The Analog Life, Briefly

I have embarked upon the great modern experiment. My phone needed repair, and I had to hand it over to Apple for a few days.

I have no way to send or receive telephone calls — which, frankly, is kind of okay with me except the fear that something will happen to my children and no one will be able to reach me. But also, I can’t text from anywhere; I can’t Marco Polo; I can’t check my tracker app to see if Jon is almost home; I can’t take pictures, or obsessively document my food choices in my Zoe app, or capture every little thought that comes into my head. No Instagram!!!

On the other hand, I also can’t spin out over the news cycle, read murder stories Apple News feeds me, go down a stalky rabbit hole trying to figure out whatever happened to so-and-so, or look at pictures of me from five years ago and wonder where things went so wrong.

I was lamenting the situation with a good friend I’ve known my whole life, and this caused us to reminisce about our younger days, when we thought nothing about driving across the country by ourselves in a shitty old car without a phone or even a working stereo, and with a cat loose in the car. Or, in her case, drifting around Mexico and South America for months, using a payphone to call home once a week or so. Otherwise, sorry, can’t be reached!

Now, without a phone, the 20 minutes between when I drop my kids off for a playdate and arrive at my office, where I can easily get texts on my computer, seems terrifying. Standing in line for a chai tea at a bakery with very slow service is interminable. A thousand times a day I reach for my pocket to snap a quick picture of something that catches my eye — the avocado-green rotary phone in the window of a store that’s not open until Friday, for instance. If I don’t capture the thought for later, how will I cling to the idea?

Not having a phone has made solo car time very… contemplative. When I couldn’t sit with my own thoughts anymore, I turned to podcasts that I had downloaded at some point. The first was a Radiolab episode called The Wordless Place that turned out to be so captivating. It was essentially just host Lulu Miller reading her Paris Review essay The Eleventh Word, a really beautiful piece about how her son began to develop language, and how that shaped his view of  the world — and hers. 

Update: My phoneless time lasted about 30 hours.

“Was it strangely freeing?” people asked. The truth is, it was not. It was inconvenient, and unsettling, and I felt like I didn’t have an outlet for my creative impulses. But also, it was probably good for me.