Five years ago, I was sitting on the tile floor of a rental kitchen, trying to take a photo of myself to share online.
It was not an easy photo to take: The lighting was harsh; the walls were a weird pink color; and I had become so focused on taking the photo that I was no longer crying. I needed my sadness to be visible—runny nose, blotchy cheeks, shiny eyes—and I needed it in a 9:16 aspect ratio. How else would my followers know I was truly suffering?
I set down my phone. In an attempt to get more tears flowing, I thought about my circumstances: single, alone in a foreign country, recently diagnosed with a degenerative spinal condition. I was renting a cramped yet expensive apartment, and quickly running through my savings. I had built a whole career as an art influencer but, since my diagnosis, I could no longer produce the drawings required to keep my online audience engaged—the pain made it so that I could hardly write my own signature, let alone draw. As I considered all this, I began to cry again. I reached for my phone and this time, I got the shot.
I posted the crying selfie, which I hoped would tastefully walk the line between tragic and attractive. I refreshed my inbox for sympathy, and I got it. But I was still alone on the kitchen floor. These strangers were my whole world, but to them, I was just one tear-soaked face in an endless stream of images. I stood up and, before the impulse could leave me, I disabled my Instagram account. I had 170,000 followers and no one to call.
When I dropped out of Wesleyan University in 2015, I moved to the cheapest city I knew—Berlin—and gave myself a year to learn how to draw and to see if I could make it as a freelance artist.
I had no network. I hadn’t gone to art school, and I didn’t have connections in the gallery system. But you didn’t need any of that for social media. In 2016, Instagram was where young people discovered and shared new art. When I started posting my daily sketches—pine cones, coffee cups, fire hydrants—on Instagram, I got a few dozen “likes” at best. Clearly, I had to expand my following if I wanted to earn any money. I started targeting other, similar art accounts, copy-pasting vague, impersonal comments on their posts. “Great work,” I would write. “Love this.” “My favorite of yours.”
This was in the early days of social media, before spam was common, and we had all learned to mistrust enthusiastic strangers. I left hundreds of comments a day. People responded sincerely, “Thank you so much, I worked really hard on this one and wasn’t sure if I got the proportions right.” Most of the time, I had barely looked at their art. I was more interested in determining which hashtag to use for maximum virality—#ArtistsOnInstagram or #ArtDaily?
It worked. My following grew to 10,000 in a year. More importantly, my income grew when I started selling prints and private commissions directly to my followers. Soon, I was spending more time talking to customers than to actual friends. The latter were harder to come by and keep, while followers were grateful for even a moment of my attention. Why bother trying to make real people like me when people on the internet already did?
Still, I learned that my followers’ love was contingent on high engagement levels, and because the algorithm was constantly changing, I had to change with it. I was constantly adapting my visual and verbal style to keep up with trends. One consistently effective strategy was being vulnerable. Regardless of what I drew, regardless of how good it was, I would get more likes and comments on my art when I paired it with an emotional disclosure, ideally of the tragic variety. In 2018, I shared a tiny drawing of a shark: “Crying nonstop & blowing my nose on my shirt,” the caption read. “Thank you all for being my internet family, I truly need that in my life.”
I sold more when I wrote things like this, presumably because my followers took pity on me and wanted to help. I leaned into this effect, mining my life for pain.
By the beginning of 2019, I had passed the 100,000-follower mark. I still wasn’t earning above minimum wage, but I was selling enough prints through my website to call myself an artist. More accurately, though, I was an influencer.
I was 14 when I got my first smartphone. I spent hours on my new device each day, too caught up in the possibilities to mourn the death of an old way of being. I downloaded apps by the dozen, flooding my home screen with ways to entertain myself. The smartphone was a tool kit, a creative outlet, a conduit to everything interesting and valuable.
It did not leave my pocket, or hand, as I entered adulthood, and especially when I began my influencing career.
At first, I enjoyed being an artist online. I spent hours creating, composing, photographing, editing, captioning, and promoting my posts. I was doing what I’d always wanted—being creative—but the online popularity I had to cultivate to sustain it only emphasized my real-life isolation. I was investing all of my social energy into an app that rewarded me for time spent alone. I existed almost exclusively online. I could appreciate reality only as a source of content—a pleasing image, a compelling story—to share with others.
It felt like my own life held no intrinsic value; it was not something I experienced, but rather something I used. The night I sat crying on my kitchen floor, fighting to sustain my misery just long enough to capture it on camera, I could no longer deny that feeling.
Turning my phone off at 24 was the most radical life change I had made since receiving my first smartphone. My entire adult life had centered on an object that was now locked in a drawer, out of sight. I felt purposeless, adrift, with nothing to reach for in moments of boredom or distress except my own thoughts, which were dull and shapeless from neglect.
