We Have Choices

One surefire way to protect our privacy: leave the phone at home & use cash. It worked for decades/millennia. It can work again.

Saturday, July 2nd, 2022

Dear Freedom Friends,

Don’t worry! Saturday Morning Recipes are coming (later this afternoon)…and they’re YUMMY!!!!!

For now, let me share my personal liberating moment:

It’s time for the official Wallet switch!

A number of years ago, when I was raising my kids, my husband really wanted me to have a cell phone but…I refused to be tethered to a phone.

I did so many things with my children, without a phone. Road trips to California, Colorado, even Mexico!

People would tell me that having a cell phone would keep us safe in that rare situation when the car broke down and we are stuck on the side of the road or whatever other reason they could come up with. I wondered at how people could let fear play such a strong role in their lives…and I lived my cell-less life quite happily.

Ultimately, I got a cell phone because the boys were doing gymnastics in Auburn and we were gone for eight hour windows four times a week.

That was a lot of time to not be next to my house phone. From calling up friends & family to managing family business and dealing with doctor appointments (etc)…I decided on a cell phone so I could “work” while waiting for the kids to finish their gymnastics practice.

At some point I got one of these protective phone wallet contraptions, and that was when my phone started to live next to my drivers license and my debit card and my ferry ticket and all the important things that you actually really do need to have with you.

Since then, anyone in the world who has access to the vast and endless tracking data that is uploaded to complete strangers by my phone on a regular basis, has more knowledge of my movement and my lifestyle and my travels and my life than my own memory.

As I’ve come to better understand this (thank you, Edward Snowden and others)…I’ve decided that I’m not OK with complete strangers knowing where I am at all times.

As a teenager, my parents never knew where I was. I had a curfew and as long as I came home sober and alive on time, they didn’t ask any questions. As a college student, and a young adult living on my own, I was even more free to be me without supervision or monitoring. Just as it’s always been - since the beginning of time - when human beings walked around freely and unmonitored, like the deer and the ravens and the raccoons and the salmon.

Our cell phones have become, by our patterns of behavior and the attachments that we have been encouraged to form with these little technological tracking devices, as effective as a tracking collar put on a bear or a tracking device inserted into the blubber of a whale by a research scientist.

And I’m pretty sure that the people who have access to OUR data view me and you and all the other humans on the planet with the same minimal level of respect as a marine biologist views 450 different penguins that they clipped a tracking device on too.

Actually, the marine biologist probably cares about the penguin more.

And so, I decided that I didn’t want to take my phone with me everywhere. Then, I ran into the problem of — my wallet. Which was such a brilliant reminder of those many ways in which these devices have been maneuvered and positioned into our lives so as to appear necessary.

The “necessary” convenience is NOT convenient.

Today, I am moving my ferry ticket, my drivers license and all that stuff. It’s leaving my cell phone protective case and moving back into this beautiful teal colored leather wallet that I proudly bought for myself about 12 years ago at a festival.

Going forward: The decision to take my phone with me will be a decision to take a phone with me. And nothing more.

My wallet will carry what I need to have on my body legally to drive my car and what I need to have with me in order to purchase things. Including cash!

Because these little cell phone wallets really don’t have room for cash - do they? - which “conveniently” motivates you to use your $$$ cards which also allows complete strangers to track where you are and what you’re buying! Seriously?

I am moving back to the days when I walk out my front door, I travel through the world, I buy things, and if I need to make a phone call I’m gonna go back to being a “cell phone borrower” so I can even make a phone call without that being tracked because it won’t be my phone.

Then, I will return home and no one in the world except me and the people I spend time with are going to know where I was or what I was doing.

That is appropriate. That is how I want to live my life. And sometimes I’ll take the phone! But, it will not be accidental, automatic or because I have to…it will be on purpose, by choice, and for a reason that makes MY day better.

Free your mind, free your life.