I started experiencing profound relief every night when I powered down my smartphone. Why is that?
Overture: What follows is an atypical piece from me. It’s a lightly-edited journal entry that explores territory adjacent to “My Quest to be Whelmed” from a month ago.
Soundtrack: I’ve never suggested music to have playing when reading one of these pieces until now. Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” (one of my favorites) will become relevant in a few paragraphs. This version conducted by Leonard Bernstein is lovely. If you’re historically minded, the very first recording (part one and part two) is now in the public domain and available at the Library of Congress website.
Here goes…
Am I becoming an iPhone recluse? A narrow Thoreau? Since I started writing—or trying to write—fiction for 30 minutes each morning, a happy part of my go-to-bed process the night before has been powering down my iPhone all the way and leaving it on the little desk in the kitchen. The next day, whether I’ve written or not, the moment when I power my iPhone back up can be difficult.
This morning, Saturday, with Kathi at rowing and after a long and much-needed sleep, when I saw the iPhone lying there I waved “naw” at it. Even with most notifications turned off (and doing that takes work), I still don’t want to turn it on.
Turning on my iPhone is like starting to listen to “Rhapsody in Blue” in the middle; it skips all the sleepy yawny stretching and listening to the last nighttime sounds of a city and drops me into bustle and hubbub on busy streets, still wearing my pajamas.
Maybe it’s because the kids are out of the house or because I’m older or because I am both working hard on a show next month in London and writing a novella—with an even bigger fiction project waiting with an impatient tapping foot and frequent glances at the clock or a wristwatch or pocket watch or sundial—but I resist powering up the iPhone and opening the front door of my mind to chaos.
I don’t even step through the door: chaos kicks it open, the monster in a horror movie.
If Romeo and Juliet were happening in real life today, in 2025, there would be no aubade, no morning after the wedding night when the lovers debate whether birdsong signals daybreak—is it the nightingale or the lark? They’d be too busy checking their Instagram DMs, Romeo calling a Lyft to head to Mantua, Juliet looking at her calendar app to see what she has on that day.
Although my iPhone is a beautiful machine, its filtering lacks elegance—there’s only black and white, off and on, onslaught and silence, within the silence a swelling tide of anxious thought—what am I missing? Who am I letting down?
When we adopt a dog who needs a first-thing walk in the morning, will I be able to leave the iPhone behind? Or will I succumb to morning podcasts and the illusion that my ears gulping information (or is it just input?) like shotgunning a beer is productive?
The way I feel at this moment, writing at the dining room table, empty coffee cup beside me, it would be better to leave the iPhone behind. But what about safety? What if I or the dog need something? Shouldn’t I take the iPhone with me, powered down, a silent crystal brick heavy in my pocket? That is a reasonable thought but one that puts in a key and unlocks the door to chaos.
In cop shows, characters talk about “burner phones.” How much are these things really? Do they exist in real life? That might be the bargain—to have a lifeline with no apps, no music, no email or social media, no temptation.
C’mon Fido, let’s go see what’s up in the neighborhood. You smell things and I’ll look at them, really look at them rather than let them slide past as I attend to urgent but unimportant things.
When I first wrote about burner phones just a few lines ago, I had an urge to go online to find out how much they are. I swatted the urge away, but doing so cost me a coin of decision that I won’t be able to spend later.
I am old enough to remember the time before the always already on hubbub. Do people who grew up with phones and tablets know that those sleepy, waking-up first minutes of “Rhapsody in Blue” exist outside of beautiful music?
My perfect use case for an AI agent or assistant is as an active, assertive filter. I want it to be a helper to manage my attention like the old style secretary who says, “you can’t go in there” to the impatient interrupter standing in front of the desk that guards the door to my awareness.
I want a version of Siri or Chat or Pilot that will monitor everything: emails across all my accounts, texts, DMs, Slacks, WhatsApps, Signals, social media posts, phone calls. I want it to have a calibrated understanding of tone, content, and context so that it will interrupt when necessary and leave me alone when I’m doing concentration work.
No tech company has any incentive to create this. Perhaps, if the AIs ever get that sophisticated, I can do it for myself.
Until then, I’m scared of my iPhone.
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