The Appstinence Movement: Why Harvard Students Are Dating Flip Phones

:: 00:00

I'm cleaning out my car's glove box, you know, the archeological dig between stale napkins and expired insurance cards, when a stray photograph slides out. An honest to God, glossy four by six from the days when sharing meant double prints at CVS. It's my buddy Nick dressed as a taco at a 2009 Halloween party. No pixels, no filters. Just paper smelling faintly of bourbon and regret. Instinctively, my thumb and index finger pinch the corner. I wait, as if the paper will obligingly expand, cough up a like button, and serve me a targeted ad for antacids. Nothing happens. That's when my frontal lobe clears its throat and says, "Hey, genius, you just tried to multitouch cellulose." I laugh, then panic, because that phantom gesture, desperate for glass, is proof I've spent a decade training my brain to expect infinite zoom. Paper can't zoom. Life can't zoom. And that, dear listener, is where today's dumb adventure begins.

:: 01:08

Dumbify, let your neurons dance. Put your brain in backwards pants. Genius hides in daft disguise. Brilliance wears those googly eyes. So honk your nose and chase that spark. Dumb is just smart in the dark. Dumbify. Yelling like a goose. It's thinking wrong on purpose with Juice.

:: 01:33

Welcome to Dumbify, the show that gives participation trophies to ideas everyone swore were remedial, right before those ideas aced the final. I'm David Carson, and today we're praising the sacred ritual of digital downgrade. That blessed moment when you look at your turbocharged pocket casino and think, "Nah, let's throw this Ferrari in reverse." This isn't optimization. It's deliberate de-optimization. It's taking the slick little thief that keeps pickpocketing your attention and drop-kicking it out the nearest window with all the courtesy of a thank you note taped to its forehead. I was introduced to Gabriella Wynne, a Harvard junior, and the founding chief troublemaker of a movement called Abstinence. Yes, like abstinence, but, but for apps. Gabriella owns three phones, a bubblegum pink flip phone, whose ringer sounds like AOL just found Jesus. A stone gray brick that resembles a garage door opener that has features like makes calls and exist. And a matte black slab called the Light Phone 3, marketed proudly as a dumbphone for smart people. The first production run shipped this March and sold out in under 48 hours. She's not anti-tech. She's more pro-friction. In a campus Q&A, she said, "The harder it is to doom scroll, the easier it is to finish a thought." Instant poster material. Abstinence began as a dare. Survive finals week, armed only with a Jurassic era flip phone, the kind that makes you hit the seven key four times, just to land on an S. The experiment's aftermath was equal parts comedy and revelation. GPAs went up, migraines went down, and my favorite KPI, Gabriella claims she can hear birds again. So yeah, maybe in a world that straps four cameras, face ID lasers, and a casino's worth of notifications onto every phone, the slickest upgrade is yanking the thing back to call and text only dumbness. Gabriella posted her experiment on a campus bulletin board. A week later, 50 students swapped their iPhones for old school dumbphones. And a month later, 5,000 students, spanning from UCLA to NYU, were hosting scroll-free Sundays in coffee shops with hand drawn posters that read, "Wifi is lava." Imagine a silent disco, but instead of headphones, everybody's waving around 2005 flip phones like neon glow sticks, bragging about T9 texting thumb callouses the way CrossFitters brag about blisters. I gotta tell you, that analog weirdness is contagious. I attended one meetup, and within 10 minutes, I felt compelled to share my Social Security number as haiku just to belong. At first glance, it's Luddite cosplay. But dig deeper, and you'll see an insurgency against a business model that profits when your attention sits in rehab. They're not ditching tech. They're ditching tech that treats them like walking ad impressions.

:: 04:54

I'm ditching technology that treats me like an ad impression. Every click a little trick to track my next obsession. If my toaster starts suggesting pans. I'm moving to the woods to live with ants. So take my phone and all its sins. I'll trade it for a rock and some porcupine twins. Oh, oh, oh.

