Ethan Schenzel smiles when he talks. Between tangents of earnest reflection and zig-zagged thoughts, he laughs, flashing a squinted grin, then stops to ponder the red paint peeling in strips from his backyard deck.
Today, the 24-year-old University of Wisconsin graduate has an iPhone, but for a little over a month this spring, he was the proud owner of a gray, TCL Flip Pro. Yes, that’s right: a flip phone.
His brief dalliance with the large-buttoned, low-tech brick began this past Mardi Gras when a con pickpocketed his old mobile. “I looked up, and it was gone,” he said.
But Schenzel saw the loss as a boon, “I was like sh-t, well, this is my opportunity.”
Just the week before, he’d told his roommate, LSU computer engineering senior Clyde Ball, that he wanted to get a flip phone.
“This has been a thought I’ve had in my head for a while,” Schenzel said. “I wasn’t actually going to get rid of my iPhone—I was just like, damn, I wish I could.”
While they offer convenience and connectivity, smartphones come with cons. Like many young adults, Schenzel struggles with anxiety and finds that constant access to social media can exacerbate the problem. The sticker price is another issue.
“At the time, I wasn’t working, and I didn’t have a ton of money, so I couldn’t drop $700 on a phone,” Schenzel said.
As luck would have it, his Apple Care plan, which would have replaced the stolen phone, had expired the month before. However, even before he found out he couldn’t get a new one, Schenzel was gung-ho for the Flip Pro.
“I knew I was getting a flip phone,” he said with a grin.
So, it began.
“The first week was hard,” Schenzel said, “but after that, I didn’t have that attachment. I wasn’t always looking at my phone, wasn’t. . .chasing that dopamine rush.”
Without a smartphone’s constant whirring, vibrating and chirping, Schenzel found he had more space for his thoughts and time for himself.
“I was just living in the moment. When sh-t was going down, I wasn’t pulling out my phone and taking a video, I was just living. . .I really liked it because I wasn’t worried about anything else. I wasn’t worried about going on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat,” he said.
In many ways, the life sans smartphone is one made richer by subtraction. And while uncommon, there are small enclaves of young adults returning to the ‘90s tech: A group of highschoolers in Brooklyn, New York, for instance, created what they call the “Luddite Club,” according to The New York Times.
Named for Ned Ludd—an apocryphal, 17th century anti-industrialist—the Luddite club seeks to tune out social media’s static in favor of pursuits like reading, art, music and in-person interaction. Like Schnezel, its hardcore members eschew smartphones altogether.
“When I got my flip phone, things instantly changed,” said high-school senior Lola Shub in an interview with The Times. “I started using my brain. It made me observe myself as a person.”
For most young adults, however, the low-tech units remain a distant memory.
“Last flip phone I had was in 2006,” said Trey Butler, a Baton Rouge Community College cyber security sophomore, of his very first phone, which he got when he was 8.
Yet for Ethan Schenzel, the Flip Pro came as a blessing cut entirely too short.
Sure, life with a flip phone posed challenges. The texting was “wacked out,” Schenzel said. Friends mentioned they had a hard time getting in touch with him. And the GPS was existent but difficult to use. Yet, he found himself less anxious as the owner of a flip phone, with more time for reading and being active.
Schenzel recently started a new job and navigated to his first day of work with directions he’d scrawled on a piece of paper.
As it turns out, that drive was his flip phone’s death knell. Schenzel soon learned that he’d need access to an app for the job—an app which the Flip Pro couldn’t run. Forced to return to smartphone life, Schenzel managed to unearth an old iPhone 8. It was the end of an era.
Today, his flip phone sleeps, drained of battery and disconnected. Within its chunky exterior the potential for a simpler way of life lies dormant; outside, whirs the necessities of the life we lead, and for a brief time, Schenzel managed to exist somewhere in between. The march of progress continues, gaining ground and losing perhaps something more difficult to define, something precious, in the process.
“It was sweet,” said Schenzel, but the flip phone couldn’t last.
Going back to a mobile phone raises some emotion for him, “I really didn’t want to have the iPhone, but I have to.”
Although his Flip Pro now collects dust, Schenzel said his month with the brick taught him to spend less time staring into static and more time in the moment.
Even if you’re not going to haul off and turn in your smartphone, Schenzel’s experiment captures our modern dilemma.
You can fill the odd gaps of “doing” that lie before and after—the silent interludes between what’s finished and what’s next that fill our days, round our months and will ultimately become our lifetimes—with scrolling.
Or you could do something else. The choice is yours.
Ethan Schenzel raises a dead TCL Flip Pro to his ear, as if to speak, at his home in Baton Rouge on April 4, 2023.
