5 Things We Knew Before Smartphones

The doctor’s waiting room, the queue for a lottery ticket, the bus stop. Look around today and you’ll almost certainly see a sea of people with their heads down, reading, swiping or tapping at a phone.

Very few moments seem to escape it now. We reach for our phones while we wait, while we travel, while we eat and, increasingly, even while we’re supposed to be experiencing something extraordinary, from the birth of a child to a Taylor Swift concert.

Using a phone to fill those little gaps in the day has become so automatic that it’s surprisingly hard to remember what we did before.

So what did we do?

Quite often, very little.

We looked out of windows. We read whatever happened to be lying around. We got annoyed at our friend for being late again. Often we simply sat there, contemplating life, while staring into space.

We tend to romanticise the world before smartphones as a more attentive, connected place, but much of that supposedly precious free time was actually rather dull.

Smartphones solved a lot of problems. The interesting question is whether, somewhere along the way, they started creating a few new ones.

Five Things We Knew Before Smartphones

1. How to be bored

Boredom used to arrive whether you wanted it or not. If somebody was late, you waited. If the train journey took three hours, it took three hours. There was no endless supply of alternative stimulation waiting in your pocket. That did not necessarily make us wiser or more creative. Sometimes it just made us bored. But out of that boredom came silly games, talking to people and contemplation.

For younger people especially, empty time has become incredibly uncomfortable. A ten minute wait without a smartphone feels like an eternity. Why? Because they never learnt how to be bored.

2. We remembered things because we had to

There was a time when you actually knew other people’s telephone numbers. Your parents’ number, your children’s number, the local taxi firm or your local pub. Those numbers lived in your head because there was nowhere else particularly convenient to put them.

Now we rarely need to remember them, so we don’t.

So what happens when your phone breaks, you’re in a foreign country, you’re being chased by crocodiles and you need to phone your wife for help? OK, so a rare set of circumstances, but you see the point.

Our phones have become an external memory bank. They hold our contacts, appointments, directions, passwords, photographs and reminders, which is incredibly useful, right up until the moment we can’t access them.

That doesn’t mean we should all start memorising 20 phone numbers again. But perhaps there’s something to be said for keeping one or two important numbers somewhere other than your phone, just in case life ever does take a particularly crocodile-shaped turn.

3. We knew roughly where we were

Before Google Maps, navigation involved considerably more optimism. You looked at the map before setting off, maybe printed off pages of instructions, or jotted down a list of road names that later made absolutely no sense once you were actually on the road.

Few people would genuinely choose to go back to that.

Having directions in your pocket is one of the great advantages of the smartphone, particularly for somebody who wants to remain independent and get around confidently. But there is a trade-off. When the phone does all the navigating for us, it becomes very easy to stop noticing where we actually are.

So what happens when the battery dies, the signal disappears or Google Maps decides you’ve somehow driven into a field?

You suddenly realise you’ve been following a blue dot for the past 40 minutes and couldn’t tell anyone the name of the road you’re on. Again, not a reason to throw away Google Maps. But perhaps it’s worth glancing up occasionally, noticing the landmarks and keeping a rough sense of direction.

4. We made a plan and stuck to it

There was a time when arranging to meet someone was remarkably simple.

“Outside the cinema at seven.”

And that was basically it.

You didn’t send six updates on the way there, change the restaurant twice, move the time by 20 minutes or spend ten minutes trying to work out whether “fine” meant genuinely fine or absolutely furious. Of course, messaging has made life easier in lots of ways.

But it has also made plans more fluid, and sometimes more complicated than they need to be.

A message can be misunderstood and a simple arrangement can somehow become an ongoing negotiation. In the old days, a phone call would sort the whole thing out in 30 seconds.

We may not want to go back to waiting outside the wrong cinema for half an hour, but perhaps there was something useful about making a plan, agreeing it, and then simply getting on with it.

5. We knew how to be unavailable.

Once, when you left work, your email generally stayed there. If you went out, you could simply be out. People could call you, but they might not reach you, and nobody assumed you had seen something merely because they had sent it.

Smartphones removed those natural boundaries.

At first, that felt liberating. Then the apps arrived. And with them came something we now call the ‘attention economy’.

Many of the services on our phones are not simply waiting patiently to be useful. Their business depends on keeping us engaged, hooked even. So notifications appear, feeds refresh endlessly and another video begins before we have quite decided whether we wanted to watch the first one. Every app is competing for a small piece of our attention.

Which means being unavailable now takes a little more effort.

There was once something quite ordinary about having parts of the day when nobody could reach you. Those gaps gave us a bit of mental breathing space without us having to consciously create it.

Now, calm often has to be chosen.

Maybe that is one thing worth holding on to from the pre-smartphone world: the idea that not every message needs an immediate answer, and not every moment needs to be interrupted.

So were things better before smartphones?

Probably not.

But have smartphones gone too far?

Possibly.

A smartphone does not need to contain every possible distraction simply because it can. It can give you the apps and functions that make everyday life easier, without expecting you to manage a miniature digital universe in return.

The Chatsie phone is designed with simplicity in mind. Everything you need, without all the things you don’t. A smartphone that knows when to help, and when to leave you to look out the window and contemplate life.