An experiment in awareness, attention, and freedom
A Gen Z friend asked me a simple question:
“What was life like before smartphones?”
I opened my mouth to answer — and nothing came out. I had to catch myself because of the hesitation to answer and…realized… I actually didn’t remember.
Three decades of devices had slowly swallowed the memory of what it felt like to livewithout a glowing rectangle in my hand.
Somewhere between my first cell phone in the ’90s, the BlackBerry in 2003, and the iPhone in 2008, “reachable” became “always on,” and silence quietly, ironically, disappeared from life.
So this past Monday, I did something radical:
I put my phone away.
All day. No email. No apps. No scrolling. No “just checking.” I even hid my laptop and iPad so I couldn’t cheat. — Gulp…just me. My mind. My attention. My day.
Part I — The Descent: How I Became Always On
I got my first phone around 1996. I was in sales, and the logic was clear: Accessibility = professionalism. Then in 2003, I got a BlackBerry — whoa, that was the moment “available” quickly morphed into “on call”. Suddenly I had become an emergency room surgeon and wasn’t just reachable; I was tethered.
And by 2008, the iPhone turned every pause into a moment to scroll:
Waiting in line? Scroll
Commercial break? Scroll
Deep breath? Scroll
A little lonely? Scroll
Uncomfortable? Definitely scroll
I guess I didn’t notice this paradigm was even happening. I just woke up one day realizing: I couldn’t remember the last time I was “bored”. Or quiet. Or still.
Part II — The Experiment: The Day I Went Dark
Monday morning felt weird. Uncomfortable.
There were so many tiny moments — brushing my teeth, making coffee, walking down the hallway — when my hand reached for a phone that wasn’t there. Not because I needed anything, of course. Because my mind wanted to escape the mundane - and maybe feeling a bit of FOMO.
Early in the morning I went for a run with no headphones, no music, no podcast, no distraction. And for the first time in years, I actually noticed the noise:
Garbage trucks clanging through alleys.
Overnight Construction pounding on our street.
Honking.
Sirens.
Doors slamming.
It was chaotic. Loud. Unfiltered. And strangely…I felt alive in it.
For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t trying to drown out the world. I was in it.
And that’s when it hit me: Quiet isn’t the absence of sound. Quiet is the absence of distraction.
Part III — The Revelation: When the Noise Stopped
By afternoon, nothing outside me changed — but something inside me had.
The city’s soundtrack was still the city’s soundtrack. But it didn’t pull at me. My mind wasn’t darting to what I needed to check next. I wasn’t prepping responses to imagined messages. I wasn’t filling dead space.
I wrote a few pages in my journal — not to post, not to share, not to “capture content,” but just to write.
I noticed my breathing. I noticed sunlight moving across the floor. I remembered random moments from years ago I hadn’t thought about in ages.
And I realized: The noise wasn’t out there. The noise was in me. The phone just gave it somewhere to hide. Without the constant urge to check or refresh, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time:
Just Being.
The stillness wasn’t empty — it was full. The silence wasn’t absence — it was reality.
Part IV — The Reentry: Awareness Begins the Journey
At 10 p.m., I finally turned my phone back on. It lit up immediately — dozens of messages, alerts, “urgent” updates that had somehow managed to survive without me.
But I didn’t rush to respond. I didn’t feel the old pull. I felt slower. Softer. More centered.
Not anti-technology — just a bit of freedom.
The last couple days, I’ve made a commitment to a few “atomic habit” shifts:
No phone before 8:00 a.m.
Check messages at 10am, noon, and 2pm — not multiple times each hour.
Sit and just be present (meditate) - before being productive.
Pay attention to everything around me - before being available.
Not perfection. Just Practice.
As I’ve learned in mindfulness, awareness begins the transformation… and habits are what completes it.
Truthfully?
Monday didn’t make me more or less “efficient” - it just showed me how disconnected I had become. So, you could say it made me more real.
Closing Reflections & Field Notes
What Stood Out
When my phone wasn’t around, I could feel my own attention again.
I realized how often I reach for my phone not for information, but to dodge a moment of quiet or reflection.
The world is noisy, but the noise wasn’t the problem — the problem was how often I tried to drown it out.
Boredom showed up quickly, but I realized it wasn’t actually boredom — it was restlessness.
Without the constant pull of notifications, I could notice my thoughts, my breath, the room I was in, and the people around me.
I felt more like myself when my attention wasn’t split into a hundred tiny pieces.
When I turned my phone back on, I slipped into old habits almost immediately — but at least I could see it happening.
The simplest truth from the whole day: putting the phone down gave me my mind back — even if only for a while.
If you have had a similar experiment, I’d love to hear about it and share notes. Drop me a line at : steve@renaissance-cc.com
