Good Luck Thanksgiving No Phone
On this Thanksgiving Day, give yourself one more thing to be grateful for: a day without smartphones.
Yes, I can already hear you tell me all the reasons why it won’t work. How can you give up your phone all day, let alone cook with unfamiliar recipes, chat with traveling family members, or FaceTim with loved ones who live too far to go to the party?
But if you find a way to put your phone down, even if it’s not completely removed, until all the guests have arrived and all the food is on the table, you can have a more conscious and more enjoyable rest.
As David Leonhardt explains in The New York Times :
Many of us have difficult relationships with phones. We are enjoying them at the moment. However, when we think about how much time we spend staring at a tiny screen, we feel disgusting . We yearn for a less exciting relationship with the online world.
So let me make an offer for this Thanksgiving weekend: turn off your phone, and don’t turn it off for the full 24 hours. I suppose you will be surprised how much you like it.
Leonhardt has incorporated Technological Shabbats into his family’s life (essentially off-line Saturdays) and describes them as “wonderful” – although he admits it requires some planning ahead, from scheduling with friends to printing cards. spend offline all day.
This is what I need to do if I want to spend Thanksgiving without a phone, because my parents and I get in the car to visit relatives out of state, and I’m in charge of preparing the podcast queue. …
So maybe I’ll download a bunch of podcasts ahead of time, put my phone on airplane mode, and see how long I can stay in the moment with the people around me.