:: 05:26

So what's actually going on in our brains when we're on our phones? Let's crack open the hood a bit. The average person touches their phone 2,617 times per day. That's not hyperbole. That's from a D-Scout study where researchers literally installed tracking software on people's phones and counted every tap, swipe, and desperate scroll for seven straight days. And what they found was that 2/3 of those touches happened inside apps owned by just two companies, Google and Meta. Which means we're essentially letting those two companies program a significant chunk of our waking hours.That is bonkers. But why can't we stop touching the glass? Because smartphones have weaponized what psychologists call the variable reward schedule. You scroll, maybe you get a like. Dopamine whispers, "Hey, nice hit." So you scroll again. Maybe this time there's a comment. Maybe this time there's drama. Maybe this time someone finally appreciated your photo of that sandwich. It's the same mechanism that makes slot machines so addictive, the intermittent jackpot, the near miss high, the just-one-more-pull compulsion. Except the slot machine is in your pocket, and it never closes. Now, here's where the neuroscience gets wild. Researchers at the University of Utah and Baylor College of Medicine actually implanted electrodes, real wires, into the brains of epilepsy patients and watched what happened during creative thinking. They discovered that creativity lights up in a network called the default mode network. Think of it as your brain's backstage jazz club, where memories jam with daydreams and half-formed ideas, riff with each other in beautiful, chaotic harmony. But here's the really weird thing. This creative jazz session only happens when your brain's executive function steps away for a little break. The moment your notifications start pinging again, your brain shuts down the jazz session like a, like a nightclub bouncer hitting the lights at 2:00 AM. Music off, party over, everyone out. Constant interruption doesn't just steal your time, it shuts down your ability to think creatively. No wonder the abstinence kids swear they feel taller inside their own heads. When you buy yourself silence, you're actually buying vertical space for ideas to grow. Doctor Larry Rosen, professor emeritus at California State University, has proven that to be true. He spent years studying what he calls continuous partial attention. Our modern ability to sort of focus on everything while fully focusing on nothing. His research shows that the average person checks their phone 150 times per day. That's once every six minutes during waking hours. We're not using our phones, we are having a relationship with them. A codependent, slightly abusive relationship where one party provides all the dopamine and the other party provides well, everything else. When researchers study what happens to people who voluntarily downgrade their phones, who choose friction over convenience, something fascinating occurs. Their ability to think deeply returns. Their attention spans expand. Their anxiety decreases. They activate their default mode network, the same brain state that leads to creative insights, problem-solving, and [laughs] what we've been calling dumb brilliance. In other words, when you make your phone dumber, your brain gets smarter. Now, I know what you're thinking, "David, this sounds great in theory, but I have a job. I have responsibilities. I can't just go back to smoke signals and carrier pigeons."

:: 09:19

I can't just go back. To smoke signals and carrier pigeons. Tried once, the bird stole my fries. And joined some magicians.

:: 09:34

I miss my brain. Yeah, I miss my soul. But TikTok don't work on a pile of coal.

:: 09:46

And you're right, this isn't about becoming a digital hermit. It's about strategic stupidity, intentional inconvenience, the art of making your technology work for you instead of the other way around.

:: 10:00

Let me introduce you to the abstinence movement's secret weapon, the concept of beneficial friction. Think about it this way. Your smartphone is like having a casino in your pocket. It's designed to be frictionless, instant, addictive. Every swipe is optimized to keep you engaged, scrolling, clicking, consuming. But what if you could add just enough friction to break the spell? What if posting on social media involved enough steps that you had to consider whether your thought was actually worth sharing? What if your phone was just slightly less convenient? Just annoying enough that you used it intentionally instead of compulsively. That's the genius of abstinence. It's not about going backward, it's about going sideways, taking the path that seems less efficient but leads to more thinking. And that's where Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang come in. They're both ex-Google design rebels who built the Light Phone. Their elevator pitch is pretty simple. A phone designed to be used as little as possible. The specs? A black and white E ink screen. The ability to make calls, texts, navigate around town, [laughs] podcasts, because obviously you still need this podcast.

:: 11:17

Yeah.

:: 11:17

And that's basically it. If you try to ask Siri a question, she just screams in existential dread because Siri does not exist here.

:: 11:27

Yay.

:: 11:27

But a hefty price does. It's $599. The same basic ballpark as an Apple iPhone. Why would anyone pay that kind of money to not have an app store? Because boring sells. Counterpoint Research estimates US feature phone sales hit 2.8 million units in 2023 and will hold steady as Gen Z flirts with detox culture. That's 2.8 million pockets refusing to double tap your brunch pick. Light Phone adverts show smiling 20-somethings sitting on docks reading philosophy, and my favorite, looking at trees like trees are live theater.It's goofy, yet the wait list is months long. People crave subtraction the way over-salted diners crave water.

