By the time 28-year-old Grant Besner met Danny Hogenkamp, his future Month Offline co-founder, at a Shabbat in Washington, DC, he had already lived many lives. There was his semester spent at a religious seminary in Jerusalem, where the then-computer science major moved after taking an interest in spirituality. There were also stints at a llama farm in the desert, a normal farm in the middle of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and jobs as a journalist and educator. Then there was the time he spent as a grad student at New York University, where he studied anthropology and religion. It was there at NYU, while struggling to concentrate on writing his thesis, that Besner first purchased a dumb phone in order to improve his focus. 

When Besner arrived at that fateful dinner in 2024, Hogenkamp, who Besner says had been “vehemently anti-smartphone for a number of years”, was checking people’s phones at the door. He was doing so by using Yondr pouches, lockable bags designed to create phone-free environments. (The pouches, often used by schools, allow users to keep their devices on them, but remain locked until opened with a specialised magnet.) “I was like, ‘Dude, I’m looking at my dumb phone – I don’t need you to lock it up,’” Besner recalls telling him. Hogenkamp, of course, was delighted to have met someone like-minded. “We started hanging out and talking about ways we could convince our friends to get off their smartphones,” says Besner. 

Those conversations resulted in Month Offline, a 30-day-long program meant to help people live a more offline life. Described as a mix between a happy hour and a support group, the program entails switching from a smartphone to a flip phone, attending weekly meetings and celebrating with a phone-free art gallery at the program’s end, when participants are joined by their family and friends to showcase the creative projects they worked on during their month of disconnecting. You won’t find the program on social media (because that would defeat the point), but you can sign up for the challenge on the Month Offline website.

Despite the support group comparison, and the fact that 57 per cent of Americans admit to having smartphone addiction, it’s important to note that Month Offline isn’t exactly trying to be a sort of ‘Smartphones Anonymous’, with the weekly programming leaning more playful than diagnostic. At the meetings, for example, participants team up with partners, and are given conversation prompts to reflect on “the frictions and fruits of offline life.” Each week also comes with a theme and corresponding challenges, such as “memory week”, when participants get a disposable camera, a shot list, and are tasked with going on a scavenger hunt-style photo adventure around their communities. Overall, the vibe feels more akin to an afterschool program than any sort of therapeutic or militant experience. 

As for the phones themselves, the devices are more sophisticated than you might expect, as the organisation created the spin-off company “dumb.co” based on insights from the Month Offline program. Today, the dumb.co phones have unlimited calling and texting, 100 hours of emergency data and allow you to keep the same phone number, meaning your calls, texts and contacts are still synced. Later models even have Uber and WhatsApp. (Participants of the Month Offline program pay $24.99 for the Month Offline phone plan, plus $75 for the program materials and weekly meetups.) 

Since Month Offline began in 2025, there have been eight cohorts, and hundreds have already participated in the program, including Emily Kennedy, a 30-year-old who works in tech. Kennedy was a part of the first cohort in New York City, where Month Offline recently expanded in January. She first heard about the program through a friend who had done it in DC and had a transformative experience. According to Kennedy, her friend saw an improvement in her anxiety, decided she wanted to quit her job, and opted to keep using the dumb phone even after the program ended. As for Kennedy herself, she joined with the hope that switching to a dumb phone would serve as a much-needed reset. 

“I felt like, between long days of work and the busyness of the city, I never had enough time in my day to pursue other personal interests and spend time with friends,” says the Month Offline alumna. Overall, Kennedy’s decision paid off; in switching to a dumb phone, she found that her sleep improved, her social media use declined, and she felt a regained sense of autonomy over how she spent her days. Plus, though she wasn’t previously a big phone call person, during this time, she found herself calling her friends more, as opposed to texting. “Sometimes it’s hard to get a hold of people that way, but I find that the conversations can be a little more gratifying,” she says.

