Welcome to all the new readers! Every Tuesday morning I send a brief update from the 1,000 hours of nothing.
Since January 2026, I have devoted my two hour daily commute across London to Phone Free silence. What are the tangible benefits of spending so much time doing absolutely nothing?
I normally say: having more control over otherwise automatic phone use and generally feeling better. Profound, lifechanging… but blah.
But last Thursday evening a weirdly specific benefit emerged.
It was Hour 245 of Phone Free Commuting, and I was on the 19.06 out of Waterloo.
After so many hours of doing nothing, thoughts just come and go.
This isn’t like watching clouds cross the sky - more a bad suburban sitcom.
The journey started with a little burning feeling as I remembered something really stupid I said at work. Then almost immediately a sudden impulse to check work emails, as if pulling refresh on Outlook would somehow reveal my status within my tribe.
My hand went to my pocket entirely automatically, but very fortunately I was wearing a high vis vest that says Phone Free Commute. In a full carriage, it’s enough to stop me. After all, I don’t want to look stupid.
The work-burning feeling soon passed. (I very much doubt it would have done so if I were on my work emails.)
Unexpectedly, a commuter said hello. She found the vest funny, and she said she would read the articles. We talked politely for a couple of minutes.
But then disaster. The conversation ended and we didn’t know what to do. I had no social shield without my phone. And she could hardly pull out hers after talking to a man so anti-phone he was dressed like a total idiot. We both stood helplessly for a few seconds. We had at least fifteen minutes of journey ahead of us with no obvious out.
Perhaps too suddenly I turned to look out the window, as if resuming some important business. At my back I sensed her relief and gratitude.
The streets around Vauxhall were getting dark. It made me think about arranging a drink with my friends sometime. I thought about WhatsApping but then oops no phone.
I closed my eyes, and listened to the rumble of the train.
And then it happened. A wonderful thing. I got a little flush of energy. An abrupt and sudden burst of optimism. There were so many things I wanted to do with my life, and I would do them. It was mixed with confidence all my plans would succeed and a devil-may-care attitude to the future.
This feeling had erupted a few times over the Phone Free Commuting year, beginning in the second month. I had never really known how to describe it. Once I called it the feeling of having drunk the lucky potion from Harry Potter.
But this time it hit me: this wasn’t entirely new.
I had felt this way before, in a very different time and place.
Two thirds of the way through any holiday, I always knew exactly how I wanted to change my life.
I was suddenly filled with all sorts of new plans and schemes. I will wake up early and write (I’ve always wanted to write). I will go to the gym. I will take up a hobby. I won’t worry so much about work and get things in perspective. I will be present.
I will change A LOT. And it will be easy to do so.
Towards the end of every holiday, we always bought (and still buy) a fridge magnet from wherever we are. For my wife and kids, it was just a way of remembering the place. Secretly though, I would cast a little spell on it to remind me to do all the things I wanted to do when I got home. The fridge magnet would transmit my holiday optimism into my normal life.
But it never worked. Things just went back to normal. I would tell myself I didn’t have the time to do the things amid a busy routine. (But my huge screen time would make me a liar.)
And then a few months later I would go on another holiday. And after four or five days the stress would die down. And the cycle would repeat itself. Until the fridge was full of lovely but entirely unmagical fridge magnets.
Until this year that is, when I started having confusing bursts of optimism on the train - lo and behold it was Holiday Fridge Magnet Mood! An emotion designed for a Cornwall gift shop appearing willy-nilly throughout the year in the Underground.
The Holiday Fridge Magnet Mood is just the tip of the optimism iceberg. But my overall improved mood across the year is considerably harder to describe, especially as it ebbs and flows with all sorts of factors: sleep, exercise, what’s going on at work, whether my daughter’s gerbils have covered the floor in wood shavings again. It’s not unalloyed bliss.
It’s more like an increased likelihood that I will view the world in a glass half full kind of way.
No more than a tendency, but invaluable. It has been enough for me to write regularly for the first time in my life.
