The Case For Going Gray

How Removing Color on Our Phones Can Give Us Freedom

I recently turned off color on my phone, and this simple hack has had a surprising impact.

I don’t look at my phone as much and experience fewer urges to do so. It doesn’t deliver the dopamine hit that it used to.

And when I do look at it now, it’s more focused and more on my terms. I’m less likely to be lured over from the task at hand to some other shiny app because, well, nothing is shiny anymore.

It’s surprising how extraneous color is most of the time. It makes our phones sexier to look at without making them more useful. It’s more noise than signal.

In the 24/7 tug-of-war between deep, deliberate thought and instant dopamine, between real connection and (anti) social media, going gray makes the “bad” choices a bit less alluring and the healthier ones a bit more competitive.

It makes the prospect of a stroll through the park a bit more competitive with the prospect of a scroll through Instagram. Reaching for a novel a bit more competitive with reaching for my phone.

It’s easy to forget that when we’re looking at pictures of a sunset on Instagram we’re not actually looking at a sunset. We’re looking at pixels on a glass rectangle. Grayscale makes me a bit less gullible.

Of course, I can switch on color at any time. But the friction of a few taps and clicks is enough to dissuade me most of the time. The instant gratification of shiny colors loses it’s allure when it’s no longer instant.

In the rare event that I need to toggle color back on to say, take a photo or identify a car on Lyft, the colors scream out at me. They look more vivid, more saturated than they did before. So saturated they’re almost unpleasant like a smoothie that is a little too sweet.

Trust me, I’m not a luddite. I love technology. I just think that we should have a relationship with our devices that actually enhances our freedom and life quality rather than chipping away at them. Simply put, we should own our phones — not the other way around.

Going gray along with other tweaks like shutting off notifications and deleting enticing apps frees us from a thousand tiny, unsolicited demands on our attention that quickly add up.

Going gray is a small act of defiance against the ever-increasing pull of our digital devices, a gesture toward agency and self-sovereignty in our lives, and a reminder of what’s actually important to us.

We are Pavlovian creatures and when something stops lighting up our brain’s reward circuitry we stop doing it…as much. My phone still demands “look at me! look at me!” but now in a strikingly muffled voice like a late-night infomercial with the volume turned way down.

Looking at my phone is almost boring now. And that’s a great thing, because when I look up from that gray, lifeless screen, the world around me suddenly has a bit more color.