A few months ago, we covered One More Hour, an initiative by dating app Hinge aimed at boosting real-world interactions between young adults. This week, ahead of Global Day of Unplugging, which lasts 24 hours from sundown March 1 to sundown March 2, 2024, Hinge is launching a companion piece: the Hinge Phonebook. Nothing like the hefty tomes once distributed door-to-door, this is a slim little book the size of a smartphone.
The Hinge Phonebook features over 100 entertaining pages of activities designed to get people to ditch digital distraction in favor of in-person interaction. Included is everything from volunteering for an animal shelter and how to cook a Peruvian-Chinese dish called Lomo Saltado, to ideas for random acts of kindness and "Grab a friend and start collecting something random for reasons you agree never to explain."
The book also playfully points out how tethered most people are to their screens, both through facts (the average US adult will spend 44 years of their life staring at screens) and reminders of our collective online obsessions (four feline-only pages function as an offline dose of cat content). Hinge will send a paper version of their Phonebook to anyone in the US who requests one, free of charge. Since stocks are limited, the document is also available as a download.
