Goodbye, Cruel Wordle!

New experiment: Phone Fight! 30 days with no social media, games, or news

Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year. Two Gen X friends. Countless personal experiments.
Can they figure out the meaning of midlife?
(A project from The Creativity Guild)

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Field Notes on Phone Usage

A few weeks ago, I received an invitation I could not refuse. Emmy Laybourne announced that she was looking for beta-testers for her brand new 5 Week Phone Fight course, a program designed to reshape the unhealthy aspects of your relationship with your phone. It felt like a sign from the Midlife Field Guide universe and I quickly volunteered to be part of it.

Why was this a sign from the universe? I have some embarrassing behaviours to share with you.

This time is almost 100% doing Wordle and other NYT Games!

• Immediately upon waking, I spend roughly 45 minutes every single day of the week doing New York Times Games. I start with Wordle. After completing it, I send my results and a taunting roast to a competitive family group Wordle chat, where we all make fun of each other, boast about our Wordle prowess, and post stupid memes. Then, I move on to Connections, the Mini, Strands, and wrap my carnival of games with Spelling Bee. (I partly blame AJ Jacobs and his wonderful book, The Puzzler, for my affliction.)

• I compulsively check LinkedIn. Yes. You read that correctly. I get dopamine hits from LinkedIn. I check it many, many times a day. How is it even possible to have FOMO about potentially missing a barely concealed humble brag, a shameless business plug, or an AI-written attempt at thought leadership? I don’t know! There is clearly something wrong with me and I need help.

• When I’m bored, I cycle through news apps, messages, and email to fill some sort of void in my life that only deep therapy will be able to uncover.

• At night, I prefer spending time scrolling TikTok or Reels to watching TV or most streaming shows. (I feel your judgment already…)

• The result of these shameful behaviours? An average screen time of roughly four and a half hours a day on my phone. This is my one precious life, and as you may have guessed—this being the Midlife Field Guide and all… I’m not exactly a spring chicken with an infinite runway of time.

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The Experiment

Steve will abstain from social media, games, and news on any digital device for thirty days.

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The Hypothesis

A few predictions…

1. This is going to be hard.

2. I am going to be bored and restless. What exactly am I going to do for the first 45 minutes of my day? What am I going to do when I am waiting in line, or have five minutes between meetings? How am I going to unwind at the end of my day?

3. I might run out of excuses to avoid activities that I actually enjoy doing, but that take a back seat to digital distractions. Things like writing more often, reading books, or playing guitar.

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The Data: My Week One Phone Fight Diary

July 28 - Day One

I just kicked off the 30-day Phone Fight by removing the following apps from my phone:

• LinkedIn

• NYT

• TikTok

• Instagram

• Facebook

• Google News

• Apple News

It was legitimately stressful removing them from my phone. Most of these apps were firmly ensconced on my home screen because I use them so often. It was a bit like sending one of your kids off to camp. “See you in a month! Miss you already!”

More big changes:

• My phone is now out of my bedroom at night. I know I should have done this before, but I never did. I feel proud of myself!

• All my notifications are turned off, including on my watch.

• Phones are now banned during meals or at the kitchen table.

Perhaps the hardest part of this phone fight has already been accomplished. My Wordle streak has been broken! I was getting very close to my all-time Wordle streak and I voluntarily pulled the chute. I also left the family Wordle Chat (which I’m sure will be welcome news for many of my family members). I ripped off the bandaid and… I have FOMO already. There is a sense of emptiness—what am I going to do for the first forty-five minutes of my day from now on?

Proud of myself for including Adieu, a popular starting word, in my Wordle departure note.

(Please note that I CRUSHED Wordle on my last day—it was like winning the Super Bowl and immediately announcing your retirement.)

Everyone in my family seems very supportive of my Phone Fight, except for my father, who is outraged about the Wordle situation. “Whaaaat? What’s wrong with 15 minutes a day of fun? This is too much…”

Finally, in line with making this public and making a commitment I can’t back away from, I posted on all my social media channels:

As you may know, Geoff Siskind and I have started the Midlife Field Guide and are currently doing a year of public life experiments in an attempt to figure out midlife. Today, I am starting a 30-day digital detox program called The 5 Week Phone Fight course, by Emmy Laybourne. I will still post updates occasionally (from my laptop), but I will otherwise not be on social media for the next month. Wish me luck as I go through withdrawal!

I am already anxious about not being able to see if anyone is commenting on my absence on social media! Is anyone on LinkedIn interested that I am not going to be on LinkedIn? The irony! (Get over yourself, you hideous egomaniac!!!)

July 29 - Day Two

I slept with my phone in another room at home for the first time. It was shockingly fine.

It’s only day two, but I am already much more conscious of every time I pick up my phone. Every time I reach for it, I feel like I’m day drinking and should be ashamed of myself.

First thing in the morning, to combat Wordle Withdrawal, I did some journaling and ended up getting a lot of great creative work done. This could be the key to developing a creative morning routine - stay off your effing phone!

I have noticed that when I do use my phone, it’s mostly for texting and phone calls, which is kind of what a phone is actually for…

July 30 - Day Three

The universe is testing me. And LinkedIn is acting like a drug dealer. I am getting automated emails that people have left comments on my LinkedIn post about not being on social media. I am getting emails that someone has tagged me in a LinkedIn post. LinkedIn is trying SO HARD to generate FOMO and get me back in the land of shameless plugs! Not gonna lie… I am dying to click and find out what is going on. Must resist!

On the flip side, I feel like I have significantly more time in the mornings without my NYT Games, without scouring headlines, and without checking all sorts of sites and apps to see if I’ve missed anything.

