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How to live without your phone - by Sam Kriss

samkriss.substack.com · 6,381 words · saved by 1 readers

I bought my first smartphone in 2012. At the time I was an undergrad at the University of Leeds, halfway through a year abroad at UCLA. If you’ve never made a similar move, you can’t possibly imagine what it was like to be thrust suddenly out of the damp armpit of West Yorkshire and into the California sun. I was twenty-one years old and I had just discovered that happiness was possible. It was in California that I stopped smoking weed for good, even though it was basically legal and definitely everywhere: I knew I only had a few months until the world would spin again and dislodge me back in the land of dry stone walls, lukewarm ale, and the grey, all-enclosing gloom of three o’clock in the afternoon. I did not want to waste those months getting high and watching cartoons. I wanted to drink the desert while I still could. Plunge into the black hole nowhereness of this sprawling evil city. I started lifting weights. I did all my reading shirtless on the beach. I also started getting re

How to live without your phone Forty days in the desert of the real Sam Kriss Apr 10, 2024 467 Share I bought my first smartphone in 2012. At the time I was an undergrad at the University of Leeds, halfway through a year abroad at UCLA. If you’ve never made a similar move, you can’t possibly imagine what it was like to be thrust suddenly out of the damp armpit of West Yorkshire and into the California sun. I was twenty-one years old and I had just discovered that happiness was possible. It was in California that I stopped smoking weed for good, even though it was basically legal and definitely

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