Why turning my iPhone to black and white made me a better man?

A couple of months ago, I read an article about someone turning their smartphone to monochrome. That is, making a colourful, modern, do-it-all-and-then-some -phone to something boring. I was intrigued and decided to test it out.

Little did I know it would make my life, and the life of those around me, a lot better.

You see, I was not a smartphone kinda guy. All I really wanted to do with my smartphone (an iPhone 6s, my first smart phone, bought used from a friend in 2015) was to check facts, listen to music, make recordings, and take notes. As pretty much everyone else, I ended up doing those things, and a whole lot more.

Everyone with a smartphone is a little bit addicted to it. Some more, some less. We all pretty much ended up doing the exact thing that we thought was just ridiculous, way back when we still had flip phones: looking like the letter "C", hunched over our little screens, glaring at something probably not that important. While life - real life, with real people - was rolling before our shoulders, we engaged in something instantaneous, immediate, and immaculate. We engaged in something easier.

I did not like it. And I was a part of it. How could I not? What could be more enticing that getting all your wishes come true in a digital heartbeat? No matter that the beating hearts of our loved ones were beating all around us, but they were...how to say it? They were just so slow. The smartphone was faster, more responsive, and was giving the dopamine hit by the like - and boy, were those likes fast to come. No matter where you looked in this open system of a digital universe, everyone was liking me. Quite unlike those drab humans I kept bumping into in my physical surroundings.

One day I decided to fight.

I turned my iPhone to black and white. No easy feat: you have to search a little. But after that, everything changed. Here are the top five things that happened to me after turning my smartphone to black + white.

1. I use my smartphone only when I need to. With the phone looking so boring, I use it only when I need to do something with it. I rarely check Instagram, or browse through online stores as a way to pass time. I don't hang around with my phone anymore.
2. Everything looks more colourful. You don't really notice the colours in your phone until you switch them off. They are really, really bright. Artificially so. But so is this life around us. It can look pale in comparison, until you switch out the lights from the competitor with an unfair advantage.
3. I look less like an adult baby. Monochrome smartphone (from here on, a "wisephone") is like having a lollipop that has no taste: you do not want to suck on it. The basic deal of a smartphone is that it removes lack and fulfils our wishes. By accepting it, we enter the trap against which the Finnish eco-philosopher Pentti Linkola warned us against, when he suggested that lack is a basic human need. If we do not learn to deal with lack, we become (and often are) like arrogant children.
4. I do more. During the course of this autumn and winter, I have finished my PhD dissertation, written my sixth book, and started a new business. These are all highly meaningful ventures for me and my clients. I don't know whether these have a correlation or not, but all of these quite time-consuming projects coincide with the time I first made my smartphone black and white.
5. I play chess with my kids. Real wealth is discretionary time, as my mentor Alan Weiss says. We only have so much of this wealth, and it is often spent with people closest to us: our spouses, kids, and family. If real wealth is this time, what should we do with it? Should we use it in checking how many likes we got on Instagram, or browsing the comments made in Facebook by people we used to know? Or should we direct it towards playing chess with our kids, talking with our spouse, or watching movies from start to finish? From the perspective of our brain chemistry, these are actually quite hard choices to make. At least, until you turn the colors off and make the competition more even.

Smartness helps you give quick answers to meaningless questions. Wisdom helps you ask the right questions. So, whether you read this article on a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer screen, consider turing off the colors. Wisephones just might be the next small thing. For me, at least, it was.