Human Writes: Cellular Restart

Life unplugged | Non-Fiction | Fresh Soup

I spent the past week without a cellphone. To be clear: it’s not that I got sick of the digital tyranny constricting our lives, or that I'm trying to win a TikTok challenge. I just left my phone on the backseat of an Uber.

I can’t explain exactly what made me forget my phone in that Prius that drove me to JFK Airport. Maybe it was the arctic New York temperatures that froze my brain, or maybe my subconscious wanted to leave a part of me there, faraway from the embattled Middle East to which I was reluctantly returning. Whatever the reason, I boarded my flight without the phone, which the responsible Uber driver had returned to my workplace in NYC. A friend who was coming to Israel agreed to bring it back for me, and until she arrived, I was left—exposed and devoid of push notifications—in the strange sensorial world that surrounds us, a world that once, when I was young, I used to spend a lot more time in.

My phoneless week has been pretty weird. Trivial tasks like ordering a cab or a pizza became as challenging and stressful as landing a spaceship on a distant planet. Arranging meetings over WhatsApp, reading email while out and about, getting news updates: all of that was taken from me in an instant. And without a phone as a consistent part of my life, I found myself contending with a vast expanse of free time.

During this week I read very little about the U.S. warships in the Gulf, or about Netanyahu’s latest attacks on the Israeli legal system. I sent fewer urgent text messages to all sorts of people asking them to finish doing all sorts of things on time, and I even wrote less. The result was that I was in a very unfamiliar mood.

I have been bored this past week in a way that I have not been bored in a very long time, and strangely, the boredom was good for me. I found myself having interesting conversations with strangers, devoting more time to the cats and dogs I meet on the streets, and finding unusual shops in the neighborhood where I’ve lived for more than thirty years. I’m not saying my life has changed forever—I know that the second that device is back in my hand, I’ll give myself over to it completely and with no regrets. I’ll instantly dive into its oceanic depths of unimportant reels starring cats and politicians whose names I’ll forget by tomorrow. And yet, somewhere deep in the storage unit of my brain, something will remain from my experience of sitting in a taxi or standing in line for the doctor, staring at a random spot out the window, trying to guess what the hell time it is by the angle of the sun. I will still hold the fragmented memory of a less efficient, less speedy, less sharp existence, but one that overflows with smells, tastes, and peculiarly aimless thoughts. And if the day comes when I miss that boredom, I can always trust my subconscious to know the right moment and the right backseat in which to forget my phone again.

Translated by Jessica Cohen