I Surrendered to My Phone Completely and Honestly It's Going Fine

Sometime around 2019, give or take a global catastrophe, I stopped trying to understand my phone and started treating it more like a weather system. Something to be observed, occasionally complained about, and ultimately just endured. I don't control it. It doesn't fully control me. We have reached an uneasy truce, and I refuse to renegotiate.

This is not a confession of failure. This is a confession of wisdom.

Because at some point, every functioning adult in America has stood in their Settings app, stared into the abyss of toggles and permissions and nested submenus, and thought: I could learn this. Or I could just restart it and see what happens. And then they restarted it. And then they did it again three days later. And they will keep doing it until they die or the phone dies, whichever comes first.

You are not alone. This is a movement. We just don't have a group chat because none of us can figure out how to manage our notification permissions.

The Exact Settings Nobody Is Opening on Purpose

Let's be specific about the carnage, because vagueness is for people who are too embarrassed to admit the full scope of their avoidance.

Dark Mode. You've toggled it on and off approximately forty times. You don't actually have a preference. You just keep accidentally hitting it when you're trying to adjust brightness at 2 AM, and then you live in whichever mode you land on until something annoys you enough to try again. There is no system. There has never been a system.

Location Services. You have apps that know where you are right now that you haven't opened since the Obama administration. Do you revoke their access? No. Because what if you need them? What if you suddenly need to check in at a Chili's in 2025? You can't risk it. The Chili's might need to know you're coming.

Notification Settings. The most chaotic frontier of them all. Your phone buzzes for things that are genuinely baffling — a weather alert for a city you visited once in 2017, a badge on an app you don't remember downloading, a "suggested memory" from a day that was, objectively, not a good memory. Did you set these up? Did someone else? Did your phone achieve sentience and start curating a life for you? Unknown. Unknowable. Moving on.

Storage Management. There are 4,000 photos on your phone. At least 600 of them are accidental screenshots. There are 12 apps you have not touched in over a year. You have been warned that your storage is almost full for so long that the warning has become ambient noise, like traffic or your own breathing. You will address this never.

The Workarounds We Have Invented Instead

Here's the thing about refusing to learn how your phone actually works: the human brain is incredibly creative when it's trying to avoid doing something correctly.

We have developed an entire shadow economy of workarounds that are objectively more complicated than the actual solution, and yet we commit to them with a dedication that is almost admirable.

Is your phone acting weird? Restart it. Works about 40% of the time. The other 60% you just restart it again and hope the second reboot hits different. Is an app crashing? Delete it, reinstall it, and act like you performed surgery. Did something change in your settings that you absolutely did not change? Stare at it for a while, then ask your nephew.

The nephew thing is important. We have collectively outsourced our tech literacy to whoever in our lives is under the age of 22 and willing to sigh heavily while fixing something in under thirty seconds. This is the actual support structure holding American adults together. Not therapy. Not community. Teenagers who are mildly exasperated with us.

The Moment Someone Accidentally Changes Something

This is the darkest timeline. This is when the whole house of cards comes down.

Somebody — maybe you, maybe a toddler who got hold of your phone, maybe a ghost — changes one setting. One. And because none of us have any baseline understanding of how things were configured in the first place, we have no idea what changed or how to fix it.

Suddenly your keyboard is in a different language. Suddenly your phone is reading your texts out loud. Suddenly every photo you take is in some aspect ratio that looks like it was shot for a 1997 camcorder. You didn't do this. You would never do this. And yet here you are, filming your life in portrait mode when your phone has apparently decided you meant landscape, and nothing makes sense anymore.

The response, always, is to go into settings, scroll frantically, recognize nothing, and back out. Then Google "why is my phone doing [description that is way too vague to return useful results]." Then restart it. Then text someone younger than you and describe the problem using the wrong words.

The problem may or may not get fixed. The anxiety absolutely will not.

Why We Are Like This

Here's the real answer, the one underneath all the jokes: there are too many settings. There are genuinely too many. The number of toggles in an average smartphone settings menu has exceeded the number of decisions a reasonable person should be expected to make about a device they just want to use to text people and look at pictures of dogs.

We didn't get here by being lazy. We got here by doing a rational cost-benefit analysis and concluding that the time and cognitive energy required to actually understand our phones exceeds the inconvenience of just not understanding them. That's not avoidance. That's efficiency. That's optimization.

Also, yes, some of it is avoidance.

Peace Through Surrender

I want to be clear that I am not advocating for actually learning your phone settings. That ship has sailed. The settings have changed three times since you bought the phone anyway. Whatever you learned in 2021 is now wrong because they moved everything in an update and gave you no explanation.

What I am advocating for is the full and total acceptance of not knowing. Stop pretending you're going to fix the notification situation. Stop lying to yourself about the storage. Let the location services apps keep tabs on your historical Chili's locations. They've earned it. You've earned the peace that comes from just letting go.

Your phone is doing its best. You are doing your best. Neither of you fully understands the other, and yet here you both are, making it work, day after chaotic day.

That's not a disaster. That's a relationship.

Now restart it. See if that helps.