Unlike people in their teens or early twenties, I did not grow up with smartphones. There were no apps or YouTube. Only books, my Sony Walkman, television, and my own imagination. As a kid I spent more time on books, my imagination, or playing outside than I spent on television. Yet later in my teens, video games eventually took a larger role in how I spent my free time. Eventually, in my late teens and early twenties my first laptop computer became where I spent most of my time, and most of that time was spent reading online. Today the smartphone has largely replaced my laptop in terms of time spent on it as well as being the primary place where I read.

But most of the time I don’t feel better or happier for this little device in my hand. Often I feel my days waste away while spent on it rather than indulged in any of the myriad things I enjoy that are not it. With this feeling and a reflection on my personal history comes a realization: it wasn’t always this way. Because I grew up in a time before smartphones, I know that where I spend my time can and has been different, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that this is a new lifestyle—a smartphone lifestyle.

Perhaps as a consequence of my growing dissatisfaction with this new lifestyle or because I have a friend who loves old time technology, or both, I have begun to think about going back, getting back to a time before my smartphone. Oh, not out of nostalgia: I don’t want my childhood back. No, I just want to live more in the physical world, to touch real people and real things rather than view their avatars on a screen, to have in-person conversations wherever possible, to have the actual experiences rather than their representations. More real world, less cyber world.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t dislike modern technology or wish to take on some kind of anti-technology hermitage. Rather I wish to have the technology augment my life instead of replace it. More and more I want my smartphone to go back to just being an accessory and not my friend, oracle, and personal entertainer. I desire more to be present in the physical world and less in its cyber parallel world, to blend the two where it is healthy for me but weighted heavily on the real rather than the virtual. I want to move on from the smartphone lifestyle.