CULTURE

The Secret Lives of Flip Phone Users

Life, when you’re unreachable, isn’t as bad as it seems.

By Eva Rizk ☆ Issue 2, Fall 2025

Nelson’s Schok Classic Flip

There’s rumours going around Montreal that 20-somethings are using flip phones. I first heard it back in March, when a friend of a friend complained of young guys switching out their iPhones for the morally superior flip phone, becoming, as a result, out of reach.

To most of Gen Z, switching out your smartphone for a flip phone sounds like a nightmare. Our phones go everywhere with us yet we aren't good at keeping in touch over phone calls. Instead, we communicate over Instagram group chats, story likes, and shared posts. A response to a DM or text is expected from anywhere between a couple seconds to a few hours—anytime above that may warrant spam calls and a wellness check. So what happens when you’re cut off from all your notifications, because of a flip phone?

“One of the reasons [my ex] cited for breaking up with me is that she could never reach me when she wanted to,” said Marcel, 27. He’s had a Nokia 2720 Flip for about four years. It doesn’t have a touch screen but it’s red and can connect to 4G when he wants to put an exhaustive amount of effort into a Google search on a numeric keypad. It was his solution to escaping morning doom scrolls in bed and enforcing down time on the bus. He now lives with more intention. If he’s traveling a long distance by car, he writes down the directions. When he’s shopping, he buys what’s available at the store instead of searching for other options. “Life is just less complicated,” he said.

Annelies, 22, who made the switch nine months ago, had a hard time getting her social circle used to her off-the-grid life. She has a ZTE Cymbal 2. On it she can set an alarm clock, browse the internet, read emails, and record audio. But without read receipts and constant access to WiFi, her friends couldn’t help but roll their eyes at her, she said. “A friend of mine gifted me an iPhone XR, because I was so incredibly hard to reach.”

Switching a smartphone for a flip phone as an act of surrender doesn’t apply to everyone in their twenties. Like Nelson, 29, and Skylar, 26, who have both been using flip phones, colloquially known as flips, for as long as they can remember. They both dabbled with iPhones in high school but the technology never stuck with them. “I find it frustrating to always be accessible,” said Skylar, who works in graphic design, a field that relies on one's constant availability. “I didn't really want that to become my status quo.”

Nelson, 29, has a Schok Classic Flip, which he bought refurbished. It has a touch screen, chat history, huge buttons built for elderly fingers, and two language options: English and either Hebrew or Yiddish (he believes it was previously kosher). Skylar, 26, has an Alcatel GO Flip. It has all the basic specs and was purchased for $9 at a store on Rue Saint-Hubert as a backup for her then-current Alcatel.

Communication through a flip phone is direct, succinct. The technology itself can lend people to be blunt or unresponsive. Flips have small screens, numeric keypads, slow processing times, and an average lifespan of three years. They’re the birthplace of text abbreviations and most don’t have text message history. “I get shit for my style of texting, which is very terse,” said Nelson. “I don't wanna send any kind of flowery or romantic texts because I so frequently am going to lose all access to all of them. It's not an archive for me.”

Skylar’s Alcatel GO Flip.

For long-time flip phone users, the differences in their day-to-day lives are irrelevant. They had no handheld algorithm to detach from and their friends always knew them to be bad repliers. At one point, people learned to submit to unreachability. “I’m usually a bit behind [on plans], but it's okay. People fill me in,” said Nelson. Skylar agreed with the same serenity: “I like not having the option to do everything. I have no sense of missing out because I didn't get the information. It's quite refreshing.”

To Skylar, owning a flip has subverted her digital communication skills. She was once trapped on a motionless bus next to a woman who was frantically texting her friend about everything happening in the moment. “She was just narrating her entire life to this other person, and that's kind of alien to me,” she explained. “I don't wanna be able to have a thought and send it immediately to someone because it doesn't feel like a real thought.”

That was the exact problem a new user, like Annelies, was trying to escape. Yet sacrificing a part of her social life for a flip phone didn’t last long. “The whole point is that it was gonna make [reaching me] more difficult. But then it worked a little too well,” she said. “I avoided responding because of the time that it takes to respond,” she confessed.

Annelies got her flip after her iPhone was stolen at a bar and saw it as a sign from the universe to diminish her screen time. She briefly spent the following month phoneless—no smartphone, or flip phone—until she went back to school and needed a device for two-factor-authentication. She communicated through the flip phone for a month until her friend offered her their old iPhone. Unable to refuse the generous gift, she now calls herself a part-time flip phone user, carrying the iPhone around, just in case. And to use Apple Pay. So far, being between an iPhone and flip phone is not the most ideal situation, she admitted. “You kind of get the worst of both worlds in a way.”

In the end, a flip phone user’s communication style comes down to their personality, as they all still spend time online. Marcel, Annelies, and Skylar all have Instagram, and Nelson has X and Discord. Though their screen times vary. “I spend catastrophic amounts of time on my laptop,” admitted Nelson. “I don't think it's really deeply changed me except that I just don't have access to the internet when I'm out,” said Marcel, who keeps an iPad at home. They might not be reachable when they’re outside, but inside, they’re definitely lurking on the same feeds.

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