Reflections on Younger Years Untethered by Cell Phones

After teaching an online yoga class on Zoom, I sit at my laptop, determined to finish writing a competitive swimming feature. I open the Word document and position my fingers on the keyboard. I can do this.

An email chime tempts me to read the message that just popped into my inbox. No! Finish this project first. Be disciplined for once.

I type one paragraph and another. You’ve got this. I start hammering out the closing lines when a ding from Messenger breaks into my thoughts. What if someone needs me to process an app in the Chow Chow rescue group? Damn it! I release a long sigh. So much for staying focused. I check Messenger and learn the post is from one of my hundreds of Facebook friends. It could wait, really. But I’m already distracted, so I respond anyway.

I swing my gaze back to my article and start typing again. I’m focused. Really focused. I can finish this. My iPhone rings. It’s no one in my contacts, so I push a button to end the annoying ringing. A text from my daughter pops up before I set the phone down. She’s in Australia visiting one of her besties. It’ll just take a minute…

I glance at my watch. An hour has flown away. And I’ve finished about 15 minutes of work. Why can’t I stay on task? How did I end up this distractible and unfocused at 63 years of age?

My life was so peaceful when I first moved to Tucson in 1988. A poor University of Arizona grad student, I rented a cheap apartment, owned mostly secondhand clothes and one good pair of Reeboks. But no tech stuff. No cell phone, laptop, iPad, Kindle or desktop computer.

If I needed to use a computer, I strolled over to the university computer center. My ringing landline was the only sound heard in my apartment other than occasional radio or TV. And when I left to drive to the Geosciences building at the University of Arizona, where I spent 12 or more hours a day working on my graduate studies, only silence followed me. Untethered by device or work, student life in the 1990s was nothing short of idyllic.

My adult children roll their eyes when I mention “the good ole days” pre- all this tech stuff. But, seriously. Whenever I ask myself how owning electronic devices has improved my ability to complete projects, my joy, my connection with others and my overall life satisfaction, I have to say that my answer is always the same. It hasn’t. In fact, owning these things causes more misery than anything else.

On several occasions recently, I’ve received texts or WhatsApp messages from someone annoyed because I didn’t answer instantly. If something’s that important, call me, I tell them. I don’t want to be tied to checking messages every five minutes. I need to not check my phone all the time so I can work productively, maintain some kind of decent attention span, stay sane.

One volunteer group I help with has a Facebook chat and the other one, a WhatsApp group. I silenced notifications in this WhatsApp group when message dings constantly woke me in the middle of the night and made my nervous system cry for help. Am I the only one who routinely receives offers for meditation apps and workshops to soothe the Vagus nerve on their Facebook feed?

Opening Facebook and scrolling through the disaster feed makes me long to delete my profile. The bots feed you exactly what pushes your “hot” buttons.

Maybe young people don’t want to hear about what cell phoneless life was like. Most of them didn’t attend high school, college or graduate school without a cell phone glued to their hands. They never experienced the freedom of a long hike, a cross-country driving trip or a Friday evening watching a movie at home without a constantly chiming phone or computer cutting into the fun. Whenever I reflect on those experiences, my lips turn up in a smile and calm washes over my body.

I’d be happier and much less anxious without a cellphone glued to my body. Unfortunately, I have no way to manage modern life without it. As much as I loved the landline, I can’t use it to pay bills, book air and hotel reservations, track workouts, grocery shop and message people.

All I can do is try my best to minimize the ill effect of tech devices on my life as if I’m managing some dreaded chronic disease. So I keep my Facebook window closed most of the time, installed the News Feed Eradicator Extension on Google to keep myself from Doomscrolling and set up Do Not Disturb on my phone for certain hours or when I’m using my meditation app (the app allows a small family group to be able to get through in an emergency).

The good news is that I finished my swimming article early this afternoon. My editor in southern Florida received the Word document I emailed and the photos I submitted through Dropbox. In two weeks, I’ll receive an email notification about an electronic payment sent to my bank account. Technology serves me in these instances.

But now my Chow Chow, Chief, wants to take a walk. And my iPhone is going to stay where it belongs. On my desk. So I’ll chat with neighbors, soak up views of the mountains and the colorful array of spring flowers in the southern Arizona desert without any interruptions.