The messages and emails still came in on my computer, but the money from print sales and commissions dried up. I flew back to the U.S. and moved in with my mom in Connecticut. I started to learn piano. I went on long walks around the suburbs. I bought a film camera and took photos of the snow. I was not happy—in fact, I was isolated and lost—but I was present. There was now no alternative to reality, no escape hatch to flip open in moments of boredom. I had to accept things as they were, and things weren’t great. I turned on my smartphone every few days, but there was nothing much to see there. Without Instagram, I was on my own.
For years, I’d treated the smartphone as a one-stop shop for my entire pyramid of needs. I rarely embarked on a real-life activity without first researching or coordinating it online. If I went on a walk, I mapped my journey. If I went to a restaurant, I checked the menu online. If I went on a date, it was with a stranger from an app, or else an Instagram follower who had commented frequently enough to attract my notice. I didn’t know how I would replace these functions once I downgraded. I didn’t know how to get anywhere, meet anyone, or do anything unassisted. I had never experienced adulthood without a smartphone, but knew I couldn’t continue with one.
It took a while, but eventually, I fully switched to a dumb phone, a Nokia 2780 I got at Best Buy. A decade after it began, my smartphone era was officially over.
I’ve reclaimed so many hours since I downgraded—the national average is 4.5 hours of smartphone use per day—that now I don’t have to worry about how I spend every minute.
Although I do still spend a few hours a day on my laptop writing, doing admin, and yes, using social media, I am otherwise unchained from the internet. When I close my computer, I am offline. I read long novels, uninterrupted by digital demands and distractions. I practice piano. I write songs. I look at the ceiling. I do things that do not directly benefit my career, or my finances, or my public image. I still make art, but I share only a small fraction of it online. I prefer to receive feedback in person, during shows or studio visits.
I also get lost. I once biked around Berlin for hours after dark, trying to divine my way home using the distant TV tower as a reference point—only to realize that the tower, being in the center of the city, conveyed absolutely nothing about my location. I finally returned home cold, exhausted, and by no means grateful for my offline adventure. Still, the inconveniences of low-tech living are nothing compared with the ravages of tech addiction.
A few months ago, I felt compelled to revive my largely dormant social media accounts in order to talk about downgrading. Social media, despite—or maybe because of—its negative impact on well-being, remains the most effective way to spread a message quickly. My post went viral, attracting 1.5 million views. Suddenly, without ever making the decision to do it, I found myself in the deeply ironic role of online anti-tech activist.
The demands of anti-tech activism often leave me feeling precisely the way I did when I had a smartphone: anxious, isolated, alternately revered and harassed by complete strangers, and incapable of mentally disconnecting from online discourse. In using social media to promote my ideals, I betray those very ideals.
What keeps me coming back to the internet is the importance of sharing what life is like beyond it. At the beginning of my time on social media, I was focused on sharing my own pain. Now I realize that this pain is not particular to me. We are all suffering from the infiltration of personal tech into every aspect of our lives. We cannot escape the call of notifications, the pressure to be reachable ’round the clock. Now that I’ve done all the hard work for myself, my goal is to make downgrading easier for other people than it was for me.
Since I first started speaking out about this issue, I’ve spent months patiently explaining the logistics of downgrading to thousands of people online, many of whom did not want to hear it. This summer, I compiled my thoughts in a printed pamphlet, titled: You Don’t Need a Smartphone: A Practical Guide to Downgrading & Reclaiming Your Life. My hope was that a physical object would have more impact than anything on a screen.
The questions I get about downgrading are largely practical. How do I navigate, take photos, and listen to music? Those living abroad want to know how to maintain relationships without WhatsApp and social media. There’s also dual-factor verification: employers and services requiring a smartphone for identity verification at log-in. Face and Touch ID are standard security features, and all but exclusive to smartphones. Certain lines of work require smartphones, whether explicitly or implicitly, and in these cases, downgrading can mean sacrificing income and advancement. Each day, downgrading is made more and more difficult by tech companies and governments, and even by ourselves. We accept every new digital demand placed upon us, telling ourselves that there is no opting out.
Except there is. For example, and this one’s a freebie, most dumb phones actually have Google Maps, complete with public transit information. You can also rely on paper maps or handwritten directions copied down before leaving the house. Fortunately, this tip and many others are now available as a convenient and philosophically defensible physical object. Unfortunately, I still have to go online to promote it.
One day, I would like to delete my social media accounts. This should be an option for everyone, even those, like me, who still rely on an internet audience to sell their work. For this to happen, we will need to build and strengthen real-world networks. But first, we will need to stop spending our attention online.
Our attention is all we have, and where we choose to direct it is ultimately how we spend our lives. It’s not that we are choosing incorrectly by looking at screens; it is that we are not choosing at all. We have surrendered these choices to others—corporations, software engineers, content creators, followers. We are now riding in the backseat of our lives. Or, at least, you are. I was too, until I realized I had a choice.
August Lamm is a writer and visual artist. Her debut novel, Lambing Season, is forthcoming in 2025. Follow her on Substack and other social media @AugustLamm.
