent to my smartphone. And when the Knicks won the NBA Finals, I couldn’t record the moment.
That’s when my typing slowed down, and the speech-to-text feature (which was surprisingly accurate) came to the rescue. With plenty of time to spare before getting on the subway, I wrote down the directions by hand. I asked my friend to call me and tell me my plans instead of texting. I came to understand that my limited technology forced me to be in the moment.
The longer I live without my smartphone, the more I realize that inconvenience is part of the process. Things have slowed down, but that’s the point, and that’s why dumb phones are suffering temporarily.
With books like Haidt’s Anxious Generation, school-wide phone bans, and warnings about loneliness and screen time from the US Surgeon General, the topic of screen addiction among young people has become more mainstream in a post-COVID-19 world.
At the same time, Gen Z is feeling increasingly nostalgic. They are suffering from a decline in social infrastructure and are disillusioned with their fiscal situation, widening political divides, and a job market overshadowed by AI.
Influencers in their 20s and 30s are leading a revival of hobbies like needlepoint, painting, and woodworking on TikTok. According to Afterpay’s Spring/Summer 2026 Trend Report, Walkman sales increased by 111% and instant film cameras by 157%. Eventbrite declared this summer the “Summer of Offline” in June, and found that local gatherings like picnics, block parties, and potlucks have skyrocketed, especially among Gen Z.
Traffic on the Dumbphone Finder website jumped 12 times from 2022 to 2025, according to the site’s founder Jose Briones. When Briones launched the site in 2019, it had 45 phones listed. Currently, that number is 91. The r/dumbphones subreddit, which Briones also moderates, receives 184,000 weekly visitors.
The presence of Gen Z in this movement is perhaps best illustrated by Dam.co. Afreka Ebanks, director of brand and communications, said the average flip phone user is 24 people. The startup grew out of Month Offline, a DC-based cohort program where participants tried out dumbphones for 30 days. The program has a waiting list, and the company’s flip phones were on backorder when I looked into purchasing one earlier this year.
“When I think of Gen Z, I think of the first generation to grow up in a world with smartphones,” Ebanks says. “I think the core of it is that we crave real connection with each other.”
Even if I wanted to run away from my smartphone, I couldn’t.
It took me half an hour before I reached into the drawer where my iPhone was kept.
Logging into work email required two-factor authentication using a smart device or purchasing a physical passkey.
This experience was repeated throughout the month. We were required to bring our smartphones to show tickets to Broadway shows to ushers, and were instructed to view menus, order, and pay using QR codes at restaurants.
Below is a non-exhaustive list of tools that we have identified that you should purchase or acquire. Security key. camera. printer. Photo album. credit card. Have the courage to explain to the staff You can’t eat at a restaurant without a physical menu. Meteorologist. bus map. tape recorder. A crystal ball to predict subway delays.
And while the Litephone was good enough for personal use, I struggled to keep up with my work. The speaker volume wasn’t loud enough to hang up during an interview, there was no voice recorder, and the text message interface was impractical for quickly communicating with sources.
Light Phone III, released in March, addressed many of these concerns. It features advancements such as cameras and larger typeface displays. (I chose the Light Phone II for this experiment because the Light Phone III was on backorder and more than double the price at $699.)
Even as I got used to the newfound joy of being unplugged, I became disillusioned that my stupid cell phone still required my smartphone as a backup. Even as time spent using mobile phones decreased, time spent using computers skyrocketed.
At the halfway point of the experiment, I decided I needed to adjust my posture. I treated this project like a restrictive diet, locking away junk food instead of changing my relationship with it.
So for the second half of the month, I turned to the digital version of intuitive eating.
I treated mistakes and discomfort as an inevitable part of the process and kept a media diet diary to record my thoughts. Practicing mindfulness helped me understand why I was scrolling so much on my phone in the first place.
In some cases, that even means intentionally choosing to go online. Watching the Knicks make the playoffs on social media made me feel joyful and connected to the city around me.
What I learned about my relationship with technology from using a dumb phone
On day 24 of the experiment, I sat on the floor of my Fort Greene home on a phoneless night, reading my analog clock for the first time in years.
Litephone marketing host Dan Fox beats the drum, signaling it’s time to put away your phone. We dropped them into a metal colander and never saw them again until the end of the evening.
I had some concerns, but those feelings were blown away. Not everyone there had a phone (in fact, most didn’t), but everyone committed to two hours of phone-free time. During those two hours, I journaled, created, and read without any influence from the outside world. And for the first time in this experiment, I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything else.
In the weeks leading up to and during the experiment, I integrated into the low-tech community. I attended a phone-free party in East Williamsburg, practiced mindfulness with the Strother School of Radical Attention at a rainy Prospect Park sidewalk study, and discussed the philosophical meaning of space and time at the week-long Summer of Rad Festival in Tompkins Square Park.
The hardest part about living without a smartphone wasn’t curbing my own addiction, but adapting other people to my alternative lifestyle.
It’s no surprise that people who are trying to break away from technology are drawn to each other. These spaces also gave me room to reflect on my progress.
At the beginning of the experiment, my attention always felt fragmented. When I was with people, I was physically present, but my mind was always preparing for the next notification and I often forgot my train of thought in the middle of a conversation.
I watched TikTok and was happy in the moment, but the next morning I couldn’t remember a single video I had watched. When I replaced short-form content with How I Met Your Mother episodes and threads with long-form magazine articles, I noticed that my reading comprehension improved and that my days began and ended on a more calm note.
There were some things I really missed about my smartphone, like the ability to take and send photos and the way to stay in touch with a wider range of friends in group chats.
The takeaway from my experiment wasn’t that everyone should get an incompetent phone, but that everyone might benefit from a little more balance when it comes to technology.
At the end of a no-phone night in Fort Greene on July 1, some attendees groaned as Fox handed back our devices.
I’ve been to Analog Night a few times, and in the past, the silence has sometimes been broken the moment I see missed notifications flooding my screen. Early that morning, my Litephone cell plan expired, so I brought my smartphone instead.
But this time, I left my phone turned off in my bag when Fox told us to turn it back on.
So I’m going to completely unplug it for a while. Then, enjoy the subway ride home.
Rachel Hale’s role covering youth mental health for USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
Contact her at rhale@usatoday.com. @rachleighhale With X.
