Once boasting a social media following of more than 170,000, writer and artist August Lamm has ditched her smartphone and is urging others to downgrade to "dumb" phones to counter social media addiction. "When your whole social life is online, you can feel popular," she says, adding that she "would never go back" to using a smart device. According to UK telecoms regulator Ofcom, Brits aged 25 - 34 spend on average more than four hours per day glued to their phone screens.
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00:00I
00:29can feel popular. You can feel like people want to talk to you, like you're important,
00:40like you matter, like there's an audience. And then once you put your phone down and
00:45you look around and you realize you don't have any friends and you're not doing anything,
00:48your schedule's completely empty, and that creates this cycle where you keep going back
00:52to your phone to feel like you matter. And so I shut it down and I ordered a Nokia on
00:59eBay and I switched to that, and that was the beginning of my downgrading journey.
01:23There's really nothing that has impacted my life as much as downgrading, and I feel
01:44more present. I mean, I wasn't present at all before, because even in moments of presence
01:49I was still thinking, I can't wait until this wonderful moment is over and I can go
01:54check my phone. Everyone should have that privilege of knowing what it's like. I personally
02:01would never go back, because if I did I would become addicted all over again, because at
02:06least for me, and I think for most people, boundaries don't work.