Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do Read Free Page A

Suddenly, I found myself a little bit closer to Thoreau. I was walking more slowly everywhere I went. The words leisurely pace occurred to me. Things were starting to actually occur to me! I was looking around, noticing people, their faces, emotions, appearances, and style. I felt as if I hadn’t been down my own street for years. It reminded me of when I got my first pair of glasses in sixth grade—I walked outside andlooked at a big tree and really saw the tree. All the details that I had been missing amazed me. I hadn’t realized that I couldn’t see. Other things started coming into focus too. I was listening in meetings, engaging my friends in genuine conversations that lasted more than thirty seconds, and reading magazines and newspapers, which for the last two years I had complained I didn’t have time to read but had actually stopped reading because I could not concentrate on them. In fact, I always had the time but had wasted an estimated four and a half hours per day on my phone! Four and a half hours—time I could have spent reading several chapters of a novel, writing a blog, doing work, calling my grandparents, having a much-needed conversation with a friend or significant other, or even going to the gym (okay, probably not the gym). I did the math, and it was even more alarming: At that point, I had owned a smartphone for more than six years, and my addiction to it cost me roughly 9,855 hours. That’s 411 days . Well over a year ! And it had left me with a less-than-satisfactory ability to read, an obnoxiously low attention span for my friends and family, and an almost complete unawareness and disavowal of the world around me.
    I recalled how one night, I was eating dinner with a friend who had recently broken up with the boyfriend she had been with since college. He had cheated on her after years of dating, so her tears were in no short supply. In the middle of analyzing the post-breakup texts the ex had sent to her, I picked up my glass of sauvignon blanc, and, behind it, a pop-up message on my iPhone caught my eye.Thus began the familiar itch—including the twitching minor anxiety that I was missing something good. I began imagining all of the exciting things that the pop-up message could portend, and before I could snap back to the conversation, my urge to check turned into a complete loss of attention. For a moment I even forgot that I was, in fact, at dinner, listening to a friend in the middle of a crisis. I took a deep breath and reflected on the situation. It was eight P.M . on a Sunday night, so the likelihood that the message was signaling an important work e-mail or anything at all that would demand an immediate response was minuscule. Still, I was fighting a powerful urge to check and felt a cold sweat building up on the back of my neck.
    A good friend would have ignored her phone. Make that: a good friend would not have had her phone on the table. I had always prided myself on being caring and attentive, but over the previous few years I had received countless complaints from friends and family about the fact that I never put my phone down during meals or face-to-face conversations (I can see my friends reading this and nodding their heads in affirmation right now). Knowing full well that I would be reprimanded but still too engrossed to come up with a better excuse, I used the same line I had a thousand times before:
    “Ugh I’m sorry, this is probably work. I just have to check to make sure it isn’t my boss . . . Just one sec—”
    This was the seventh dinner in three weeks during which I had recognized that my catching a glimpse of the light on my phone was quickly followed by the compulsionto check. Of course, when I gave in to the itch I found junk e-mails: Wasabi Lobby’s sushi specials, Pottery Barn’s seasonal sale, a pop-up notification about the score of a sporting event that I didn’t even know was happening, or the five-times-per-day AccuWeather alert, warning me about