OFFLINE

I was all ready to write a September post about my favourite subject - change! The correlation between new beginnings and a new school year.

But then, over the last month, whilst I’ve taken some time off, something else has happened for me and I began to see the reality of a habit that had formed slowly and crept up on me without my really noticing.

My phone.

The truth of it was brought to my attention when a friend showed me a research study about phone use in children, which really made me stop and think.

My parenting has always relied on showing, not telling. If you don’t want your child to smoke, you don’t smoke cigarettes. So, if you don’t want your child to become addicted to their phone, there is a clear task at hand.

Also, to add to the parent guilt (sorry, not sorry), every time you stare at your phone instead of engaging with your child, you are demonstrating that the little rectangular plastic thing in your hand is more important than them.

It’s the small things you miss - bids for attention and glances that go unnoticed because you are too distracted by something else. Something that is absent from the room you are in.

I’ve often taken breaks from my phone, putting the SIM card into a brick phone so that I can’t get on the internet. When a phone is restricted to calls and texts only, it is surprisingly quiet!

I usually go at least a week a year like that, and was creating more intentional time by adding evenings to that habit when I’m with my daughter.

But, as I was restricting my phone use more and more, the physical act of transferring the SIM card each day became a bit tiring. So I decided to take direct action and got myself a Brick.

I’m not sponsored by them - though I’m completely open to it, given the amount I talk about it - but if you haven’t seen it, it’s a physical device that blocks specific apps from your phone. You can basically turn your smartphone into a brick phone, restricted to calls and texts, but with the added benefit of being able to whitelist essentials like maps and the camera. You keep the things that feel necessary, and eliminate the noise.

It’s been over a month now since I took this direct action, and I can already see a positive impact on my mental health. I’m unlearning the deep habits of distraction and making my time vastly more intentional.

I’m not going to pretend it’s easy.

The reason we are all addicted to our phones is because they are the ultimate self-soother. The moment the brain experiences a second of boredom, you have the ultimate distraction right there in your pocket. All your real-world problems can be temporarily scrolled away in a haze of digital imagery and noise.

But on the other side of distraction, when you actually start dealing head-on with all the things you've been distracting yourself from, there is something worth much more than temporary soothing. Which, for me, was quite enough reason to cut out my dependence on that little black mirror.

I thought my reasons for doing it were purely personal. Until this summer, when the physical climate collided with my digital one. We started watching our country fall into severe drought, and I began seeing Instagram posts (yes, I still use it, just less and more intentionally) about data centres being built within an infrastructure already struggling with water shortages.

And my brain went straight to solutions.

What can we do about this?

So, using the very technology I am petitioning against, I typed in a quick question: What would happen if we all used our phones 50% less?

The answer was rather more complicated than I expected.

The electricity used by the phone itself is actually only a tiny part of the story. Behind that little black rectangle is a vast infrastructure of networks, servers and data centres, all consuming energy - and, increasingly, water.

Data centres already account for around 2% of the UK's electricity use, and that figure is growing rapidly as our appetite for digital services and AI continues to explode. Around a third of the energy used by data centres goes towards cooling.

And then there’s the water.

All those computers generate an enormous amount of heat, and some data centres use water as part of the process of keeping them cool. In England, data centres used an estimated 1.125 billion litres of water back in 2024–25. While that represents a relatively small proportion of water use nationally, 83% of the largest-consuming data centres are in the South East, where water scarcity is already a critical concern.

This becomes particularly uncomfortable when you put the two things together: a country experiencing increasing pressure on its water resources, and an industry building infrastructure that needs both electricity and water to keep running.

And then the conversation landed on my doorstep. I found out about plans to build a massive, windowless, energy-hungry data centre right in the historic heart of the East End, at the old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane. I genuinely thought it was a joke when I first heard - too absurd to be real - but it was true and against calls by the council and the local community who fought it unanimously, the masterplan was signed off anyway.

A huge server warehouse is coming to the streets where East London’s independent, raw creative culture grew up. I’ve watched this area change over the past twenty years - from cold, derelict warehouse rooftops to a messy, vibrant mix of studios, artists, clubs, shops and independent spaces. And now this.

A colossal digital engine room, designed to shave milliseconds off trades in the City.

There’s something strange about that to me: the invisible architecture of our digital lives arriving as a very physical building, and in doing so taking the place of some of the physical and cultural fabric that made this area what it is.

It made me wonder what would happen if, instead of constantly asking how we could build more capacity to satisfy our appetite for more, we asked a much simpler question: what if we consumed less?

What if we spent less time scrolling, watched less, kept our phones for longer and allowed ourselves to be bored occasionally? What if we stopped filling every quiet moment with something?

It sounds ridiculously simple. And perhaps that's the point.

I'm not suggesting that putting my phone in a digital lockbox is going to single-handedly save the planet. It won't. But it has made me realise that consumption isn't only about the tangible things we buy. We are consuming information, images, entertainment, electricity, water, and, perhaps most importantly, our own attention - constantly.

And unlike the things we buy, digital consumption can feel almost invisible. Perhaps that's what makes it so difficult to question.

And perhaps that's also why it is so easy to point at the big companies and feel powerless. Of course, the biggest changes need to happen at a structural macro level. But we aren't completely powerless either.

We make choices every day about what we consume - in the physical world, with disposable plastics and finite resources, and in the unseen world of technology, where we consume information, images, entertainment and our own attention.

We have a choice.

And I am choosing to cut down.

I hope that's helpful in some small way. And perhaps this is actually my September change after all - not a new beginning, but a small attempt to be more present for the beginning that's already happening.

Now, where did I put my phone?