This morning in 2026, I'm of the persuasion that it's actually easier to ditch your smartphone than it is to delete your social media.
Both point to an ideal, a simpler way of living, but if there's one change that may have less friction working against its adoption and more momentum to be found in its implementation, it may just be the smartphone shift.
Network effects are the foundational feature of social media platforms. To embed yourself within one is to pay the price of engaging a self-sustaining loop of growth. Growth for your own network, your relational awareness, and your online "presence" that each become subservient to the platform's designs.
As has been well laid out by Haidt and others, these compounding effects create constraining defects for users. A collective action problem arises where every user of social media knows its better to be off social media, but the fear and (seemingly) suboptimal conditions they may face on the other side of leaving are viscerally greater than the pain of staying.
This is not necessarily true of a smartphone user's conditioning to their technological slavery.
Smartphones are convenience machines (machines may be underselling it) that give a user maneuverability within the world. They may contain network effects, but the majority of the benefits of those effects exist within a person's secondary device (a family iPad or work computer can access platforms, engage in commerce, and interact online with parity to the smartphone).
There is also less of a collective action problem in ditching your smartphone as you can still maintain the appearance online of owning one. You don't have to disengage social media or drop your subscriptions or take a monastic vow as long as you keep a desktop or portable computer in the wings awaiting your digital adventures.
As a bonus and in my own experience, people react with excitement, curiosity, and hope to seeing a LightPhone or other alternative to their own "smart" lifestyle choices.
Maybe its the novelty and innovation or the comfort of someone not simply eschewing technology all together but simply finding a simpler, hipster alternative. Maybe it is genuine hope and inspiration for them to one day do the same.
Whatever it is, it is not the reaction you get from telling people you're not on social media.
The standard, (I would argue) pre-programmed reaction to this choice is one of weariness, complacency, and, much of the time, an indiscriminate frustration.
We all know the harms. This week, the law has begun to affirm these findings, but after nearly two decades as comatose batteries for these companies, our ability to see a future beyond a life on these platforms is drained.
Maybe, surprisingly, ditching your smartphone is an easier place to start...