Hand up. I’ve definitely been to events before where I’ve taken videos. Sue me. But let’s be honest with each other… re-watching the videos afterwards can be a little disarming when you realize you can only hear your own shrilly voice screaming the words to Get Low by Lil Jon and The Eastside Boys. And you know what? I’m not really sure that recording it helped me have a better memory of the concert. I actually wish I didn’t even bother taking out my phone.

I love going to concerts and sporting events, but somehow I’m always the person at the concert standing behind the 6’5” colossus of a human being with both arms up recording every single song for the duration of the show. We’ve all been to concerts or watched sporting events where EVERY SINGLE PERSON is on their phone recording what’s right in front of them. It’s like a Black Mirror episode.

Preface: You know when you go to send a professional email and you’re trying to balance the uses of exclamation points, periods, and questions to come across as serious but also lighthearted? This next paragraph is all question marks. I’m sorry.(!)

The question becomes, are we okay with this? Are we falling into this trap because everyone else is doing it and the social pressure of “missing out” on recording the moment is too great? What would happen if we didn’t take our phones out? What might our experience and our memories of that experience be like if we simply just experienced them with a good old fashioned ocular pat-down? To go a step further, what might it look like if the event venue completely bannedthe use of your phone?

Why The Masters Gets It Right

For those unfamiliar & uninitiated into the greatest week in golf, The Masters is one of the four major tournaments of the golf season. It’s easily argued to be the best and most prestigious tournament, with many long-standing traditions that heighten its allure for golf fans around the world. Many traditions have become iconic: the green jacket given to the winner of the tournament, the champions dinner before the tournament where the winner gets to pick the menu to share with past winners, pimento cheese sandwiches for $1.50 (think of this like the Costco glizzy which will never go up in price), and many, many more.

One of their long-standing and iconic traditions has been the banning of phones from being brought in and used during the tournament. Instead, they provide courtesy phones that are stationed around the course for people to utilize. These phones become a fun way to make a call to back to your family at home to let them know that you’re at the course. In Augusta, your use of a phone becomes intentional rather than compulsive. Just like everything else in Augusta, everything is intentional. Not a blade of grass out of place.

In any other major tournament when you see Rory McIlroy walk up to the tee box, you’re going to see every single person with their phone recording him (most of them will also be looking at their phone instead of looking at him). Fans are vying at the chance to take a selfie with the players. People are recording themselves heckling the players to make a viral video. You’ve got phones ringing during backswings. People looking at their Slack notifications, emails, texts, Teams messages, eBay bid notifications, FarmersOnly Moosages, Candy Crush alerts, full volume TikTok videos, and everything else we absolutely cannot possibly live without.

But not in Augusta.

The Masters forces you to live in the moment. You can’t take photos or videos with your phone (oh darn), so your only option is to commit everything to memory. And you know what the consensus is? People love it. After the fourth or fifth time of frantically checking your pockets, you just accept the fact that you don’t have your trusty companion anymore. You live in the moment. You smell the azaleas. You pull a Green Day and take the photographs and still frames in your mind. You talk to the people standing next to you. You listen to the birds chir– oh what’s that? I’m being told that’s pumped in to the TV artificially… oh okay … You check the scores on the physical scoreboard. Your pimento cheese sandwich tastes a little better. The grass looks a bit greener.

Can It Be Emulated?

What might a concert or a music festival look like if we banned phones? Would we enjoy the experience more? Instead of checking your messages in between sets, maybe you talk to the strangers around you. Maybe they become your new friends for the night. Maybe you pay more attention to the work it takes from the crew to get the stage set up. Sure, you don’t get to watch the video you took, but maybe there are other ways of remembering your experience there. Maybe you take a couple photos and keep your ticket stub. Your memory of the night doesn’t have to live in the cloud. It can live in the stories you tell and the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you recap the night with your family & friends.

Steelers games with my dad. Music festivals with my wife. Baseball games with my family. My best memories from all of them share one thing… my phone was nowhere near my hand. Don’t live to prove to everyone else that you’re living. Live to be fully present in every single moment.

I would love to hear your thoughts! Do you think it’s possible to emulate The Masters experience? Is it worth trying?

I have no control. Easter was this past weekend and with it came a basket full of candy (yes I’m almost 30 years old but you’re never too old to absolutely house 300 Starburst jelly beans and a bag of nerds gummy clusters.) If there’s candy out on the counter, I’m going to eat it. Plain and simple. It’s only after I’m sick to my stomach that I decide that to just put it away in our candy bin on the high shelf that makes it hard to reach. And you know what? It’s strangely effective. Sometimes our candy box greets me with candy from holidays past.

The candy out on the counter is exactly like the relationship I have with my phone. Can someone say relevant metaphor? If my phone is within reach, I’m going to use it. I have no control. As the kid that blew through a $50 Dave & Buster’s Power Play card in about 10 minutes, this isn’t exactly shocking. There’s something about the infinite scroll that seeps deep into my cerebellum and locks me tf in. Maybe it’s the unmitigated and rampant ADHD, maybe it’s the fact that our phone is based on the same concepts as a casino… either way I find myself stuck looking at my phone more than I would like.

And that’s what it boils down to, I’m looking at my phone more than I would like and it makes me feel disproportionately worse than I would like. Maybe others can relate to how I feel, but after a long day staring at my morning-screens, work-screens, then my night-screens, I’m left feeling like my brain is buzzing from the constant focus-shifting. I feel kind of sick and in a weird state of craving just another little boost of dopamine.