And this optimism is combined with a recurrent feeling of playfulness, a sense that life is a game.
This - of course - is very necessary for the wearing of high vis on public transport.
Phones are the natural enemy of Holiday Fridge Magnet Mood. Phones make nah.
I noticed years ago that if ever I had an exciting idea about a new thing to do - signing up for a run, learning the piano - I could reliably kill it by scrolling a bit. Nah, I would think.
But this year I came to believe that phones don’t just make in-the-moment nah. They radiate a Cloud of Nah, an All-Pervading Field of Eeyore that seems to take weeks to clear.
My suspicion is that the Cloud of Nah had all sorts of deadening effects, causing me to view work and other problems in a negative way, and meaning I was less likely to have the energy to carry on with any plans that survived in-the-moment nah.
And perhaps worst of all, it repeatedly thwarted the one project that could clear the Cloud: tackling phone use itself.
One day it felt like a great idea to read a book on the commute. Or try out a new restrictive app. But after a while I thought nah. Or even if I got through the early stages of nah, it turned out there was lots of nah to wade through before I reached the other side. (My estimate for doing so was about four weeks, which is eerily consistent with Anna Lembke’s recommendation in Dopamine Nation.)
Over the years I tried and tried again, but long before I’d cleared the Cloud of Nah, I would have dismantled or declared dead whatever habit or restriction I put in place and gone back to square one.
Phones begetting pessimism begetting phones. Quite the trap.
As the train got near Surbiton, I found myself interrogating my newly named optimism.
Was Holiday Fridge Magnet Mood just caused by reducing phone use, or was it increasing meditation? Over the years I have alternated between success and failure in both - and this has convinced me both play a role. I now think of them as connected opposites.
Phones fill my head with glum stuff, the cares of the world and the deadening effects of comparison. They also seem to tire out my mind - even if what I look at is benign, the refreshing seems to be exhausting.
And tiring out my mind seems to make it pessimistic. It’s reminiscent of my mind late at night: glass half empty, or if I get to 3am, downright panicky.
And now, through doing the Phone Free Commute, I get what I would call regular mental rest. The rest that previously I had only achieved a few days into a holiday.
The train gets into Surbiton. I take off my high vis vest, tootle my way home and write this quickly before my mood changes.
If I wait too long, writing an article about phones themed on fridge magnets might seem like a stupid idea.
Next week: my shameful history of failing to form habits. And yet more nothing.
Confused as to what I’m doing? This short post might be a good place to start.
A lot of people seem to be considering new ways to fight the phone. I’m keen to find ways for those interested to compare notes and support each other, perhaps on a (hopefully not irritating) Substack Chat or similar. If this would be at all helpful to you, please message me on Substack.
This is part of a series of articles following 1,000 hours of nothing on the London commute. My free archive is available at phonefreewill.com, sorted into sections ranging from practical through to humiliating.
If you know anyone who’s tired of their phone use (or if there’s anyone whose phone use you are tired of) please share this with them.
I love this! I always intend to leave the phone outside the bedroom at night because I used to love reading. Now I scroll before I sleep, first thing in the morning, and if I wake in the night. That’s what I was doing when I found this article. In fact,
just before I had read a horrible racist comment at the end of a news report on a tragic event. Scrolling itself and the negativity we absorb can’t be good for our brains. Your article had the opposite effect and has inspired me to commit to at least 4 weeks of ‘no phone in the bedroom’ and see what happens…ps: I am also an aspiring writer, who doesn’t get to writing because I am so ‘busy’. Excited to see what happens..thank you!
"The conversation ended and we didn’t know what to do. I had no social shield without my phone. And she could hardly pull out hers after talking to a man so anti-phone he was dressed like a total idiot."
This had me laughing out loud. I also didn't realize your commute is an hour each way. That's crazy. I'm not sure of the rules: do you read a book sometimes or are you just completely rawdogging your commute? This is coming from a guy who makes sure he takes his phone to do a wee...