Abbey's Road: Combating data withdrawal, one day at a time

Mid-last week I found myself in the most embarrassing first-world conundrum — and it wasn’t that my “Cool Mom” sweatshirt was in the laundry for longer than I’d have liked (I don’t know what you have to do to get prompt laundry service around here? Wait, don’t answer that).

Somewhere on Errands Day between Aldi and Home Depot, I received an automated text message from our phone carrier: I was down to 10 percent of data remaining, with a week and a half left to go in the billing cycle.

I parked, paused the Instagram reel I was watching — my favorite funny internet family throwing out their fall decorations and getting out their Christmas stuff — and dealt with the gut punch. How could this be happening? (And what would it be like to live next door to that family?)

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The last time a similar incident occurred, I’d been unknowingly disconnected from Wi-Fi at home and blissfully continued all my normal internet activity until my mother-in-law, who is in charge of our family phone plan, questioned the anomaly.

This time I have no excuse, except too much scrolling (from my parked — very parked — van) in the school pickup line.

And maybe other places.

In light of this information, I began mentally reviewing my habits and came to the realization that every time I had a spare two minutes — pickup line, grocery store, sitting at the ice rink, walking to the end of the street — my tendency was to pick up my phone.

Maybe I’d watch a reel or check Facebook for news of Christina’s latest family drama or Google “does tomato paste clean brass as well as ketchup” or hop onto Amazon just to see what deals were available.

Turns out that two minutes here, five minutes there and so forth can really add up. On your phone bill and in your life.

When I started paying attention to my own browsing habits, I also started to notice those of the people around me. In the bleachers at the ice rink, in the aisles at the grocery store, on the benches at the playground, a similar trend: We like to scroll.

We scroll when we are bored. We scroll when we have a minute. We scroll when we don’t feel like talking. We scroll as a way of putting up walls: “Don’t talk to me, I’m scrolling.”

(In my defense, this was a weakness I foresaw with myself and was one of the reasons why I was one of the world’s final holdouts in finally purchasing a smartphone.)

But this week, while I was out and about, my financial well-being depended upon me NOT scrolling. And here is what I discovered:

-It’s funny how picking up your phone is such a mindless habit; how instinctively I found myself reaching in my back pocket or cupholder or purse to pull out my phone and open it onto *something.* Nearly without fail, anytime I had a few minutes to spare, out it came. It wasn’t until I checked myself (“Abbey, you have NO DATA!”) that I realized what I was doing and consciously put it away.

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-It’s also funny how hard it is to break that habit once it’s in place. But once you do, I find that the appeal of it lessens. (Strange how that works, isn’t it?) I began leaving a book in my car so that, instead of reel-watching, I could read. If I really needed to use my phone during a gap in time, I used it to text a friend about their day. Or honestly, I just took a moment to take in my surroundings and be thankful for what I saw.

-Fifteen years ago, this was not a thing for me. How quickly a society’s habits can change! What if we spent less time scrolling and more time being thankful? Or reading books? Or encouraging others? I know I’m not always going to get it right, but I’m thankful for this forced window in which I was able to break free from a problem I didn’t really feel like acknowledging. What an eye-opening experience.

I still have a few days left before my data resets, and I can’t guarantee that when it does, I won’t go back and spend more time with my favorite funny internet family while I’m in the parking lot or pickup line.

But I think it might get old after a while, and I’m determined to remind myself that there really are better things out there, if I just tear myself away long enough to see them.

Abbey Roy is a mom of three girls who make every day an adventure. She writes to maintain her sanity. You can probably reach her at amroy@nncogannett.com, but responses are structured around bedtimes and weekends.

This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Short on data, Abbey learns alternative ways to use time