A couple years ago, my phone broke and I just didn't get another one for an entire year lol.

I told people to email me, drove them nuts and everyone thought I was crazy like a phone is required to go down the street "just in case", much like fear psychology surrounding masks now that I think about it. Anywho, I was a late adopter to smart phone tech, I'm coming up on 30 so I've seen it all happen, but I just always lagged behind as far as phones and tablets go because I primarily always dealt with PC and used the PC for the longest time as the primary hub for all media,communications, and work.

Anyway going phoneless for a year was great. Literally no problems. The only thing I would say is it's pretty handy to have a smart phone for things like verification purposes and being able to check your bank account very quickly, you know to pull stuff up when you are doing some boring errand, good to access virtual documents instead of having to prepare physical papers.

Other than that if you really think about it you probably only regularly speak with maybe 5 people, then maybe a cluster from work. You can easily get away with a flip phone to just talk and text these people simple messages if you don't want to go completely phoneless like I did.

Or if you want to be a reallllllly big cheapskate I think one dumb phone for a couple could work and could essentially be used like a house phone with additional benefits of being mobile.

I don't know. I type this from a smart phone right now, but they really aren't necessities and honestly if you just got them all taken away tomorrow it wouldn't hurt. I literally had no problem not having an actual phone, if I ever reallllllllyyy needed to make an emergency call I would just ask someone for a phone and be like my bad I left my phone at home and I need to call my wife do you have like a regular phone anywhere? Then, imagine that, I would be able to make a call for free with someone else phone to establish plans or whatever.

That literally happend like maybe 3 times in a year. Otherwise emails worked great. It was kind of nice spending like 30 minutes on email time. It was nice like not being available to everyone all the time. It was like okay "this is my communication time let's see who wanted to speak with me today" OH my uncle? Okay yeah let's send him an email? Oh Ted from work okay meeting on the 25th. Cool glad I didn't get that text while I was out to eat with my wife. It was just great to partition my availability with people. It was like I had my own secretary guarding my office, and the secretary was basically- if you want to communicate with me you have to go through the effort of sending an email and you need to establish purpose with your message or intent, and also must wait at least a day for response. Otherwise, don't bother. It's not important enough for me.

Anyways I for one am super supportive of less phone movement. Real world case study here. Definitely promote this. Try it yourself. Just try it for a week yourself too lol. Turn smart phone off tell everyone you broke your phone and your just off the grid for a week or two until you get it fixed. If they need you they can email you. Try it out, it's liberating in certain ways.