Uber is ruining my life. I know what you're thinking, but no, I'm not a taxi driver, nor an eccentric with a phobic aversion to the lyrics of European national anthems. I'm a private citizen who doesn't much like driving, or more accurately doesn't much like finding parking. Instead I like to walk, and I like public transportation and mini-buses, but sometimes there are late-night occasions when you want to get somewhere, such as home, but all that fresh air and conversation has left you unsteady on your feet and you don't want to wait 45 minutes for an overpriced cab, and that's where Uber comes in.Uber is a kind of convenient cab-calling app, but the problem is that you need a smartphone to use it, and so I'm tempted, and that's why my life trembles like a dewdrop at the edge of a leaf. I haven't had a smartphone for about a year, and I've been a better man for it.Now, I'm not one of those individuals who does some slight thing, usually involving not doing something - not owning a TV, say, or never eating sugar, or pretending not to know who the Kardashians are - and uses it as evidence of their moral or intellectual virtue. Not having a smartphone doesn't make me better than everyone who does, and it's not as though I'm immune to the trashy, sick-making, empty-calorie temptations of the web on my computer at home. It's just that we each have to learn ourselves well enough to know what makes us happy, and I'm far happier without the world at my fingertips.Some people thrive on constant information and the ghostly implied presence of dozens of people they know and millions they don't, but when I had a smartphone it made me queasy. It placed a fine febrile layer of sand behind my eyeballs. It stretched me taut and dry, like old, scraped vellum, so that I caught each electronic breeze blowing by and was briefly carried along with it.Not having a smartphone means that once I stand up from my desk I can give my entire attention to my own thoughts or to whoever I'm with. I have better ideas more unexpectedly, and better conversations than I had before. I'm calmer and kinder and more patient and I sleep better and I'm less prone to knee-jerk opinions or fears, both in real life and online. I'm not at the mercy of strident voices or public moods; at any given moment I have no idea who's upset with Woolworths. I'm not saying this would work for everyone, but it works for me.I also have a 10-year-old Nokia that has no e-mail or internet access but needs to be charged only once a week, and that I could use as a puck in a game of street hockey between phone calls. You realise what good phones we used to have only once you start using them again.But maybe what I like best about not having a smartphone is the element of anticipation it has brought back to my life.Many years ago with my first pay cheque I bought an answering machine for my apartment. It was a lonely time of my life, and each night I'd go out drinking in the hope of making friends and then return with that heart-heavy feeling that alcohol only ever makes more maudlin, so that you're just one Marlene Dietrich song away from sitting half-undressed on the edge of your bed with tears like diamonds in your eyes, wondering why you ever had to leave home.But each night as I climbed the stairs I had the hope that I might open the door and find the red "message" light blinking on the answering machine, and that would mean that someone had remembered me. Sure, usually there would be no light, or crueler yet, the message would be a wrong number, and then my soaring heart would plunge and I'd start crooning "I can't give you anything but love" in a Teutonic accent, but until I opened the door I had hope, because I had possibility. Until that moment, I had neither a message nor no message - I had Schrodinger's message, pure potential.I have that same experience these days when I return from a walk or a night out or lunch in my neighbourhood - that slightly thrilling sense that I could right now have a message on my computer that might change my life. When you have a smartphone there's no mystery - you either have your message already or there isn't one at all. Perhaps by the end of my life there'll never have been that message. That's how it goes. But the way I live now, I'll have spent less time without it...