GoKawiilThe first thing I noticed was the silence.
I woke up, reached for my iPhone and found nothing waiting for me. No Slack messages stacked on top of Gmail alerts. No Instagram likes to feed my ego. No Apple News headline to spike my cortisol. No Uber Eats promo. No Amazon deals. No little red-numbered accusations telling me I had already fallen behind before I could gather my thoughts and wash my face.
My lock screen was blank. Not "quiet" in the way Do Not Disturb makes it temporarily quiet, where everything is still piling up behind a curtain, waiting for you to turn the world back on. This was different.
I had gone into my settings, app by app, and disabled notifications completely the night before. Apple doesn't have a feature that does this automatically. I had to do it manually, and it was arduous.
Now my phone wasn't holding its breath, waiting for permission to shout at me again. It wasn't hiding anything from me. It simply had nothing to say.
Zooey Liao/CNET/Apple/Shutterstock
It felt wrong.
I'd expected relief that day, or at least the smug little calm that comes from doing something vaguely healthy. I'll go for a brisk walk today, rather than rotting on the couch. Why don't I feel good instantly?
Instead, I felt a low, unsettling anxiety. Something was happening somewhere, but I didn't know what it was. Someone could be texting me. Work could need me. A friend could have sent a meme. A story could be breaking. A package could be arriving. A sale could be ending.
My digital life had become like a house party I'd stepped out of: The conversations kept happening, rooms kept filling and people kept looking for me. The only way to know what I'd missed was to open the door again.
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