Victoria Wolff writes the Substack “Our Amagansett House,” from which this article was adapted.
The iPhone isn’t even 20 years old yet and it and its smartcousins have already rewired modern life — people’s behavior, expectations, even the way they pay attention. It has remade mental landscapes much as, a century ago, the automobile remade physical ones.
Which is one of the reasons I treasure my friendship with Adrian: He has never owned a cellphone. Never. Not an iPhone, not a BlackBerry, not even a Nokia.
I should clarify that Adrian is not a man who “doesn’t have a phone” because an assistant six feet behind him has two. He genuinely does not have a mobile phone. He is living, essentially, in a parallel world.
“It’s entirely thanks to never having had any type of portable device that I managed to get away with this,” he told me. No “Wall Street”-style brick phone or even a flip phone in his past. “Once you start, it’s totally impossible to go back.”
Adrian’s phonelessness has, at times, been annoying for his friends.
He once came to visit my family in Amagansett, New York, coming from Brooklyn. He took the train but didn’t realize he needed to change at Jamaica in Queens. Train announcements seem to have dwindled on public transportation because it is increasingly assumed that every traveler is being personally shepherded across the planet by a small glowing screen.
Not Adrian.
He missed the connection, ended up somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, found his way to a bar, asked somebody for directions and eventually devised a wildly circuitous route to Amagansett.
He arrived three hours late, having finished his book, entirely unperturbed. He always carries a slim book for just such occasions.
This is the maddening thing about Adrian. The inconveniences that the rest of us regard as overwhelming evidence that he desperately needs a phone don’t seem to convince him at all.
When I asked what he does when he gets lost, he seemed almost confused by the question. He rarely gets lost, he said, because he looks at a map before leaving and writes down his route on a piece of paper. Oh.
If he does get lost, he asks someone. Ah.
“That’s the whole point of being out and about,” he told me. “‘Finding your way’ in every sense.”
I cannot remember the last time I went anywhere without knowing — and Apple knowing — precisely where I was and how long my little blue dot would take to get there.
Millions of people have now spent years systematically removing or avoiding life’s little uncertainties and inconvenient adventures. We don’t have to wonder when the train is coming, whether the restaurant has a table, what the name of that actor was, or what to do with the empty 12 minutes before somebody arrives.
We certainly don’t have to be bored.
Adrian is very good at waiting. If someone he’s meeting is late, he’ll wait half an hour before leaving. He reads. He also looks around.
I’ve watched him look around. He notices things the rest of the world misses: the cornice of a building with a colorful history, the peculiar name of a coffee shop, an interesting-looking stranger with whom he’ll begin a conversation.
But if someone he’s speaking with takes out a phone, Adrian takes out a book: “If they can’t be bothered, nor can I.”
His unavailability does, by his own cheerful admission, drive his friends “mad with annoyance, which of course is part of the whole pleasure.”
He is not entirely cut off from civilization. He uses a computer. He has email. He prints tickets. And he carries a notebook filled with addresses, quotations, observations and the email addresses of people he meets.
Adrian makes a point of meeting one new person every day. This seems to me exhausting. To Adrian, it is the point. He finds people — all kinds of people — endlessly interesting.
Not being burdened with a smartphone may liberate you to be more charming with strangers. But it also makes you less employable generally. My phone is a creative command center, office, camera, publishing house and demanding boss.
And I’m a mother. We run our children’s lives through our phones.
Adrian enjoys confronting anyone who tells him he needs an app with the words “But I don’t own a phone,” and then standing there while they figure out what to do with him.
“Amazing how it is becoming almost a legal obligation, a smartphone,” he says.
We built a world around the assumption that everyone carries a smartphone, which made carrying one indispensable because the world had been built around it.
I asked Adrian what the rest of us have lost.
He just laughed. In other words, he knows what we’ve lost, while the rest of us have forgotten.
I envy Adrian and long to throw my phone into the Atlantic — free my mind and my hands — but I know that I won’t.
Perhaps those of us who cannot or will not surrender our phones, despite longing to, are asking the wrong question. Not: How do I spend less time on my phone? But: What do I want to pay more attention to?
Recently, I’ve tried the Adrian approach. I’ve started talking to people while standing in line. I call restaurants instead of automatically reaching for an app. I try to slow down while shopping, taking my daughter and savoring the pleasure of being together, wandering around and finding something we weren’t looking for.
I’ll never surrender my phone when I still have school pickups to perform. But in the meantime, I might try getting a little lost.
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