There is a particular sound that New York apartments make at six in the morning, just before the city remembers it is a city: a low mechanical hum, the refrigerator asking to be forgiven, the radiator ticking like a small, patient clock. I have come to know this sound well because, for the past three months, I have been waking at that hour and not looking at my phone. I want to be clear about what I mean by that. I do not mean I have deleted anything, or changed the lock screen, or installed one of the new applications that promises to keep the others at bay. I mean that I have placed the device, deliberately, on a wooden shelf across the room, and I have not walked over to it.
This is, I recognize, an almost embarrassingly small act. It takes perhaps twelve seconds longer to retrieve the phone than it would to lift it from the nightstand. But those twelve seconds have changed the shape of my mornings in a way I did not anticipate, and they have made me think — as so many of these small domestic adjustments eventually do — about the much larger shape of how we have agreed, collectively and without ever quite voting on it, to live.
For most of my adult life, I have treated the inbox as a kind of background weather. There are messages from editors, from readers, from friends, from the various institutions that maintain my life in their filing cabinets. There are also, increasingly, messages that belong to no one in particular: a newsletter I subscribed to in 2019 and forgot to unsubscribe from; a confirmation number for a flight I took in November; a note from a stranger in Lisbon who read my essay about walking and wanted to tell me his father used to do the same thing. These messages accumulate not because they matter but because the cost of receiving them is zero, and the cost of ignoring them — of genuinely, structurally ignoring them — has only ever grown.
What I did not understand until this winter, until I started walking the Brooklyn waterfront before the inbox opened, is that ignoring is itself a kind of labor. It is not, as I had assumed, the absence of work. It is a posture. It is a continuous low-grade decision, renewed every few minutes, to do something other than the thing the device is so gently suggesting. And like all continuous low-grade decisions, it is exhausting.
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