Kennedy didn’t get rid of her smartphone entirely, however. A major part of Month Offline’s pitch is that rather than being dogmatic, it introduces ways to create tangible boundaries with technology. One example of this is the “internet chair”, a concept that Kennedy adopted, which encourages participants to choose one designated spot in their home to be online, but only for a limited amount of time. It’s an idea that’s reminiscent of the olden days, when going online meant sitting down at the family computer, browsing for 30 minutes, and then leaving the room to return to real life. In other words, it represents a time when the internet was a place you visited, not an omnipresent universe you lived in. Kennedy also kept her smartphone in a physical box provided by the program, only taking it out when she truly needed it, like when adjusting the app-controlled lights in her apartment.

Aside from the time spent away from smartphones, it seems that the sense of community Month Offline provides is just as much of a pull for participants as the unplugging is. After all, in an era where third spaces are notoriously lacking, the weekly Month Offline meetings, often taking place at a bar or event space, offer a time and a place for people to consistently gather. It’s a simple yet desperately craved opportunity that explains why everything from run clubs to book clubs have been on the rise in recent years; people are eager to gather, even if that means agreeing to use a flip phone for a month. 

According to Month Offline co-faciliator Tim O’Brien, camaraderie can be a powerful thing. “I think the ultimate antidote to the atomisation and isolation smartphones have created is creating community and resistance to that,” says O’Brien. A musician and teacher by trade, O’Brien started to become disillusioned with technology due to the “flattening of culture” he felt he was witnessing as a producer and concert-goer, as well as the developmental effects he saw in the classroom as a creative writing teacher to elementary and middle school children. After hearing about Month Offline through his sister, he reached out to Besner personally and offered to help get the program running in New York.  

“I think the ultimate antidote to the atomisation and isolation smartphones have created is creating community and resistance to that”

“People make friends really quickly [during Month Offline] because they’ve made a big change in their lives and they don’t have their smartphone on them,” says O’Brien. “You break through the avoidance, you break through the friction and the awkwardness, and everybody's in that situation together.”

Naturally, though, friction is an inherent part of attempting to live a more offline life, especially since, as past participant Patrick Grant pointed out, not having a smartphone makes it more difficult to engage in the modern world. The 29-year-old joined the program in January, after going through a period of personal transformation, where he quit vaping and ran a marathon. Though Grant had previously taken all the usual steps to limit his phone use – sleeping with it outside his room, incorporating app limits, turning on grayscale settings – he says he always felt like he was doing it alone, and was attracted to the idea of a group effort. And for a while, it did work; Grant began to leave the house without his smartphone and was no longer listening to music or podcasts on the train. “I would read, or at the gym, I would just be alone with my thoughts,” he says. “It was a little bit frustrating, but mostly really fulfilling.” 

The challenges came during scenarios such as eating at a restaurant with QR code menus, requiring Grant to look at one of his friends’ phones. Or, on nights when his friends would agree to meet up at a bar that turned out to be closed, meaning that, when the group attempted to find a new spot on Google Maps, smartphone-less Grant had to sit back and watch, unable to help. “The world is built for you to have a smartphone, which is fine, but then the answer to your problems is to be annoying to your friends,” he says. Though Grant’s friends didn’t mind, this “offloading of necessities” was the hardest part of his month offline.

The ultimate challenge for Grant also came at the program’s end, when the accountability of a group was no longer there. When I caught up with him, he was travelling and had brought his smartphone with him to use as an alarm clock. The result? A complete reversion back into doomscrolling. “I don’t think that over a month, I developed better willpower,” he says. “I think over a month, I spent a lot more time with better architecture – a smartphone out of sight and a dumb phone in hand. But when I am in that state, I’m a lot happier, and I think a lot more clearly.”

Perhaps that sense of clarity is what explains Month Offline best: a digital cleanse that doesn’t require you to go back to the Dark Ages, but does provide you a structure that makes unplugging feel attainable, even communal. As the lines between the digital world and the physical one continue to blur, Besner says what people want is choice. “They want the agency to still be reachable, but to have the option to not have the internet as an extension of their nervous system,” says the co-founder. “And this experience and the dumb phone – a big part of it is not just what you're leaving behind, but also what you’re getting back.”