MY YEAR WITHOUT A SMARTPHONE It wasn't one dramatic moment that made me give up my smartphone, but a small, embarrassing discovery. One evening I caught myself picking the phone up, unlocking it, staring at the screen — and realising I had absolutely no idea what I had picked it up for. When I noticed I was doing this dozens of times a day, I decided something had to change. I bought a cheap handset that could only call and text, put my smartphone in a drawer, and promised myself I would manage for a year. I had expected the first weeks to be difficult, and they were — but not in the way I had imagined. I had worried about missing important news and emails. In fact, what I actually missed was far more practical: the map when I got lost in an unfamiliar part of town, the train timetable, the camera. The news, it turned out, could wait until I was at my computer; surprisingly little of it ever needed my immediate attention. My friends found the whole project hilarious. Most of them bet I would give up within a month, and for a while every meeting began with someone asking, in a mock-serious voice, how the 'digital hermit' was coping. As the months passed, though, the teasing changed into something closer to curiosity. More than one friend admitted, quietly, that they envied me — usually while scrolling through their own phone as they said it. The biggest change came in the evenings. Where I had once drifted between apps until midnight, I now read books, cooked proper meals and went to bed earlier. I slept noticeably better, though I suspect this had less to do with screens themselves than with the fact that my mind was no longer processing a day's worth of other people's opinions every night. Did the year turn me into a different person? I should be honest: no. I am writing this on the smartphone I bought the week the experiment ended, because modern life without one involves real inconvenience, from banking to bus tickets. But something important has shifted. The spell is broken: the phone now feels like a tool I pick up for a reason and put down when the job is done, not a place where my attention lives. That, for me, was worth a year of getting lost.