Sorry Anton, I'm Keeping the Fucking Smartphone
I fucking love my smartphone. This creates a slight problem with Secret Eight.
Anton Kreil's eighth secret to financial success is to ditch the smartphone. This presents me with a slight problem because I agree with a great deal of what Anton says, but there is absolutely no fucking chance I'm ditching mine. I use a Samsung S26 Ultra religiously and if you tried to take it away from me I'd probably chase you down the street. Anton and I have reached a temporary diplomatic disagreement. He can ditch his phone. I'm keeping mine.
This is one of the reasons I like Anton's material. I don't think the point of listening to intelligent people is to agree with every fucking word they say. That's not education, that's joining a cult. If somebody gives me ten ideas and nine make sense while one doesn't fit my circumstances, I'm perfectly comfortable keeping the nine and telling the tenth to get in the bin. I don't need Anton Kreil to be right about everything any more than I need my accountant to advise me on trousers.
I understand what Anton is getting at. Smartphones can become fucking parasites. People carry these little rectangles around all day and allow them to interrupt meals, conversations, work, sleep, holidays and apparently even having a shit. The phone makes a noise and their hand shoots towards it like Pavlov has just fired a starting pistol. We've somehow reached a point where a grown adult can be halfway through a conversation with another human being, feel a vibration in his pocket and immediately decide that whatever has just arrived from the internet deserves priority. Where Anton and I part company is over the solution. His answer is to ditch the smartphone. Mine is to ditch the shit on the smartphone and keep the extraordinarily useful machine underneath it.
I don't use Instagram. I've never used TikTok. I've now shut Facebook down for good. I have no interest in carrying a playground for idiots around in my pocket so that strangers can show me their breakfast, their arse, their dog, their motivational quotations or the fucking view from their hotel balcony. If your phone spends six hours a day firing algorithmic custard into your brain, I can understand why throwing it into a river might look attractive. Mine has a job.
A large part of my working life involves people who aren't standing anywhere near me. I need to keep in contact with the offices in Seoul, Tokyo and Shanghai, as well as people elsewhere. There are clients, staff, lawyers and accountants. There are messages that matter, conversations that need to happen and occasionally problems that require my attention. Meanwhile I can be sitting thousands of miles away in Vietnam or Malaysia. That's not a bug in my life. That's the fucking point. My smartphone is one of the things that makes the geography possible.
Twenty or thirty years ago, trying to live like this would have required a collection of equipment that made you look like you were invading a small country. Laptop, telephone, fax machine, maps, phrasebooks, travel documents, banking paperwork, address books and probably a suitcase full of electrical adapters designed by Satan. International calls cost enough to make you check whether the person at the other end was genuinely worth speaking to. Now most of that lives inside one slab of glass in my pocket. And Anton wants me to throw the fucking thing away. Sorry mate, no.
I suspect part of the difference is what the smartphone represents to each of us. Anton comes from professional trading. I can imagine that having markets, prices, charts, news and financial information sitting in your pocket creates its own special form of insanity. If you've spent years in markets, the ability to check a price every thirty seconds isn't necessarily freedom. It's a casino putting a fruit machine beside your bed. I don't spend my day staring at charts on my phone waiting for something to move by 0.7 percent so I can experience an emotion. If something I own goes down, I'm perfectly capable of losing money without watching it happen in high definition.
For me the phone is primarily a communication device, and communication is one of the things that allows me to live the way I do. There is also a part of this that matters far more to me than business. My parents are getting older. I chose to live overseas. They didn't make that decision for me. I've been away for a long time and there is a selfishness built into that choice which I'm perfectly capable of recognising. I built my life where I wanted to build it, and one of the costs is that my parents are thousands of miles away.
The smartphone doesn't remove that distance, but fuck me, it helps. I can message them. I can call them. I can video call them. They can reach me. If something happens, I'm not sitting on the other side of the world waiting for a letter to arrive by steamship. For all the criticism smartphones receive, being able to tap a piece of glass in Vietnam and see your parents in Britain a few seconds later is still fucking astonishing when you stop taking it for granted. I'm not ditching that because somebody on Instagram can't stop photographing avocado toast.
