Trade the iPhone for a Dead Zone

It was definitely naive to think, as I did, that a new iPhone launch would save me. The rumors of a new flip phone that would solve maybe 80% of my problems—and by “my problems,” I mean watching too many TikToks about first dates gone wrong; keeping count of how many times a former colleague went to Italy over the course of one summer; emails from publicists about holiday gift guides; WhatsApp group chats with long-ago landlords that I was added to against my will and can’t mute; and any kind of Slack notification—enticed me. In this respect, I am not special. I am all of us, the overstimulated.

I already want my iPhone 13 to have as little presence in my life as it can. At first, going smaller seemed like the answer. One night I found myself browsing Razr foldable smartphones, hearkening back to a time in the early aughts when I owned one and found it sexy but impossible to use, even when it came to talking, as it had awful service anytime I tried to call a long-distance boyfriend. Yes, I could use something that renders my phone useless. I realized soon into this journey that the answer is not in phones; it is in life itself.

I have gone from experimenting with long, phoneless walks with my dog to keeping my phone on Do Not Disturb at nights and on weekends. I used to worry about what would happen when my phone was off, and now I realize the answer is nothing. I am not a doctor on call (and they—wisely—use pagers for the urgent stuff). I’ve thought a lot about the worst thing that might happen to me as a childless, unmarried person without a phone—I am late to confirm a meeting time or congratulate a friend on a baby? I miss out on a notification that Le Veau d’Or has a last-minute opening that night? At the risk of sounding clinically depressed, nothing important is happening in my life.

The theater, the ballet, the opera, and the symphony, where turning off your phone is gleefully enforced, are sanctuaries. Those places are regarded as high art, and it’s unfortunate that, as such, only their audiences are deemed deserving of being fully present. I have very mixed feelings about members clubs, but truly appreciate any place that requires a sticker to be placed on a phone’s camera. Should I start going to stand-up comedy shows where they make you check your phone in one of those bags? Should I get a set of my own to bring to parties? The quiet, the concentration, the gossip you can get away with without the fear of being caught on digital film!

I want to remember what it’s like to have a conversation with someone and not need to whip out a phone to show a corroborating photo or google the name of a character actor. I long to be bored or confused or have to ask someone for directions. The problem here is not the desire to unplug, or the follow-through—that part has been easy—it’s how this behavior is regarded by others. Last weekend I decided I’d email a friend back on Monday about which day to buy tickets to an Alvin Ailey performance. Delaying doesn’t make me a bad friend, but it’s a little selfish. Practicing being hard to reach tends to shift (if not sour) some of one’s relationships.

And can a person who is employed ever really unplug? When I’m writing or editing, I try to be at home with notifications off so I can focus. It’s how I work my best. But just in the span of a couple hours where I didn’t check my phone or email last Friday, I received multiple missed calls from my editor and some queries I was slow to answer, which made me a little bit annoying to work with. The base level of availability expected of people who work is unprecedented. Think about what is considered standard in a white-collar job: 24-hour, seven-day-a-week queries (in America, at least; in some European countries, workers have the legal right to disconnect). The ability to not give someone immediate access to you is a status symbol. It means you do not work the kind of job that involves high amounts of communication—that you are important enough that someone assumes you have better things to do than respond to them within 30 seconds.

Or it signifies that you don’t work at all. It telegraphs to the world that you live in a kind of place, like Manhattan or some other friendly, perhaps more tropical or remote island, where you can get around with a decent sense of direction and the kindness of strangers.

It’s become unsurprisingly chic to have a slight aura of unreachability. And so, of course, you can also play-act this kind of freedom. There are hotels and destinations that pitch themselves as dead zones without Wi-Fi or even cell service. When I mentioned going to one in a meeting a few weeks ago, someone asked how I’d be reached in an emergency. “On a landline,” I said. If the analog world of vinyl records can make a comeback with a young demographic, then I believe landlines can too.

At one point luxury travel meant being able to be anywhere and have the comforts of your office—yachts and Aman resorts offer satellite service and Wi-Fi so that you can be pampered but still take a meeting or be active in the family group chat. Now the luxury crowd still wants to travel in style, but I don’t think they want to be so easily in communication with the world, whether it’s doomscrolling or work drama. I have been to resorts and spas that advertise that they limit phone and laptop use to guest rooms, but in my experience, no one complies and it’s certainly not enforced. I don’t want to be the Karen of the Alps, asking people who are FaceTiming to go back to their room.

And still, that is just unplugging as tourism, not unlike visiting a spa with a raw-vegan menu and daily yoga classes or attending a writers retreat that brings you breakfast in a basket every morning and someone who cleans your room. Dead-zoning is dabbling in an idealized world as a vacation from your normal hyperstimulated life, but to truly live in such a world is not feasible for most anyone. As when renting a cottage in Provence for a week, you can only pretend.

Finding an actual dead zone is surprisingly hard. It takes not just money but also effort to get to tree houses in Central America or mobile camping sites in national parks. And I don’t long to go off into the woods as a way to unplug . I am not 2026’s Henry David Thoreau going to Walden Pond. I don’t want a sojourn; I want this as a lifestyle. I find myself fantasizing about being a nun, but even nuns have podcasts now.

There are the few and the brave who really put dead-zoning into practice in their daily lives. I always think about a normal woman with a normal job who once lived in the same building as me. She had neither a cell phone nor an answering machine. Her explanation was that, if someone needed to reach her, they would call her landline, and if she was available, she would happily pick up, but if she was gone, they could call back or email her. That woman was truly unbothered, a term tossed around online, but the literal act of not being bothered is impossible for most people beyond the quirkiest, like my onetime neighbor, or maybe Fran Lebowitz.

Unavailability as a lifestyle choice is ultimately for the few. Just a few days ago, Harry Styles told Radiohead’s Thom Yorke in an interview that his laptop has been dead for six years and he doesn’t know where his charger is. I normally have positive feelings toward Styles, just as I would for anyone who loves Italy and looks great in Celine. But that tossed-off comment made me feel like starting a formal boycott of his music and maybe even expanding it into a class war. Styles has essentially bought his freedom and is bragging about it, in a roundabout way. It’s wealth that gives someone the sheer ability to ignore the tyranny of availability. Those who have it get to break the social contract and call it a lifestyle choice.