Vitaminwater offers NYC novelist $100K to ditch her phone for a year

In December, beverage company Vitaminwater announced a $100,000 cash prize to one brave soul willing to ditch their smartphone for an entire year.

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About 104,000 entries later, we have a winner. New York City native Elana Mugdan, a fantasy novelist who caught the company’s eye with her “creative and unique infomercial contest submission” will be giving up emojis, phone navigation and access to her beloved fantasy gaming community in hopes of finishing her book series and establishing “real-life connections that will propel her further in her writing community,” according to an emailed statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Mugdan, 30, also hopes the challenge will encourage her to help others “become more cognizant of the ways in which their phones have become not only extensions of themselves, but crutches, and scapegoats.”

It won’t be easy, but she’ll have her rescue pet snake, Medusa, to give her a bit of comfort, she said. And the prize money, of course, is a big motivator.

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"I really need help — I'm mega poor," she told CNBC. "Writing is not paying the bills yet."

Mugdan told the network she plans to invest her winnings into books and publishing. “I would love to get to the point where my writing is what sustains me,” she said.

For $100,000, Vitaminwater is asking Mugdan to trade in her iPhone 5S for a company-provided Kyocera calls-only flip phone. If she survives six months, she’ll take home $10,000.

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The non-legally binding guidelines are fairly simple; no smartphone use at all for 365 days. And no, you can’t use a friend’s or anyone else’s, either.

According to CNBC, “she will be able to use laptops and desktop computers. Devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo are OK, too, as long as they're not hooked up to a smartphone.”

The company doesn’t go into details about how exactly it’ll monitor use, but lie detectors will be involved.

You can read more about the millennial winner at CNBC.com.