Girls, I am writing to you from a very precarious position. I am either on the brink of total mental collapse or enlightenment. Either way, I have come to a conclusion: our telephones are ruining our lives. And they have got to go. 

Let it be known that I am not writing an anti-smartphone manifesto because I think I am better than you. I am writing it because I am significantly worse than you. You may think “Susie, we’re all addicted to the phone, you’re not special”. Allow me to state the extent to which I have lived and died on the hill of phone addiction:

• As soon as I left college I became a professional TikTok correspondent for a newspaper. I was on the phone so I could pay the rent. And I was paying rent so I had a roof to be under while I was on the phone. 
• I used the phone to the point of physical injury (thumb cramps and weakness of the wrist. Pathetic.)
• I could only fall asleep while on the Toks. Yes, this involved scrolling with my eyes closed. The weight of the phone in my hand was like a teddy bear to me.

The people preaching to me about getting off the phone were, by definition, losers, and their arguments could not get through to me. I do not care about the companies taking my data. I am not distraught when I see beautiful young women on social media. The very idea of FOMO is an embarrassment to me – I do not suffer when I see others having fun.

No. These arguments could not convince me to get off the phone. And yet, here I am, researching which Nokia to buy and ordering a physical alarm clock.

I do not want to be unlike other girls, and I fear that abandoning the phone will make people think that I consider myself to be unlike other girls. The only solution is that the other girls (i.e. the gorgeous women reading this) must also put their phones in the bin. Here’s why.

1. It’s so ugly

I’ve said this before, but you see when people are sitting in public, and they’re hunched over their phones, it is so, so ugly to me. 

It’s even worse at nighttime or in dimly lit locations, like the far end of a coffee shop or a pub. The pale blue glare of the phone reflecting off someone’s face, which is invariably unsmiling and hanging down at an unflattering angle as though the head is too heavy for the body. (I ask you, how are we supposed to attract our husbands in public places if we look like this? And how are we expected to be attracted to men if they look like this?)

Anyway, we have always known that to be on the phone in public is to be ugly. But – and this realisation was the catalyst for my whole phone epiphany – have you realised that you also look like that in private?

I was lying in the bed one night, on the Toks, probably about five in the morning, and I had something of an out-of-body experience. While my eyes were taking in a five-part house tour and my mind was thoroughly enjoying it, I became aware that my body was lying there, in the foetal position, in the dark, with the glare of the phone illuminating my face.

And that’s when it hit me – when I see myself in the mirror or in a photograph, that’s not what I actually look like ever. Because 90% of the time, I am a victim of phone screen lighting. What is the point of being young(ish) and beautiful, as we all are, if we are destroying our gorgeousness with screen glare and bad posture??? Why buy nice clothes, why apply fake tan, why spend £300 a year on honey-coloured highlights if we are to submit to ugliness each and every day? As a child, when I imagined being in my 20s, I imagined looking like Rachel Green, not some hag curled around an Android.

An aside: it is also extremely ugly to see the shape of a phone in a trouser pocket. Especially men.

2. Brainrot

Self-explanatory. The phones are sending worms into our brains. 

Attention span? Fucked. Ability to understand complex ideas? Fucked. Intellectual development? Irreparably stunted at age 16 when I first got the phone.

Being stupid is not sexy. I concede some nice straight men are even more enjoyable when they are a bit bimbo-ish. But the joy of these men is that they are constantly surprised and entertained by the quick-witted, switched-on women around them. Thus, it is vital that women remain brilliant and our brains un-rotted. 

3. The violation of mystery

I understand that the phone can be an important tool in the cultivation of sex appeal. And I support all people who choose to post pretty images of themselves. You all already know that I am vain beyond words and posting pictures of myself is a natural instinct, so I cannot deny you this pleasure.

But let me tell you something. Mystery is a precious (and sexy) commodity – and the phone is eradicating it.

When the phone is in your life in the usual way, the people know – to some degree or another – where you are, what you’re doing, and who you’re with. When the phone is absent, you are an enigma.

I deleted the Instagram app from my phone in December, and then in January I decided the whole profile had to go. Why? Because people shouldn’t be able to see me unless I’m in the room with them. 