:: 12:14

Prospect Park, Sunday afternoon. I spy a cluster of teenagers sprawled on quilts. Paperback copies of Kierkegaard and Jane Eyre strewn like autumn leaves. Their flip phones sit face down, collectively ignored like a bowl of raisins at a Halloween party. They call themselves The Luddite Club, a deliberate nod to the 19th century textile artisans who smashed mechanized looms. They meet weekly, ditch smartphones, and talk in person about existential dread, homework, and whether tofu is terrible. Spoiler, it is. I asked one member, Logan, whether he misses Spotify recommendations. He just kind of shrugged and said, "Birdsong has thrown me some bangers lately." I almost wept. Watching them, I realized boredom is socially contagious. Sit next to a kid ignoring his phone and your own device feels like a clingy ex. Let me tell you about Marcus, a software engineer from Austin who joined the abstinence movement last year. Marcus was what you might call a power user. Three monitors, two phones, a smartwatch that could probably run NASA. He was optimized, efficient, connected to everything all the time. He was also miserable. "I felt like I was living inside a notification," he told me. "I'd start my day with intentions. I wanted to write code, solve problems, create something meaningful. But by lunch, I'd consumed so much digital noise that my brain felt like scrambled eggs." So Marcus did something radical. He bought a dumb phone. Not as a replacement for his smartphone, but as an experiment in intentional technology use. For one month, he used the dumb phone during work hours. No apps, no internet, no social media. Just calls, texts, and the terrifying sound of his own thoughts. The first week was brutal. He felt phantom notifications. He reached for apps that weren't there. He discovered he'd been using his phone as a fidget toy, checking it whenever he felt even the slightest discomfort or boredom. But by week two, something shifted. His code got cleaner. His solutions got more creative. He started having ideas, real ideas, instead of just reacting to other people's thoughts all day. By month's end, Marcus had written the best software of his career. "It wasn't that the dumb phone made me smarter," he said. "It's that my smartphone had been making me stupider, and I just never noticed." And this brings us to today's dumb word of the day.

:: 15:03

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb word of the day. Dumb word of the day. It's a word. It's dumb. Use responsibly.

:: 15:12

That's right, it's time for dumb word of the day. Because learning weird new words that sound made up makes life worth living. But then again, so does ice cream, industrial strength hair mousse, and the comforting blink of the kitchen lights when you are halfway through a seance with the ghost of a mildly disgruntled clam. That was weird.

:: 15:34

Yeah!

:: 15:34

Sorry. So here's your dumb word of the day. Nomophobia. Spelled N-O-M-O-P-H-O-B-I-A. Nomophobia. It's short for no mobile phone phobia, because apparently even our psychological conditions have bad acronyms now. Nomophobia is the irrational fear of being without your mobile phone. It's the invisible leash we paid for. The condition where the moment you realize you've left your phone at home, you briefly forget how to function as a mammal.

:: 16:07

Time slows, sweat forms. You start looking around for the nearest payphone, only to remember those were hunted to extinction sometime around the debut of Shrek 2. But here's the beautiful dumb truth about nomophobia. It's not really about the phone. It's about the fear of being alone with your thoughts. The terror of experiencing a moment without input, without stimulation, without someone else's content filling the spaces in your head. Nomophobia is your brain's way of saying, "Please don't make me think. I'm out of practice." And that's exactly why Gabriella Wynne wants you to feel it, because once you sit in that discomfort long enough, not scroll, not check, not click, you stop panicking and start noticing. You notice the color of the sky, the sound of actual birds instead of notification chimes. The fact that your thoughts, when left alone, are actually pretty interesting.

:: 17:13

Nomophobia isn't just a diagnosis. It's a clue, a sign your brain is overdue for a vacation from the digital IV drip.

:: 17:23

Okay. So, you want rubber meets the road instructions for lowering your phone's IQ without shaving your head and moving to a monastery?

:: 17:34

Yes!

:: 17:35

Welcome to what I fondly call the ladder of inconvenience. A solid seven-rung escape hatch for attention hostages. You start on the bottom rung by draining the color from your screen. One tap, everything goes gray scale and Instagram suddenly tastes like sugar-free candy corn. Technically edible, but why bother? A step higher, you slip a single app off the plank each week. The ones that leave you feeling like a houseplant under fluorescent lights. Gone.... next rung, you muzzle notifications until only genuine emergencies and your mother's texts make the cut. Keep climbing. Shove your most-abused apps onto a distant home screen. Bury them under passwords so obnoxious you have to want the dopamine before you can hit enter.

:: 18:29

Halfway up, declare one sacred hour when your phone is banished to airplane mode and you remember books are three-dimensional objects that smell like vanilla and dust. Higher still, swap the supercomputer for a dumb brick one day a week. Calls, texts, that's it, luxuriating in the radical thrill of being unreachable. And if you're feeling frosty at the summit, use an old-school flip phone for an entire month. Watch what blooms in the silence where your thumb scrolling and tapping used to be. You may even start hearing birds again, or, wild thought, your own ideas getting loud enough to shout back. Let me tell you what happened when I tried that last step. I bought a flip phone, not a retro one designed to look cool, but an actual honest-to-God flip phone that could barely send texts and made every call sound like you were underwater. The first day was comical. I kept trying to use it like a smartphone. I'd flip it open and stare at the tiny screen, waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened. It was just a screen with numbers.

