Hanging up your cell phone

By Melissa Kirsch

In 1996, my colleague Pam Belluck wrote about a 17-year-old so addicted to the internet that he spent “more than six hours a day online and more than an hour reading his email.” More than an hour on email! It seems quaint now. Pam documented the phenomenon of “netaholism” and the support groups that were emerging to help people resist the whine of their dial-up modems.

Here in 2026, our efforts at remediation of our own screen dependence are meeting with mixed results. Most states now have laws to keep phones out of classrooms, but students are destroying the lockable pouches where their devices are stowed. A Wirecutter writer tried to downgrade to a BlackBerry, only to find that life without maps and banking apps was unrealistic.

But! There’s hope! Even if that hope comes via methods that seem extreme. “What used to be innocent enough — checking social media to see what our friends were up to — has escalated into a battle of wills in which there can emerge only one victor: man or phone,” my colleague Madison Malone Kircher wrote recently. She reported on Brick, a device that locks down your phone and requires you to tap it against a plastic square in order to reinstate access to certain apps. Desperate times, desperate measures.

People are repairing to the woods, building full-scale replicas of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond — no plumbing, no electricity, definitely no Wi-Fi. One modern transcendentalist’s dwelling has just a kerosene lamp, a desk and research materials to keep him from using Google. “It naturally makes me not want to check email impulsively,” he told The Times.

Sometimes it feels as if our phones are our captors, and we’re in perpetual search for a device or a detox that will release us. We’re constantly negotiating: I’ll keep my devices out of the bedroom. I’ll wait 15 minutes after waking before checking social media.

No matter how reasonable our efforts to decrease dependency, however, there’s frequently an element of deprivation involved. More effective, perhaps, are solutions that fill the empty space. I have a friend who reads in the morning before checking her phone, another who meditates. Replacing checking your phone with something else seems like a step in the right direction. You can’t have your phone for this period of time, but you can have this other very satisfying activity. It sounds like the way you’d bargain with a child, but for many of us, our relationship with our phones is not so different from a child’s with a blankie.

My colleague Callie Holtermann reported recently on a group of students at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., who undertook a six-day tech fast. This led them to insights that seem elementary to anyone who remembers life before phones, but profound when you consider how commonplace it has become to be present but not really there.

“When I’m in a situation where I have nothing to do, I cannot find someone to hang out with other than the people who are around me,” one student reported. “In not being able to communicate over distance, I have to be more invested in communicating where I am.” It seems simple: communicating where we are. But how often are we truly invested in that? How often can we say we’re not at least partly invested in communicating elsewhere, only half-aware of what’s happening before us?

The organizer of the tech fast told Callie about a previous project to establish a tech-free dorm at St. John’s. Over time, the project’s focus shifted from being “anti-tech” to “pro-community.” Yes! That feels like an important distinction as we try to unshackle ourselves from constant phone checking. Rather than frame our plight as what we’re against, rather than focusing on what we are cutting out, we might frame it around what we’re seeking: community, connection, presence. It’s easy to list all the ways in which screen dependence detracts from our lives, but we don’t often articulate what becomes possible on the other side.

I’ve taken to picturing moments and events without phones. What would this scene look like if we couldn’t beat a digital retreat as soon as the conversation lagged? What would this car ride, this bar, this meeting, this lying-around-on-a-Saturday-afternoon look like if no one were checking their device? First, it feels a little weird — all that empty space. But then you get to imagine what would fill it.

It’s an interesting thought exercise. What do we want our lives to look like? How do we bring the benefits of the cabin in the woods to our everyday routines? As a scholar of American Transcendentalism put it to The Times, “The whole point for Thoreau was a deliberate experiment in simplifying our wants — what we think we want — and trying to get to the heart of what it means to live a full life.”
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Credit: The New York Times