A new wrinkle today… I just got feedback from my wife that she misses me giving her “kudos” on Strava for her runs. This is a long-running joke between us. Even prior to this experiment, I have never given “kudos” often enough or quickly enough on Strava. Why? My explanation is quite simple: I resent having to give people “kudos” on workouts. (For a while, I tried giving “robo-kudos” that automatically “like'“ workouts from select people (Debbie), but those people (Debbie) told me that robo-kudos don’t feel “genuine.”)

I have made the bold decision to abstain from giving kudos to anyone for this experiment and it already feels like one of the best gifts I have given myself yet. (I have already asked Debbie about her latest run and congratulated her in person… but it appears that a public “Strava kudo” is her Love Language).

Speaking of Debbie, I have a big Phone Fight announcement to share today! She has joined me in her own personal Phone Fight. She deleted Apple News, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and is voluntarily keeping her phone away from the meal table. She is never on LinkedIn and won’t give up the NYT for news, but most importantly, she has bailed on NYT Games, too!

Insight alert! I've come to realize I don’t really care that my mega-Wordle streak has ended. It was more about seeing the taunting streak number inside the app. If I’m not in Wordle, there’s no streak number to make me feel good or bad.

I need to pay attention to this type of gamification and how vulnerable I am to it. (At some point, I should do an experiment that removes all my health tracking information—I can’t even tell you how long my streaks are on Apple Watch!)

July 31 - Day Four

Emmy Laybourne says that this might well be the hardest day of the entire month! The day you have to break the back of your phone addiction.

So far, my day four has been better than expected. I hopped out of bed today. No Wordle and no NYT Games. I’m finding that I am already replacing my game time with writing time, and it feels great. Just the act of writing this Phone Fight diary is making the absence of green and yellow squares, or trash-talking my family in the Wordle Chat, very manageable.

Insight Alert! Screen Time is another B.S. thing to track. My Screen Time is down over 40% on average for this first week of the Phone Fight, which is great, but I’ve already learned something about myself and about Screen Time in general.

My first day was WAY down, under an hour and a half. But days three and four were over 3 hours. How is this possible? Well… It’s because I was listening to audiobooks and music. I realized that I am still being victimized by gamification design!

My new Screen Time without NYT Games, news, or social media.

I’ve been subconsciously using my Screen Time number as a marker of achievement or success, but it’s not actually measuring the things that are important to me in this experiment. The win for me is that I am not spending time compulsively checking LinkedIn, social media, or news apps. And that I am not burning the first, precious hour of my day doing Wordle and all the other NYT Games. (Note to self: where else am I subconsciously using someone else’s gamified leaderboard that is defined on their terms instead of mine?)

I’m not going to punish myself by avoiding audiobooks, music, or actual phone calls that increase my Screen Time so that I can feel better about a number on a screen.

I’m not sure whether I’m an outlier with this Phone Fight, but this is going better than I had expected. Yes, I am still having the itch to check social media. But it’s more of a ‘mosquito bite itch’ and not, say, a ‘rolling around nude in poison ivy itch.’

End of day four. Scratch that previous overconfident thought. I am outdoors watching the sunset and I am actually restless without my go-to apps. I want to use TikTok and Reels pretty badly right now… How can I be restless looking at this?

And yet… I want to zone out and watch dumb short videos.

Emmy was right… so far this IS the hardest day!

August 1 - Day Five

Returning to app leaderboards and gamification, I need to confess that I have an Oura ring and I pay a lot of attention to my sleep score. I generally wake up a lot at night and rarely get a sleep score above 80. Last night, my sleep score skyrocketed. Is it because my phone was out of my room? I don’t know, but it certainly is the primary suspect at this point!

Emmy Laybourne has a strict ‘no phone in bedroom’ rule in the Phone Fight course, with scientific justification:

“Having your phone near your bed triggers something called "Psychological Hyper-Vigilance."* When your phone is nearby it creates a subconscious urge to check it, keeping the brain alert and preventing it from fully relaxing.”

I’m going to keep monitoring my sleep to see if this trend continues. If it turns out that having my phone beside the bed has been subconsciously ruining my sleep for decades, and just putting it in another room gives me better sleep… this entire 30-day experiment will be 1000% worth it.

News Alert! An interesting observation so far about removing news apps from my phone:

• I found out about the potential tsunami on the West Coast of Canada (text from my father).

• I heard about a wildfire in the interior of British Columbia (phone call from my mother).

• I was told that the EU negotiated a tariff deal with the U.S. (cashier told me)

I honestly don’t feel all that out of the loop at this point, but I feel less anxiety hearing about these things from humans compared with frantically checking a news app for updates to see if anything has changed or evolved.

August 2 - Day Six

I heard through the rumour mill that I am being trash-talked in the family Wordle Chat. Using all my willpower to restrain from jumping in to defend myself and also to burn everyone else!

As I near the end of week one, another sign from the universe arrived in my inbox. Padraig O’Sullivan, who you’ll be hearing more about soon, sent me a quote from David Foster Wallace in 1996 (!) that was featured in Tim Ferriss’ newsletter:

And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. …how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn’t all that much fun minute by minute but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being?”

This is exactly what this Phone Fight is all about. I am giving way too much of my time to a screen filled with content from people who do not love me but want my money. Taking refuge for 30 days is about sacrificing the immediate, mindless dopamine hits for a much bigger reward—the ability to spend my time and attention in the ways that are most meaningful to me personally.

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I’ll provide another update on the Phone Fight in a future edition of the Midlife Field Guide. I hope this might lead some of you to do a similar experiment with your phone and attention—if you try it out, please let me know! Here’s the link to Emmy’s course if you’d like to learn more: https://www.fightyourphone.com/

Please let me know if you have any advice for managing the rest of the month!

Steve

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