Give up your smartphone for a month and get paid $10,000
It's now pretty hard to imagine a world without smartphones - it's the one bit of tech most of us would struggle to live without.
We're also all quite used to being warned that too much phone usage every day can be a bad thing for our mental wellbeing - staring at that little screen for hours at a time can have negative effects, for sure - but that doesn't seem to stop us.
Now, a new contest aims to see how people might manage without their phones for a whole month.
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It comes from yogurt company Siggi's. In what seems to be part of a general message to both eat and live healthily, Siggi's is launched something it's calling a Digital Detox Programme.
The idea is simple - it encourages people to ditch their smartphone for a month, to see whether this can form healthier habits.
Winners of the contest stand to be given a nice list of prizes:
- $10,000
- A flip phone
- A lockbox for your existing smartphone
- A 1-month pre-paid SIM card
- 3 months' worth of Siggi's yogurt
If you're wondering how you prove that you lived without a phone for a month, though, it's worth clarifying that you actually don't have to in order to enter.
Rather, Siggi's is asking for a personal essay exploring why you think you need a digital detox, and how you think it could help change your life. It needs to be up to 500 words long, and you can enter using this online form.
It seems like a really nice idea, but it's hard to ignore the fact that Siggi's won't actually be enforcing that one-month phone ban for the winners - rather just encouraging it with the tools it'll give as prizes.
So, if you think you could write a compelling 500-word argument about what good a digital detox would do for you, you should definitely enter the contest. It ends at 11:59PM ET on 31 January, so you don't have that long to lodge your entry.
There will apparently be 10 winners, too, so Siggi's is putting $100,000 where its mouth is on this one, making for pretty solid odds, we'd say.