I keep subjecting myself to interesting conditions and out-of-the-ordinary choices. This time, it was living with an inactive sim card. For a month. A month of my life, which is quite a lot, I lived without a sim card in Goa. Good times!
It was around 1.04.24 when my Airtel sim just stopped showing on my device. It didn’t show up and my Iphone 14 threw a ‘No Sim Found’ error. This was very uncalled-for behaviour by my phone, and I was a little taken aback. I hadn’t done anything to damage my poor little sim card, although I do a lot on a daily basis to damage my phone haha. Since I live with an internet connection, I figured that I would get the card looked at in a few days. Having an internet connection allowed me to keep in touch with the world, do most of what a normal person with a sim card would do, and live life pretty much normally. At least for whenever I was at home.
When I was out and about, it became a bit of a pain. To start with, my Google Maps application stopped working. This was a P0 problem. I got lost a couple of times. Had to run into random shops asking for people to provide me a hotspot. And had to keep a date or two waiting for me. The fix, as I later was guided to discover, was to download an offline map of the area I was travelling in. Payment too became a hassle. Cash is something I don’t carry with me. Card is an object many shops don’t have the device to read. UPI depends on internet. Internet is provided by a sim. Sim is not with me. Because simran (sim ran hehe). But thankfully other people are normal. So, I developed a slightly annoying habit of asking people for their hotspots if they wanted me to pay haha. There are only some spots I visit on a weekly basis and that made it easy. From my shwarma guy to my local supermarket to the cafe where I get my lunch veg thali from to a small cafreal place super close to ‘The Second House’, I have everyones hotspot (Gotta catch ’em all!). Having a limited social life and dependency network actually pays!
The calling though! That’s what phones were originally meant for right? To call other people. I couldn’t call anyone. In an emergency, I would be pretty much fucked. But this thought didn’t really occur to me given that I hadn’t developed the tasteful habit of running into emergencies. And likely because I was a guy living in India. Providing directions to the Swiggy delivery guy though became impossible and every time I ordered food/supplies, I would have to pick up my scootie and go to the incorrect incorrigible GPS point that gets pinned to near Kahvi cafe instead of my place. Additionally, my parents and friends tried to reach me multiple times but couldn’t. That’s fine though. As long as they could message me on Whatsapp, this wasn’t a worrying problem.
At this point, the reader might be wondering why the sim hadn’t been fixed already. A normal person would have gone to a shop, gotten it fixed, and moved on with their life. Truth be told, I am lazy. And my internal reward function also prefers to get work done by staying at home and minimising new experiences and travel as much as possible. It is tough for me to convince myself to do things which would benefit me in the medium run but which have a cost at the start. Getting a sim card checked would mean finding a mobile shop, going there, and spending god knows how much time there. And then who knows if the problem would have gotten solved with one visit. Thinking along these lines, my mind pushes tasks like this one to when my survival is being threatened or some really important task is getting blocked by this. Otherwise, I tend to carry on, survive, and keep dealing with the minor inconveniences. I also believe we don’t need most of the things around us. We deal and live in excesses. We consume in excesses. The entire species in fact can attribute a lot of its problems to it having a very messed up understanding of what wants and what needs are. Social media, a fast paced life, and less of introspection unfortunately exacerbates this problem as we tumble down this rabbit hole. I try to passively work on this and survive with actual minimalism, not just aesthetic minimalism, whenever I can.
Anyway, I did go to a mobile shop in the first week of getting my sim fried. Turned out that my sim had stopped working and that I would have to go to an Airtel shop in Mapusa to get this fixed. 15 minutes from my place. The cost! The waiting that I would have to endure there! What if I don’t find any parking?! What if the shop is shut?! What if they ask for my aadhar card/some other doc that I don’t have?! What if they say come back again to get it fixed?! For some reason, an airtel shop in Mapusa turned had into an Indian government office in my mind and I had tagged a heavy temporal cost to this small spatiotemporal task. So…I pushed getting this done for a month.
There were major pros of not having a sim. I had to step out of my comfort zone and ask everyone for hotspots. I wasn’t constantly bugged by whatsapp messages, instagram updates, or Hinge messages. I wasn’t always picking up my phone and scrolling or checking for new content/information. I wasn’t always involved in the outside world. I was at a certain amount of peace I believe. It felt nice. I could ride my scootie peacefully without caring about turning my wrist to glance at notifications in my Garmin. It felt unnecessary to have all these apps constantly pinging or rather being so easily available to you all the time. We don’t need most of these. At least to be available the way they are right now. Ideally, there should be some cost to use these. There is obviously a very passive insidious cost. But a new cost mechanism where the cost is more upfront and explicit is needed for sure. Something that tells you after you spend 5 minutes on Insta what you could have been spending those 5 mins on instead. Something that shows you the opportunity cost of checking whatsapp and engaging in conversations. Something that quantifies your habit of picking up the phone and fiddling around with it and attaches a warning based on real life consequences of this habit.
A couple of times though, it did feel suffocating. This happened when I was at home and my internet stopped working too. It resulted in me feeling super suffocated for some reason. With no access to the outside world, no way to call anyone, no way to read any online article, no way to watch any content, it did a feel a little suffocating. A very interesting feeling. Has to be explored more. But once I gave into the suffocation, I became one with it. Took the day easy, because there wasn’t much I could do. Took everything slowly and enjoyed the slowness in the movement of the minutes because I wasn’t waiting for the next like on my story.
All in all, a good thing to have tried out. For sure…