For the last couple of years I’ve been trying different hacks and techniques to help me kick my habit of staring at screens and doomscrolling. I’m here to highlight what has and has not been effective for me as I navigate my screen addiction (I’m not saying phone addiction because frankly I’ll find a way to watch anything that you put in front of me).

What has & hasn’t worked (so far).

App limits on iPhone. 0/10 Disgustingly easy to bypass. Almost impressed with my ability to hit 15 more minutes twelve times in a row. I’m sure most people feel the same way. The only psychopaths this doesn’t work for are those people that don’t chip themselves to death at a Mexican restaurant.
Grayscaling my iPhone. 2/10 Surprisingly effective at making your phone a lot less appealing to look at. In a really depressing way, it’s sad how good the colors look on our phones compared to real life. I want to feel like the colors in my real life are better than my phone. For someone like me, all it takes is for “needing” to see something in color like a photo of a family member to switch it back and “forget” to turn it on again.
App Blockers. 4/10 Kind of like putting a Masterlock on a pack of cigarettes. Yeah it helps prevent you from gaining access, but the solution is being tied in to the thing you’re addicted to. And let’s be honest, we’ve all seen the videos of that dude opening every single Masterlock by just hitting it with another Masterlock. It’s a little harder to bypass, but not impossible. It requires you to have the motivation to not find the workarounds or bypass it.
Brick. 6/10 It’s exactly like the other app blocking apps, but this requires you to physically get up and walk over to wherever your “brick” is to unlock certain apps. It’s really effective when I can remember or force myself to do it. But let’s all say it together, I have no control. I do really like this one and when I remind myself to lock my phone, it’s very effective.
Dumbphone. 6/10 If you’re close with me you’ve probably seen blue texts from me one day and green texts from me another day. I’ve dabbled in getting a flip phone and the Light Phone. Both I actually really enjoyed more than I thought I would. It’s incredibly refreshing to go back to a time where your phone is JUST a phone and cannot do everything in the world. However, Apple is smart as hell and knows how frustrating it is to go from their incredibly convenient ecosystem to those nasty, grubby little green bubbles (kidding, but sometimes not really). Switching from an iPhone, it got exhausting trying to get everyone’s texts to come in properly. Sometimes I would get them, sometimes I wouldnt. I made all my friends make completely new group texts so that my new dumbphone could get them. It’s a shame how much of a hassle it was for me. I’m weak and I chose convenience and friendship over the cost of being exiled and excommunicated. If we all could just become luddites and go back to dumbphones, this would be an easy 10/10. But alas, I guess we all are stuck on our rage machines.
Just Leaving Your Phone In A Different Room 7.5/10 Wow just writing that made me feel really dumb. I’m sure the concussions in high school didn’t help but I don’t think I ever really achieved object permanence. It’s amazing how having your phone out of sight truly gets it out of your mind. This is obviously not a hack, but it’s surprisingly effective. It’s something I took from reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. If I keep my phone plugged in on the kitchen counter and treat it like it’s rooted there, I’m wayyyy less likely to use it. Something he mentions often in his newsletters and podcasts: “Your phone is a tool, not a companion.” If you treat it like a tool, you use it like a tool and don’t get sucked into it. If you keep it on you all the time, you treat it like a companion and can find yourself reaching for it when the slightest inconvenience arises.
Apple Watch. 8/10 This is my newest attempt at breaking up with my phone and you know what? I love it. I added a cellular plan to my watch so now I can use it as a standalone device even when I leave my phone at home. Over the course of the past month or so, I’ve been working on leaving my phone at home. I can still receive iMessages (thank god), I have light access to most apps that I need, I can still watch my puppy on my home camera, I can pay off of Apple Pay, I can still get email notifications and Microsoft Teams updates, I can listen to podcasts and Spotify. But none of that is going to suck me in. You cant scroll on a watch. I mean, you could, but I’m not that bad yet. I also bought a cool little case that goes with my watch and I can use my watch as a mini iPod and wear an analog watch. I really think that this is going to be an effective way for me to reduce my screen time and keep me off of that hellhole I call my phone.
Having a book close by 9/10 This became my new scrolling this year. I’ve read 10 books already this year just by having my Kindle within arms reach as much as possible. It helps when you have good books like the Dungeon Crawler Carl series which is basically like the equivalent of potato chips for your brain and you cannot stop at one chapter. I like to superset my screen watching with a little bit of reading. Makes me feel like I’m doing something a little positive for my health. Little bit of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and Dungeon Crawler Carl during the commercials.
Having hobbies 9/10 You straight up cannot be scrolling on your phone when you’re at the park with your dog. Again, I mean technically you can, but if you can’t put down your phone to watch a dog have the time of it’s life, we’ve got bigger issues. I’m definitely a collector of hobbies, but this year I’ve definitely tried to focus more on hobbies that don’t involve a screen. Pottery, running, reading, making bagels, and playing with my dog have been good ways to fill up my time. Can’t be on your phone if your busy doing something else.

I’m always looking for new ways to live an intentional and fulfilling life. If you have any recommendations or suggestions I’d love to hear them.

u/-onward-forward-

Should More Events Ban Phones?

Should more events ban phones? (Why I think The Masters got it right)

Why The Masters Gets It Right

Can It Be Emulated?

I've tried everything to use my phone less, here's my honest ratings

What has & hasn’t worked (so far).