Welcome to hell.

Not in a Dickensian, Struggle Street kind of way — literally without using cash.

We know the poor old 5c coin is already on the way out, and according to Westpac, Australia will be totally cash-free by 2022.

That’s only six* years away, which, despite being seven years after Back to the Future promised us we’d be paying for everything with thumbprints, seems pretty soon.

If you believe Westpac, 53 per cent of us already live cashless. Westpac’s Cash Free Report also found 79 per cent of smartphone users think making payments via your phone will pretty soon be the norm.

With the likes of Samsung Pay, which launched this week, Apple Pay, as well as CommBank, ANZ, Westpac and NAB all allowing mobile phones to be used like credit cards, it does seem like it is now possible to live cash-free.

To see if it is possible, I gave it a go. The experiment was simple: try to live for a week without using cash, credit card or any other kind of traditional payment.

The plan was to instead use a bunch of apps to do everything. And there are apps for pretty much everything now.

These days, rather than cook your own meal like a peasant, you can order a French backpacker to pedal six kilometres in torrential rain with your dinner through the wonders of food delivery apps like Deliveroo and Foodora.

And rather than wander around your local supermarket after work like all the other mindless drones, you can sit on your couch while your own personal mindless drone collects your groceries, thanks to apps like ShopWings and GroceryRun.

For daily coffees there are apps like Hey You, the Westpac-backed app that lets you order ahead from cafes and restaurants to “beat the queue” — although in practice it’s more like “stand awkwardly to the side of the queue”.

Please don’t run these guys over. Picture: Craig GreenhillSource:News Corp Australia

And if going outside and taking part in activities with other human beings is your thing, there are apps like Uber and goCatch to get around, Eventbrite to find and book tickets to events, and ClassPass to sign up for fitness classes.

By downloading and installing all these apps, in theory it should be possible to get through 99 per cent of your day-to-day life, provided you don’t plan on visiting strip clubs, giving money to homeless people, or buying large amounts of drugs.

Which sounds great in theory, but it turns out living without cash is still pretty difficult.

Long story short, I failed after three days. Not because I had to buy drugs, but I really wanted a coffee, and the nearest cafe on the app was a five-minute walk away. And it was raining. So much for that.

But after sticking it out for the rest of the week, I can safely say living cash free isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, it makes you incredibly lazy.

Up until somewhere around 1000 B.C., people bartered for goods and services, either with other goods and services, or through a medium of exchange such as grain, cattle or Tazos.

This presumably required time, effort, communication skills, and solid Tazo Slammer technique.

The invention of coin currency by the Chinese smoothed this process considerably. Fast-forward to today, and virtually all transactions are what they like to call “frictionless”, meaning the money moves from your bank account with zero friction.

Personal shopping apps are great if you eat healthy.Source:News Corp Australia

Without even moving your body above a 45-degree angle on the couch, you can now spend hundreds of dollars on overpriced takeaway and risk cutting a 417 visa-holder’s working holiday short.

I knew I had reached the low point by Friday night when I found myself ordering the poor, confused French guy to deliver my dinner from the burger place literally 50 metres from my door. The $5 tip couldn’t alleviate the shame from the judgement in his eyes: “I could have died for this.”

Which raises the second problem with this cash-free life: doing all of your shopping, eating and general living through apps is at once impersonal and far too personal.

Having a complete stranger do your grocery shopping for you sounds like a great idea, if you don’t mind paying a mark-up, and a delivery fee, and having to wait around at home at a specified time like the electrician is coming to visit.

All of that is actually fine, as long as, like me, you’re terrible with money and never leave the house anyway. The real problem with having a stranger do your shopping, is it really forces you to question some of your life choices.

Getting a phone call from a random guy to inform you that Coles doesn’t have the Macadamia and Mango Weis Bars but would you like the Mango and Toasted Coconut Frozen Yoghurt Bars instead? And also they’re out of chocolate chip cookies so do you want double choc?

That’s a little bit weird.

Of course, all of this could have been avoided by just using tap-and-pay.

But that would have been too easy.