The same applies to old friends. I'm talking about the people you grew up with, the ones who knew you before anybody had money, businesses, impressive job titles or lower back pain. Friends for life. Geography can make those relationships harder to maintain, but technology makes it ridiculously easy to keep the thread intact. WhatsApp does exactly what I need it to do. Someone sends me a message. I answer. We take the piss out of each other. Nobody needs to upload a photograph of their lunch. That's technology behaving itself.
And then there's reading. One of my favourite pastimes is reading books, although my eyesight is pretty fucked these days. I've spent years working in technology staring into screens, so apparently the retirement gift from the industry is the eyesight of a Victorian coal miner. There comes a point where the letters in a book start behaving like ants at a rave and you realise your eyes have filed a formal complaint with management.
My Samsung reads my Kindle books to me, and this is fucking magnificent. I can sit on a beach with a cocktail while a small Korean rectangle reads a book aloud because my eyes can't be arsed doing another shift. Think about how absurdly luxurious that is. Kings once employed people to read to them. I bought mine from Samsung. I can sit there with the sea in front of me, cocktail in hand, listening to a book while the same device keeps me connected to offices across Asia, my clients, my friends and my family. If Samsung works out how to rub sun cream into my back, I'll probably fucking marry it.
So no, I don't accept that the smartphone itself is the problem. The relationship is the problem. A chainsaw is useful if you're cutting down a tree. It's less useful if you spend six hours licking it. We don't respond to the second situation by concluding that chainsaws were a terrible invention. The smartphone is similar. It's a map, library, telephone, camera, translator, bank, boarding pass, office, authentication device, music player, audiobook reader and communication system. Throwing all of that away because some people can't stop watching thirty second videos of strangers dancing seems like demolishing your kitchen because your neighbour eats too many biscuits.
The important question is who is working for whom. That's where I think Anton is absolutely right about the underlying problem even though I disagree with his solution. For a lot of people, the phone owns them. They wake up and check it before they've spoken to the person lying beside them. Notifications decide where their attention goes. Apps decide what they watch. Algorithms decide what arrives next. Every spare moment gets filled with somebody else's content. The phone isn't a tool anymore. It's a tiny electronic foreman standing in their pocket ringing a bell every time it wants another piece of their life.
Fuck that. Mine works for me. That's the arrangement.
I don't need to photograph my breakfast. I don't need strangers to approve of my holiday. I don't need to know what celebrities are doing. I don't need an algorithm feeding me an endless slurry of videos selected because some server farm has calculated that I'm 63 percent likely to keep watching if the next clip contains a dog, a Ferrari or a woman with enormous tits. I need Seoul, Tokyo and Shanghai to be able to reach me. I want my parents and old friends to be able to reach me. I want maps when I'm somewhere unfamiliar, banking when I need banking and books read to me while I'm sitting beside the sea with something alcoholic in my hand. That's a pretty fucking good machine.
The irony is that Anton and I are probably trying to achieve exactly the same thing. Freedom. He ditches the smartphone because he doesn't want the device controlling his attention. I keep the smartphone because it allows me to control where I live while remaining connected to the people and things that matter. Same destination, different vehicle. Principles become stupid when people turn them into commandments. What creates freedom for one person can remove it from another. A trader who can't stop checking charts might benefit enormously from getting rid of the screen in his pocket. Someone coordinating an international business while spending part of the year thousands of miles from the office might find that advice about as useful as being told to communicate by fucking smoke signal.
So Secret Eight is the first one where I'm going to respectfully tell Anton no. I'm not ditching my smartphone. I'm ditching the rubbish that tries to colonise it. The phone can stay as long as it remembers the employment arrangement. It works for me. I don't work for it.
Now I'm going back to my book. My phone is reading it to me, and I've got a cocktail to deal with.