Do Not Disturb

In defense of (very) selective communication

I’ve written before about how my New Year’s resolutions, when I bother to make them, tend to be formatted as lists of More¹: rather than list all the specific things I’m going to do or achieve, I try to attend to things in my life that already feel good, and commit to doing more of them.

More Light

While it’s long been obvious in the abstract, this year brought home to me—with meteoric intensity—the concrete conclusion that my time is a finite resource, and that in order to do more of the things I find fulfilling, I must necessarily do less of other things. And, being a person here at the end of 2024, it’s also long been obvious that the needless thing I do the most of is “using my phone.” To do more of anything else, I need to do less of that.

This doesn’t come easily to me. I don’t just mean that various apps have been successful in getting me addicted to their particular pleasures and interfaces, though they have. I also mean that I am by nature both very desirous of connection and a relentless people-pleaser. Accordingly, what eats even more of my time and attention than simply scrolling Twitter or Instagram is the fact of communication. I’m in countless group chats on those apps and others, full of people I like and want to stay connected to,² and more of my online time is consumed reading chats than scrolling feeds. I, like everyone else, am simply perpetually available. And this perpetual availability, at the risk of sounding dramatic, has begun to ruin my life.

Put simply, I am finding it harder and harder to pay attention. To anything, which is to say, to everything in my life. Even as I commit to reading for pleasure every night, I find it harder and harder to keep my attention on the page. The ceaseless, frantic searching for something new and stimulating on my phone, and the need to respond to everything that comes my way, have destroyed my deep cognition, my ability to focus. (Just since I started typing this paragraph I’ve gotten distracted by two non-essential messages popping up on my screen; I linked my text messages to my laptop years ago and am just now starting to realize how annoying I find that.) That realization terrifies me in the most profound way. For all of my musings about death, for all of my lofty (and sincere!) beliefs that death is the necessary opportunity to give the gift of the stuff of our lives back to the earth, I am not in any way prepared to die. And if some tragedy befell me tomorrow and I had a few moments to think about things before the end, one of the most vehement thoughts would surely be: What the fuck was I doing with all that time???

This drives my anxiety through the roof and makes me miserable to be around. (It at least makes me find myself miserable to be around, which is reason enough to want to do something different.) If I can’t focus on things I purport to care about, if I can’t let them fill me in the way they ought to, I am not participating in my own life. And I am not letting the fact of my own finitude, and theirs, to fill me with the kind of urgency toward love that should be central fact of our relationships to each other, to our animals, and even to our things.

Here is the only solution I have found, short of abandoning society for the woods once and for all: my phone is now permanently on “Do Not Disturb.”

I’ve customized whose messages and calls will actually come through as notifications, a very short list limited to my immediate family and the friends who I need to check in with about dog care and our shared home-buying project. Regardless of how much I like or love everyone else, I have decided that I have to like and love myself enough to limit communication with them to such times as I feel capable of participating authentically. In fact this is how I can show them that I do care for them: by not letting the fact of their getting in touch become intensely triggering to me, thereby creating some deeply negative associations that really have nothing to do with their target.

This goes for every app: I am learning to work through the anxiety I have long had toward letting Instagram messages pile up. I used to stress big-time about this, that by not responding, not watching the funny reels I was sent, not giving the appropriate emoji reactions quickly enough, I was signaling to people that I didn’t care about them enough to reciprocate their act of friendship. Because it really is nice to be thought of! And these apps, for better or worse, are the tools of sustaining friendship in this day and age. I can’t tell you how warm I feel knowing that someone saw something somewhere and my name, my face, or my spirit came to their mind.

But it became increasingly clear to me over the course of this year that this kind of communication, on Instagram in particular, was becoming untenable. It’s been years since I let myself get push notifications from social media apps, but I now have to work to give myself permission to not even click over to the red (it’s red on purpose) message icon to see what lies beneath.³

My full-time Do Not Disturb experiment has been going on for less than three weeks, and so many of my old anxieties are already beginning to feel silly. There has not been a single emergency during that time in which I needed to be reached by someone who doesn’t have other ways to reach me. I have gone upwards of three days at a time without reading text messages from people not on that short list I mentioned, and not one of them has cut me out of their lives or expressed concern at my behavior. When Instagram reels pile up in my inbox I simply don’t watch them and don’t react if I don’t feel like it, and no one has demanded to know why. It turns out that pretty much none of this is a big deal at all.

The urgency baked in to our modern frameworks of communication papers over the fact that very little of the communicating we do is in any way urgent. Communication itself: yes, this is urgent, this is the foundation of community, of society. But we were always meant, I think, to be able to communicate on our own terms, rather than living in each other’s heads and ears and pockets and eyeballs twenty-four hours a day.

Thanks, as always, for reading. (I don’t take lightly that you are spending your own fleeting, precious life reading this newsletter and focusing your own attention on my thoughts.) I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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1. Fitting, maybe, that mores are the essential customs and values that a person or community ascribes to. One of my main mores is to seek out more!

2. Some of these people I’ve never met in real life and likely never will. For most of my time on the internet this has been one of its coolest features, the chance to forge real friendships in an entirely digital space. But this, too, can get wearisome.

3. The only obvious alternative—taking the app off my phone entirely—was off the table, even if Instagram as a whole is so much less fun than it used to be. My god, if I dislike being constantly available, do I fucking loathe being constantly advertised to. That’s like 80% of Instagram content now. For whatever reason I am being bombarded of late with ads for like…gum made of spruce resin that will strengthen your jaw? On the surface, the spruce part, this probably seems like a perfectly “me” product. But I am a priest in the cult of destroying optimization, and this extends to bodily optimization as well. Death to “mastic gum,” death to productivity hacks, death to the virus of hyperconsumerism.