Last week, as some of you might have experienced, Verizon had a major outage that affected some of its customers, meaning they had no cell service.
[cue gasps of horror]
Oh how we’ve come to be so reliant on our devices!
It was a pretty alarming feeling, seeing “SOS” up in the corner where it usually says “LTE” or some other indicator that I’m connected into a cell tower and can make and receive calls or use data to check the map or weather. I really noticed my default behavior to reach for my phone while out running errands, only to come up empty because, without cell service and no wifi close by, my phone became basically an expensive block of plastic.
And yet, there was something wildly liberating about it too. Walking through Trader Joe’s, picking up things on my list, and feeling completely free of the responsibility to monitor or check messages because, quite simply, I couldn’t. Given our technological capabilities these days, I knew this would likely not last more than a day (thankfully a true prediction) and while very annoying at times, I rather enjoyed the untethered freedom I felt for that short time.
Ironically, I could theoretically achieve this same disconnection any time by simply turning off my phone (I’d still have it handy for emergencies, but it wouldn’t be pinging and vibrating at me), and yet the sensation feels very different. Making the choice to disconnect carries the weight of responsibility, whereas the unexpected outage comes through like a snow day where school is canceled.
This digital disaster did remind me, though, how much and how often we CHOOSE the things that hold us tethered, hold us captive, hold us down, even though we’d like to think that the choice is out of our hands…
