Hardware Stores, Pigeons, and Peeing in the Street

I deleted all the apps off my phone <3 plus ins and outs for 2024

On January 2nd (only a day or two late!) I sat down and wrote out a nice long list of potential New Year’s Resolutions. I am, generally speaking, a fan of the New Year’s Resolution. In fact, I’m a fan of resolutions, regardless of the time of year they are resolved. So, I wrote out my list. There they all were, like contestants in a beauty pageant (or something) waiting for their roses (or something).

Then I closed my journal and haven’t opened it back up to that page since. I haven’t revisited, haven’t whittled it down from the many to the few, haven’t homed in on practical steps and concrete goals, etc. You won’t be getting a tidy little manifesto from me this year. It’s fine—I can write my 2024 manifesto some other time. I make the rules!

However, among my ideas of ways to change my life on this trip around the sun there was one that seemed to cry out for more attention than the rest: no apps on phone.

No apps on phone?! Obviously, some apps on phone. The ones that literally can’t be deleted, and Spotify, and Uber, and Resy (I’m not a total Luddite), but could the rest of them be gone?

It turns out, the answer is yes! I deleted *almost* all the apps off my phone. I feel bored and boring when I talk about it, but in the past few years I have become increasingly disillusioned with the apps¹ (social media et al.), or perhaps my complete inability to effectively regulate the amount of time I personally spend on them. Not that I’m to blame, really. They’re designed to be addicting, and it’s not just me—the kids are all depressed, or so I keep hearing.

I don’t think I have anything particularly revolutionary to say on the subject. It’s kind of played out. You know the bit: you don’t realize how often you reach for your phone, or go to click into a particular app, until the app is no longer there. Nothing is there. So, you swipe back and forth a couple times, scroll through your photos or check your email and lock your phone again dejectedly. Rinse, repeat every five, ten, fifteen minutes.

It was surprising how quickly I stopped reaching, though—for my phone and whatever meager dopamine hit came with it. There’s nothing there for me, so I’ve stopped trying. We are such trainable creatures.

Soon I’ll lose it in my house. Go out without it. Toss it into the middle of a busy intersection and watch the cars drive over it. Not really, but the point is that my life has improved materially. I’m not missing anything. I’m happier, I’m more productive, I’m productive in a calm way. I’m reading more, I’m writing more, I’m staring out my window and seeing interesting things. Though I’m telling you about it now (life is full of seeming contradictions) I don’t care if anyone knows that I’m doing these things.

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I looked out my window at work the other day and watched people coming in and out of the hardware store. It turned into a play. The stage, a hardware store, a space of infinite possibility. There was one on the Upper East Side that captivated me when I was little. They had so many things in there besides screwdrivers and potting soil—plush toilet seat covers, and wine openers that looked like ladies in red skirts, and pens with pompoms on the top, and foot baths, and blenders. Just anything your heart could dream of, all shiny plastic and metal. It might not have even been a hardware store, but it smelled like one. I like to think of it as one.

I like to think about people copying keys, too. They just moved. They’re giving a copy to a friend just in case, to a dog walker, to a lover, to a child who’s old enough now to need her own set of keys. A key pressed into a hand says, “enter at will”—I want you to be able to. Shiny in silver and bronze with sharp new edges. I used to wear a chain of keys around my neck, even wore it in my sleep.

Then a white pigeon landed on the sidewalk there and sent a thrill through me. A white pigeon! Could a pigeon be more commonplace in New York City? You barely even notice them—they don’t register across your sight. Except for when they get too close. One almost flew up straight into my face the other morning, and I did that specific recoil you do when a pigeon takes flight right in front of you. You know the one? A man saw me, and it made his morning. He laughed and laughed, so I did too.

It’s funny how noticeable pigeons become when the shade of them, the coloring, is even slightly off, let alone pure white. It turns out your eyes have been noticing them the whole time. Memorizing them in fact. It’s the same with squirrels. The squirrel you picture in your head right now (picture a squirrel) is actually a very precise shade of brownish grey, but you only realize it when you see one that’s red or black and think, that’s not the color that a squirrel is…

And as I pondered all this in my blissful app free world, there, right there in front of my very eyes, at 1:30pm on a Monday, a man whipped out his penis and peed in the street.

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In lieu of resolutions, or some other more traditional framework, please accept this list of Eve’s 2024 Ins and Outs. For whatever reason, this feels like the most compelling framework for improving myself (and the world around me, hopefully) in the year ahead. Many more things are in than are out because that’s just the way I like to live my life. Do what feels right as long as it’s not evil. Xx

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1. It’s not lost on me that Substack is an app.