My Christmas present to myself is a new phone. Should I upgrade to an iPhone X or make the radical lifestyle choice to downgrade to a flip phone?

If you, me, and everyone we know had the sense we were born with, we would confront this decision armed with the following information: the Alcatel Go flip phone, which has GPS and photo and video capability, is $20 and has a battery life of 16 days. The Jitterbug 5 is $180 and can go one month without charging. The Samsung Gusto 3 is free, if you buy a $15-a-month call package from Affinity Cellular. (That’s for 350 minutes of talk time and no data, because it doesn’t support data. But you can text!)

The iPhone X, meanwhile, is $999, with a battery that lasts 12 hours after heavy use and relies on the kinds of service plans that cost at least $50 a month.

We know all of this, you and I, just as we know, deep down, that the promise of smartphones – to allow us to zip through admin on the go, freeing up acres of quality time to spend with our loved ones – turned out to be false. Instead, being on the phone turned into the quality time and everything else became a distraction.

So, can the addiction be cured and if so, is the flip phone the quickest fix? Let’s start with the easy part – the fig leaf of pragmatic objection – before moving on to feelings: will ditching your iPhone damage your performance? Will you become under-powered? Will you miss meetings because your tiny clamshell doesn’t ping to remind you, and will you lose precious family moments because you never have a camera to hand and can’t upload to the cloud?

To most of these questions, my hunch is the answer is no. If anything, after ditching the iPhone you will become sharper and more organized. You will have to leave the house with a concrete idea of your final destination. You will have to be more or less on time. With your flip phone in your pocket, you will need a pen, paper, a print out of the address and you will need a diary. (Most flip phones advertise “3G speed for web access”, but trying to make one of these things actually load a web page would be like trying to make your own hummus: why would you?)

If this sounds time consuming, it is perhaps useful to hold it up against the hours we all spend ironing out kinks in synchronization after a software upgrade, or looking for ways to free up more memory on our phones, or, after finally subscribing to Apple’s storage plan, figuring out what the difference between photos held in the cloud and photos held in the photo stream is. (I spent an entire afternoon on this question this week and am still none the wiser.)

Actually, the photos thing is one of the trickiest parts of the equation. I would have approximately 12 photos of my kids if I didn’t have a smartphone and I wouldn’t know where I had stored them. And while there is a solution, it is cumbersome and will take a small outlay of resources: there are light, digital cameras that can connect via wifi and upload your photos in the same way your phone does, and you will have to become accustomed to carrying one around. This is a pain. But it is less of a pain than being enslaved to the machine in your pocket.

Apart from that, I don’t see many downsides. You don’t need to check your email on the go. You don’t need your phone to count your steps for you; get a Fitbit if you’re that bothered. The main downside about getting a flip phone is that it has a smug, Steve Hilton-ish air of the Silicon Valley martyr about it, but you can probably live with that.

All that leaves is withdrawal. And a period of anxiety. And then, I suspect, a sense of life slowing down and opening out; of being alive in the moment. So I say do it, go on. Do it. If you do it, I will. Not right now, I’m not ready, but soon. Very soon. By this time next year. Definitely.