The Analog Life Project: My Flip Phone Dilemma (Part 1)

 I may be only 23 years old, but I remember life before smartphones, convenient streaming services and social media as we know it today. For some reason when I was 4, I would always get excited to get home because I enjoyed watching my mom chat with her friends on MSN. It's not that I wanted to read her messages (I couldn't read much anyway), but I was obsessed with the animations, especially the water balloon boy.

If my mom had to leave the computer, I would just stare at it in case anybody nudged her. I would also yell, "Mom they're knocking!" 

 

Although MSN and MySpace were already thriving when I was 5, and when I was old enough to have social media these weren't a thing anymore, the reason I bring up this anecdote is because I miss when the internet was a place to visit. I miss feeling excited to get home to play FarmVille with my grandma (my mom had to make me a Facebook account that said I was born in 1980 so I could play and leave my grandma's farm alone), who we also lived with at the time. My mom also said she remembers being eager to get home from our cruise vacations to check her Facebook and post all her digicam pictures.

8-year-old me and my mom posing in front of Royal Caribbean's
Adventure of the Seas. 2010.

That's what I miss.

It's not impossible to go back to that, but now that I NEED my smartphone for college, money transfers, public transportation updates and Uber in case of emergency, I find myself in a little predicament. In Puerto Rico, WhatsApp is the main form of communication, but jeez how much I despise it. It's impossible to not get overstimulated with all those group chats, so of course one of my many fantasies is chucking my iPhone across the Pacific Ocean. I guess Do Not Disturb will do for now. 

For the month of July in 2024, I wanted to try a $20 Walmart Family flip phone. I can guarantee that at this point my friends were sick of me wishing society made the collective decision to go back to dumb phones. But I didn't care, and got the flip phone.

And blinged it.

My precious TCL Flip 2 (✿◠‿◠)

Getting this phone implied having two phone lines, but I saved my friends and family the hassle of saving the new number by setting up call forwarding from my iPhone. Sadly, it isn't the same for texts so if they really needed to text me, they had to use the flip phone's number. By then, college hadn't started yet so I felt comfortable leaving the house with just my flip phone. 

And, honestly, I loved it.

Some may have been frustrated with my obsession with going more "analog" and trying to live offline as much as possible, but it was a great experiment. I'm already a nostalgic person, so by default I often think of how things used to work back when I was a kid. 

A few days ago, Anne Butera talked about The Analog Life Project by Lori Roberts from Little Truths Studio, and it reminded me so much of the No-Phone Summer [challenge] I did in Summer 2024. I was spending the whole summer at my dad's in Florida (and a week at my boyfriend's in Texas). So, after such an overwhelming spring semester, I took this long trip as the opportunity to disappear.

I focused on decentralizing my phone, so I dusted off my digicam, my kindle, and my iPod. I only accessed social media on my dad's laptop, so it's not that I disappeared entirely. I couldn't, because it's how I could check on my online friends and see what my long distance family members were up to on Facebook. I also started reading magazines on Libby and subscribed to Cosmopolitan.

My challenge consisted of pretending it was the early 2000s, but I focused more on owning my music and my DVD's. I also went back to crosswords, fill-ins, and word-seeks. I bought the first Murdle volume I saw at Barnes & Noble during my trip, and it's honestly so fun.

So, what is this Analog Life Project?

Lori Roberts calls her project "an exploration of living more deliberately offline through making, noticing, writing, and human connection," and it's something that I could relate to when I think back to my summer challenge. Life finally slowed down, my eye strain was nonexistent, and I had more energy to interact with people around me (bonus: my shyness somehow vanished sometimes?).

I wanted to talk about this project because I think I read about it at the right time. I've been considering bringing back my offline routine but now that my uni classes started, I can't be completely offline. God, I fantasize about never having to open Outlook in my life ever again. So, this time I need to come up with a new offline routine, which I will [hopefully] get into in my next post. 

About my flip phone

I really don't know what to do yet.

It's been on my drawer since 2024 and I haven't reactivated the plan since then. I really miss using it but I think I should just keep it for time off and vacations. We'll see.

Are you doing anything to stay offline?