:: 19:38

But by the end of the week, something beautiful occurred. I stopped reaching for it compulsively. I stopped filling every quiet moment with digital stimulation. I started paying attention to my actual life instead of everyone else's curated version of theirs. I had conversations without documenting them. I ate meals without photographing them. I took walks without mapping my route. And in those quiet, unoptimized moments, I started having ideas again, real ideas, the kind that bubble up from somewhere deep instead of just reacting to whatever I'd just consumed. That's when I understood what Gabriella had discovered. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is make your technology just stupid enough that you remember how to think. This brings us to the deeper question, what are we actually afraid of when we're afraid of being without our phones? I think we're afraid of boredom, uh, of silence, of the possibility that our inner lives might not be as interesting as our feeds. When you're constantly consuming, you're never creating. When you're always reacting, you're never reflecting. When every moment is filled with input, there's no room for output. The abstinence movement isn't anti-technology. It's pro-thinking. It's about using technology as a tool instead of letting it use you as a user. If dumber phones, slower texts, and grayscale screens still sound medieval to you, remember, discomfort is where good stories and good art usually start. I bet you didn't know that Ed Sheeran, yes, that Ed Sheeran, actually ditched his iPhone for an entire month back in 2024 and wrote over 40 songs. Selena Gomez enforces her own offline Sundays and claims it's the only reason she can finish journal entries instead of rage-scrolling comment sections. And TikTok's digital minimalism hashtag has 460 million views, ironically proving we need TikTok to teach us how to quit TikTok. So yes, subtraction has momentum. Let me share just one more story.

:: 21:52

Sarah, a marketing executive from Chicago, told me about her accidental abstinence experience.

:: 22:01

She was traveling for work and forgot her phone charger. Her phone died on day one of a three-day business trip. She panicked initially. Uh, how would she check emails? How would she navigate? How would she fill the empty moments between meetings? But then something remarkable happened. Without her phone, she started talking to people. Real conversations, the kind that happen when you're not half-watching for notifications. She asked the hotel concierge for restaurant recommendations instead of checking Yelp. She bought a local newspaper instead of scrolling news apps. She people-watched in the airport instead of doom-scrolling. By day three, she'd had more meaningful human interactions than she'd had in months. She noticed architectural details in the city she'd never seen before, despite having visited dozens of times. She had ideas for her business that didn't come from her competitor's Instagram posts or industry newsletters. When she got home and plugged in her phone, she felt a strange reluctance to turn it back on. Not because she hated technology, but because she'd remembered what it felt like to be fully present in her own life. "I realized I'd been living at the surface of my own experience," she told me. "My phone wasn't just stealing my time, it was stealing my depth." So what does this mean for those of us who can't completely unplug? How do we find depth in a shallow digital world? The answer isn't to reject technology entirely. It's to reclaim our intentionality, to remember that every notification we allow, every app we install, every alert we permit is a choice about what gets to interrupt our thoughts. The goal isn't to go backward to a time before smartphones. It's to go forward to a time when we use them consciously instead of compulsively. Here's your dumbify challenge for this week. Try one day of beneficial friction. Pick one thing about your phone that's too convenient, too frictionless, too optimized for your own good. Then make it slightly harder to access. Move your social media apps to a folder called Time Wasters.Turn your phone to grayscale for 24 hours. Write your to-do list by hand instead of typing it. Leave your phone in another room during meals. Use a physical alarm clock, and charge your phone outside your bedroom. Whatever you choose, notice what happens in the spaces between. Notice what your brain does when it's not being constantly fed. Notice what ideas surface when you're not constantly consuming. Because somewhere in that quiet, in that friction, in that deliberate inconvenience, you might find something that all the optimization in the world can't deliver. Your own thoughts. Your own ideas. Your own capacity for wonder. The abstinence movement isn't about going back to the past, it's about reclaiming the future, a future where technology serves human creativity instead of replacing it, where our devices help us think instead of thinking for us, where we choose depth over speed, presence over productivity, and the radical luxury of our own undistracted minds.

:: 25:20

Thank you for getting intentionally inconvenient with me today.

:: 25:25

If this episode made you want to throw your smartphone in a drawer and buy a dumbphone, share it with someone who has 47 browser tabs open and calls that research.

:: 25:38

If you want more dumb wisdom delivered to your inbox without any push notifications, pop-ups, or algorithmic manipulation, subscribe to the Dumbify newsletter at david-carson.com.

:: 25:50

Until next time, stay curious, stay dumb, and remember, sometimes the smartest thing you can do is make your technology just stupid enough that you remember how to think. This is David Carson signing off from the age of abstinence, where less is more, slower is faster, and the most radical thing you can do is nothing at all.