Micah Zarin's Blog

It is so amazing to not have a phone. My phone broke a few days ago, and the past seventy-two hours have been some of the freest in recent memory. Today my dad handed me one of his old work phones, and I felt the shackle close again. The rectangle is back in my pocket. Not just any rectangle—the anxiety rectangle. The talisman of distraction, glowing with all the things I don’t need to know but will end up knowing anyway.

And I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. It is just that my life is better without it. My head is quieter. The background hum of obligation fades. No little glowing square yelling at me to look, scroll, respond.

The problem is that we live in the age of information and distraction, and the two are indistinguishable. There are so many things I could do if I had the time. Which I do, technically—I just hand it away to the rectangle. I don’t even mean “productive” things; I don’t really buy into that cult of productivity. A healthy person should spend hours doing stupid things. Playing video games, kicking rocks, staring at the ceiling. Life is not meant to be sterilized into efficiency. To enjoy life is to keep stupid things stupid, and not let them metastasize into the organizing principle of your day. Video games, for example, are fun precisely because they’re unnecessary. If you’re playing Mario Kart and actually worrying about “making progress” in life while you’re doing it, you’re missing the point. Stupidity done sincerely is what makes it restorative. Same with staring at the ceiling. There’s something dignified in wasting time and admitting it’s a waste. The problem is that the phone doesn’t let you waste time sincerely. It’s always pretending it’s not a waste. “Educational” reels. “Networking” on LinkedIn. Even the dopamine drip comes packaged as utility. It’s all a scam, a con dressed in productivity drag.

Anyways, I digress.

Back to phones. I mean, we never really had a chance. Imagine being thirteen and someone handing you crack for free. Not just handing it to you but putting it in your backpack, in your bed, under your pillow, and saying “by the way, all your friends are smoking this too.” And of course you don’t know it’s bad—you’re thirteen, you don’t know what’s bad yet. And worse, the people giving it to you are the adults in suits telling your parents this is the future, this is progress. Crack with a shiny Apple logo on it. Crack that comes in pink and blue cases. Crack you get congratulated for owning. What are you supposed to do? You’re inducted into addiction before you even know what addiction feels like. It’s not free will, it’s grooming.

And even if you resist one part, the culture drags you back. Maybe you don’t want Instagram, but your friends are on Instagram, and social life has now been mapped onto the crack-pipe architecture. The infrastructure of adolescence is built on the drug. And people will still tell you it’s your fault for being hooked. As if you had a choice.

The phone makes itself indispensable, but most of the “indispensable” is illusion. The weather? Look outside. The news? There’s nothing in the headlines that will change how your day unfolds. Maps? I already know how to get to school, and if I didn’t, I could figure it out like a functioning mammal. Messages? If it’s important, I’ll see you tomorrow. The anxiety rectangle convinces you it is a prosthetic limb, when really it’s a parasite—one that whispers “you’ll die without me” while it drinks your attention like a straw in a juice box.

And the strangest part is that life expands instantly when it’s gone. In just three days without the rectangle, I realized I could learn Russian. Russian has thirty-three characters. That’s nothing compared to the thirty-three thousand reels I would have scrolled through in the same time. A reel is one more brick in the landfill of forgettable images. A Cyrillic letter is a new shape etched into your brain. Which one feels more like living?

I know I sound like a boomer. Fine. Call me an old man yelling at clouds, except the cloud I’m yelling at is literally the iCloud, and I think that makes me right. Maybe there’s wisdom in sounding old. Every older generation has been accused of being cranky about whatever new invention shows up, but maybe they were cranky because they actually noticed what was happening. Cars, television, the internet—all of them had their defenders who said “don’t worry, it’s progress.” Then years later we look around and go, “maybe we should have worried a little.”

I’ll probably ditch the anxiety rectangle and get a Wisephone. Which is basically like a phone, but declawed. It has messages, maps, the weather, and a few actually useful apps—Venmo, Uber, GroupMe. No reels. No slot machines disguised as social interaction. No infinite scroll. Just the things you would want a pocket rectangle for if you were living in a rational society. It’s like carrying a Swiss Army knife instead of a casino.

Of course, people will say this is extreme. “Why not just use your regular phone responsibly?” Which is kind of like saying “why not just drink responsibly” to someone who lives inside a bar with free tequila on tap. The point of the Wisephone is that it doesn’t ask me to white-knuckle self-control every waking second. It cuts out the engineered temptation, the stuff explicitly designed to colonize my free time. There’s a reason people lock up their junk food in cupboards, but nobody feels the need to lock up broccoli. Design matters. Not sponsored, by the way. I just think the thing is great.

And really, what are we clinging to with “full” smartphones? Half the apps on my old phone were things I didn’t even want. Preloaded garbage. Stocks app. Compass app. Stocks I don’t own, directions I already know. The whole “app ecosystem” is like Times Square—loud, flashing, filled with things that pretend to be helpful but are really just neon traps. Do you know what happens when I delete Instagram? My friends still exist. Conversations still happen. Life doesn’t evaporate. If anything, the opposite—I actually start living it instead of curating it.