My phone still works and I should be grateful for that, considering the amount of times it has landed facedown on a disgusting ceramic floor or icy sidewalk, but I feel like it might be on the way out.

My cell phone can’t handle much in terms of memory or speed and I have also had complaints that it makes a lot of clacking, rattling and blapping during calls.

Young people find this amusing and older people think I am doing it on purpose just to annoy them.

So I took myself off to Bell to see if they would offer me an upgrade. I must be living in the past but I sometimes think that there will be perks for being a longtime customer. Nope, that’s not a thing.

Telling me about my possible choices, the sales woman started listing off numbers and gigs that swirled around uselessly in my head, but my mind focused when she said, ‘so it will be an extra charge of $190 a month for two years’.

Whoa! How expensive is this phone? I asked her to find a cheaper alternative and we still ended up at a new charge of an extra $90 a month for 2 years.

This seems more than it used to be? It’s hard to keep up with the arbitrary increases in prices on absolutely everything.

What if I bought a cheap phone and just put these unwanted extra bills out of my mind, I asked? The best she could do was $350 for her cheapest phone.

These are ridiculous costs. And to add salt to the wound, I know the phone is not good for my health, not physiologically and not mentally.

How are we supposed to pay for these crazy costs? The simple answer is through debt. I mean, aren’t they asking us to invest in our own enslavement?

Anyway, most people I know are struggling to buy groceries and pay all their bills, so they don’t have money for this indulgence.

But hold on, it’s not an indulgence, is it? Isn’t it a necessity? You need it to sign in to your bank, you need it to get work and to keep working.

For some reason this crazy suggestion of paying a new $200 bill every month was my last straw.

I thought about how I could buy a nice small camera with that money. I thought about how many hours are lost to scrolling. I thought about my youngest son’s rejection of the smart phone in favor of a flip phone.

We have been trapped into thinking we cannot live without a cell phone, nervously patting our pockets as we head out the door everyday.

I have to remind myself that when I was young we just wrote letters and called people once in a while. We didn’t have daily contact. I traveled across the globe in my mid twenties and my mom just had to wait to receive a letter. But I did write!

I use my phone today and I enjoy it too. I love to take photos with my phone. I post them straight to a FB page that I have set up in order to share my pictures.

I check on my kids a lot, saying hello, asking how they are, texting or free facetiming. I check my emails. I watch silly people doing silly things and giggle to myself.

I have thought, once or twice, about whether I could make money from the internet. We all wonder sometimes. It is like a crazy lottery that you could play.

I could expand my online presence. I could make podcasts, I could talk into my camera and turn myself into content. I might have a retro quality that young people could find amusing, or at least, ridiculous.

I could post innocent material, maybe just light and funny. I watch other people’s funny posts as they flick by on my phone. I could do it my own way, right? Make money?

My ‘honest’ blog would need to be more consistent, I would have to post material more frequently. I would need to be more reactive, make podcasts?

One has to wonder about the possibility of making cash flow, because there isn’t a lot of cash flowing in the regular physical world.

But no, with proper consideration, this is not the life for me, of course! I am relieved when my dinosaur computer handles basic requests, and I am not savvy, not tech savvy, not savvy in any way.

It wasn’t just the monthly bill of $190 ( for 2 years!) that made me pull the brakes on any such concept.

It was just that I saw the swindle in clear light, in a flash of clarity. I couldn’t help but think – they really have fooled us, haven’t they?

Sell your soul, it’s easy! It really feels like a deal with the devil.

Just offer your good self to the public, and then, sell, sell, sell! There’s gold to be found in them hills! Monetize yourself!

Nope. Now my mind is set against all of it. Now I am feeling contrary. I am determined to not ‘make money’ from my online writing. I am giving it away. I don’t care. I won’t participate.

I have always felt uncomfortable asking for money on my Substack; there are just too many writers out there begging for scraps.

I don’t want to promote myself. I don’t want to shill. I don’t want to beg for subscriptions.

When my phone gives up the ghost I will move on to a flip phone and good luck to anyone receiving my texts, which are prone to multiple typos at the best of times!

I may indulge in a nice little camera to replace my phone camera and I will make some small steps to return to a much more sane time.