Thursday night out couldn’t have come sooner. Manchester Be at One cocktail bar is buzzing with students as the politics ball kicks off. It’s an exciting night: long dresses and smart jackets, free cocktails are flowing and the music is turning up. Bags are discarded on tables and sofas as people begin to dance. Uncomfortable to be separated from my phone for more than 10 minutes, I move to grab my bag that’s been strewn on the table. It’s empty. Sheer horror. Straight to voicemail.
Phone addiction is something hard to fully acknowledge until you go cold turkey. My wake-up call was the level of panic I experienced when I realized it had been taken. Like most young people, my phone is like an extension of myself in that I rarely go anywhere without it. It’s my distraction, my support system- connecting me to the people I love. It’s how I record my life and stay in the loop. On a more practical level it allows me to survive- paying for the food shop and catching the bus. Losing all these things at once was a pretty big blow.
So what do you do? You panic. Get a bit teary. Beg the manager to check CCTV. You rack your memory and retrace your steps knowing deep down it’s hopeless. I was embarrassingly unprepared to have my phone stolen. You can imagine the horror when realizing my ID was kept in the back of my phone case. Typical that my phone password was my birthday- a pretty savvy security move if you ask me. We don’t want to make these phone thieves work too hard now do we?
Everyone needs a win once in a while. The bank login details written in my notes app was the cherry on the cake. Forgetting my Apple ID password was when things got ridiculous- preventing me from disabling or tracking the phone. It will now not come as a shock that I also did not remember any phone number to call for help. Given the lack of prep, you could say I had it coming- safe to say they picked the right person to rob.
I was a bit shaken by the initial blow, but waking up the next day was when things got real. No alarm clock was the first taste of my involuntary tech detox. I missed my lecture, not that I would have been able to get the bus or log into blackboard anyway. A disabled bank account and no way to contact anyone left me pretty isolated- and hungry. Not to mention no music in the shower. My life was impacted in ways I had never even considered were reliant entirely on a phone. At first, the only benefit was an impressive zero hours on the screen time stats.
Being completely unreachable is a strange experience. It’s become so normalized that we are reachable and trackable at any point of the day. It was unsettling to be totally alone. Yet at the same time, it was refreshing to hear myself think- forcing me to be more present. I braved a venture into town, quickly discovering this new world I was living in was extremely irritating and impossible to navigate. Pulling my bus pass up on my laptop to board was a low moment. No Google Maps was also pretty tragic, taking me an hour to find HSBC. Practically, losing your phone is a nightmare, but mentally it’s also hard-hitting. It’s a violation- strangers suddenly have access to your whole life. Pictures of messy nights out, text messages with the people you love, paragraphs recorded on notes. Not to mention being stripped of Instagram reels.
So my plea is to learn your Apple ID password, your mum’s number, and whatever you do DO NOT make your iphone password your birthday. It’s something that you think could never happen to you, and when it does it’s better to be prepared. Phones are so deeply ingrained into student lifestyle- from social to survival it was pretty scary to watch how quickly my life fell apart. The world is simply not set up for nonphone users, and university is no different. The experience was isolating but also pretty freeing. Right now the wounds are still fresh- for me recovery looked like 6 straight hours of scrolling when I was eventually reunited with a phone. But leaving it at home is something I would push myself to do in the future.
Why not throw yourself in the deep end? No distraction and no help line is definitely one way to grow independence and become more resourceful. Losing connection is what will build confidence in your ability to navigate a world designed to promote phone dependency and addiction. We all need a bit of space to breathe in lives so suffocated by the internet.