Of course, when my tan is applied perfectly and the sun is shining, I want to show the world. But the power of not showing the world is so indescribably major. I do not seriously believe that there are squadrons of people out there who wish they could peek into my life, but if they did, they couldn’t.

Even as someone who clinically cannot shut up, I am officially mysterious, and all I had to do was stop posting. The satisfaction? Enormous. 

4. The eradication of being hard to get

All of you know, as I do, that being hard to get is the most important thing in love and in life. Your level of hard-to-get-ness indicates to the world your level of self-esteem. 

And this is perhaps what fucks me up most about the phone. No one is hard to get. I get literally 400 notifications every day. LinkedIn gets me every fifteen minutes, no matter how hard I try to unsubscribe from those clowns. My phone grunts, I pick it up, and suddenly I’m being asked to congratulate a relative stranger for spending a year at their job? It is fucked up beyond all recognition. 

Yes, I despise to be oppressed by my emails, but the real hell, I believe, comes from how our personal relationships (romantic and otherwise) have adapted to the phone. It seems to me that civilisation will collapse if we don’t put the collective foot down on this one. 

When we were children, if someone rang the landline at dinner time, our parents would answer and say: “We’re just having dinner, I’ll call you back.” If someone rang at midnight, we all knew someone was dead. No one rang between nine and five because the girls had jobs. So the hours for external communication were like, seven till ten. Right? Makes sense, civilised, normal.

Now, anyone can message anyone at any time and, because the phone isn’t literally ringing, the social protocol is that they can go on messaging til kingdom come. Gone are the days of reasonable, valid excuses – mealtimes, bedtimes, etc. The fact is that most people are not designed to be engaged in constant digital conversation. And many of us will operate with a constant, relentless low level of guilt at all times for not providing the regular responses the people have come to expect. 

Needless to say, this works in the other direction too. Totally fucked up and hellish that now, if you’re messaging someone and they don’t reply, you’re aware that they’re probably choosing not to respond. 

This is, of course, at its worst in romantic contexts. It is literally impossible to kid yourself about why a man isn’t contacting you. Even if his phone is broken, he could message you on Instagram from his computer. Even if he’s in the hospital, even if he’s at work, no matter what’s going on, there is always a way for him to get in touch. This is no way to live.

Bring. Back. Excuses. 

It is inhumane for us to live without the ability to fool our acquaintances with excuses, and it is even more inhumane for us to live without the ability to fool ourselves by making excuses for others. 

5. Being a baby

Tragic, pathetic, and horrifying to me that people are so embarrassed about forging new relationships (romantic and otherwise) in real life. Dependency on the phone is clearly the issue.

Waiting for someone to post an Instagram story so you can reply to it – awful. We actually cannot consider ourselves adults if we don’t have the wherewithal to ask someone out in real life. Get a grip.

6. The issue of eternity

I may be an eejit for this one, but whatever. I did not understand that the smartphones are not a phase.

Like, here are the classic complaints about young people:

• Young people are ungrateful
• Young people drink too much/do too many drugs
• Young people are selfish
• Young people are always on their phones

One of these things is not like the others. Most of this stuff really is specific to being young. People do, famously, become less hedonistic as they get older.

HUGE surprise to me when I realised that we will NOT be growing out of the phones. I only realised last week: I will not just wake up at 40, buy the newspaper, listen to the radio, do the crossword and then read a biography of Peter the Great for fun. 

If I don’t cop on, I will be waking up at 40 and taking myself immediately to the Toks. I will still have my same old rotted brain. If I have children, how in God’s name will I focus for long enough to help them with their homework? Will I be able to drive them to their friend’s houses, knowing which roads lead where, or will I rely entirely on Google maps? Basically, unless I resign my phone to the dustbin of history, I will likely never acquire the habits and the skills of a proper grown-up woman. 

The Plan

I am getting off the phone. 

I do not know if my brain is young and ripe enough to recover from years of neural pathway disruption, but I am going to tell you exactly how it goes. 

My dream is that a movement (composed entirely of beautiful, charming women) takes off, and in a year’s time it will not be unusual for girls to be off the phone. I ask you, please do not force me to be unlike other girls in my phoneless life. Please, join me in evicting brain worms and embracing mystery.