Eddy Burback's Digital Detox Smartphone Experiment

What Happens When You Quit Your Smartphone for a Month

Eddy Burback's digital detox smartphone experiment starts where most people's frustration quietly lives: the moment you pick up your phone to do one thing and resurface twenty minutes later having watched none of the things you wanted to watch.

That slow-burn irritation eventually pushed him to lock the device away entirely for four weeks — not as a stunt, but as a genuine reset for someone in their late twenties navigating a big city solo. He documents the whole thing in I hate my phone so I got rid of it, on his YouTube channel.

The First Week: Phantom Limb Syndrome and Digital Withdrawal

The first few days, he kept reaching for a phone that wasn't there. Classic phantom limb — his body had developed its own muscle memory around the device.

What replaced the scrolling was something he describes as genuine boredom, a state he hadn't experienced in years. Surprisingly, it didn't feel like deprivation. It felt like space. He also noticed that sitting through a movie without a buzzing rectangle in his pocket was a fundamentally different, better experience — which says something about how low the bar had gotten.

How Retro Technology Can Replace Your Smartphone — Mostly

Rather than grabbing a basic flip phone, Burback went further back. He set up a landline and built out a Rolodex for contacts, aiming to simulate a pre-cell phone era of connectivity rather than just a downgraded version of the present one.

He filled in the rest of the gap with a physical calendar, notebooks, a traditional alarm clock, and a film camera. For the few tasks that genuinely required a screen, he used an old laptop with a chess clock to cap his time on it — a workaround that acknowledges you can't fully opt out of digital life in 2024, but you can at least make it annoying enough to stay intentional.

Using a Landline and Rolodex in the Modern World

The landline, weirdly, became a highlight. Calls felt more deliberate — people left actual voicemails, made actual plans, and the whole interaction had a weight that a text thread doesn't.

Friends apparently enjoyed it. Making plans felt less like managing a group chat and more like, as Burback puts it, something worth doing. The Rolodex, meanwhile, is exactly as charming and impractical as it sounds, and that's fine.

The Surprising Benefits of a Smartphone Detox

The practical inconveniences of navigating without a phone — figuring out that an AMC movie ticket could be redeemed with a credit card, learning that bus routes get announced out loud — turned out to be minor. The mental shift was the bigger story.

Improved Attention Span and Reading Focus

Burback found himself reading books for long stretches, something that had become almost impossible when his phone was nearby. Work improved too — less procrastination, more actual output.

It's the kind of result that sounds obvious in theory but lands differently when someone documents it happening in real time over thirty days. His attention span, essentially, had been quietly eroded and then quietly rebuilt.

Reduced Anxiety and Better Mental Health

Without a constant feed of social media, the low-grade anxiety that comes with it — the negativity, the outrage, the sense that everything is always happening somewhere you're not — largely disappeared.

He also started noticing small things again. Watching rain. Talking to strangers for directions. The kind of micro-interactions that smartphones have been slowly replacing for fifteen years. If you're curious about how creators are examining the way technology shapes perception, I hate my phone so I got rid of it is worth your time.