A couple years ago, I was standing on a sidewalk in Northampton, and a young woman, striding along with her head down as she stared at her cell phone, nearly crashed into me.
Then there was the incident last year, on Route 9 in Hadley, when I had to sound my car horn and veer to the right to avoid a collision with a driver next to me who, one hand on the wheel, appeared to be texting with his other one and was drifting into my lane.
Both times I remember swearing — under my breath on the sidewalk, out loud in the car — something along the lines of “What the [bleep] is wrong with these people with their cell phones?!”
As that comment implies, I don’t have a cell phone myself. Never had one, really, unless you count the roughly three-year period when my family had a cheap cell service with a couple phones that we kept for emergencies, like on a long-distance drive, and for my wife, Joyce, and I to keep in touch with our daughter, Marissa, when she first got a phone. I think I used one four or five times.
Aside from Marissa, these days my son, Sean, and my wife are also fully wired with smartphones, all with various bells and whistles, making me the family outlier. I’m an outlier at work, too, where some of the younger reporters seemed alternately astonished and amused when they first learned I didn’t have a cell phone. “I’ve got my whole life in my phone,” one said to me. “I couldn’t imagine doing without it.”
I guess a lot of people feel that way, which strikes me as a little weird. Really? Your whole life is wrapped up in a flat, 5 x 2.5-inch piece of plastic and metal?
Well, judging by worldwide statistics on cell phone use, most of humanity seems to believe having a cell is pretty vital. According to GMSA Intelligence, the research arm of the trade body that represents mobile networks worldwide, over 5 billion people — two-thirds of the earth’s population — are mobile phone users (the number spirals ever-upward on a monitor on the GSMA website).
A year or so ago, my brother David shook his head at what he sees as my backwardness or stubbornness or Luddite tendencies — or maybe all three — and said, “Someone should do a news story on you. You could be a ‘Talk of the Town’ item in The New Yorker: the last reporter in America without a cell phone.”
Sure, why not? I can pose with a typewriter, too, if they want to take a picture for the article. We could do it at my home, with the coal-burning stove in the background.
OK, so why don’t I have a cell? There’s no one answer or reason, but the simplest explanation might be this: I don’t want one, and I don’t feel I need one.
I’ve got a reliable desk phone at work and a functional landline at home (we have touch-tone models there, in case you’re wondering if I have a penchant for rotary phones). Since I’m a features writer at the Gazette, my in-person interviews are always arranged in advance, or they take place over the phone. It’s generally not breaking news, for which reporters can need a cell phone to touch base with the office, coordinate with a photographer, or take a picture or video themselves. (Cell phones are pretty important for our photographers, too.)
There have been a few occasions at work when it would have helped if I’d had a cell, but in those cases, I was still able to report and write the stories without issue. At home, doing without a phone has mostly been without incident — except that time I left my car headlights on in Hadley and had to walk home to Northampton, then get my wife to drive me back to Hadley and help me jumpstart the car.
I get that cell phones are convenient, that young people in particular use them almost exclusively to communicate with friends and family, often via social media. My daughter and, more recently, my son are almost never without their phones (or their laptops), and while Sean usually responds to email — if not right away — the easiest way by far to reach Marissa is by texting (she doesn’t usually answer her phone, at least immediately, and email, for her, is as antiquated as The Pony Express).
But I almost never need to reach someone absolutely right away. More than that, I spend enough time in front of a computer at work; I don’t want to be staring at an even smaller screen, either at work or at home. I also have to deal with dozens of emails every day on the job; I don’t want to have to wade though them, or texts, or Facebook feeds, or anything else on a phone, too. I don’t need the digital world at my fingertips at all times.
Basically, I don’t want to be part of some global grid. My tendency is to go in the opposite direction. When I was younger, I traveled a fair amount, especially out West — hiking trips, bicycle tours, car camping — on my own or with a few friends, and the solitude and beautiful country I saw gave me peace of mind, something that’s often elusive in day-to-day life. But I try to find it when and where I can, and a ringing/chiming phone is not part of that picture.
In his tune “Sideshow Blues,” Todd Snider, one of my favorite songwriters and singers, offers a great summation of our frantic, wired age, the 24/7 news cycle, the general level of distraction: “It’s all a big commercial, it’s a video of man / It’s a plot to put an end to my attention span … My phone is always ringing, when I want to be alone / They try and sell me everything from Heaven to cologne/ Everybody’s got an offer I can’t refuse / It’s a circus out here, mama, your baby’s got the sideshow blues.”
I want to get away from that circus, not closer to it — and I know I’m not the only one who feels that way.
And if cell phones and social media are supposed to improve our lives by connecting us all, why is it I keep reading of studies that show many cell phone users — young people in particular — experience heightened levels of depression and loneliness? Rather than connecting people, phones seem designed to discourage face-to-face interaction. Staring down at a screen is certainly a way to avoid making eye contact, wherever you might be.
I’m reminded of a scene from Gary Shteyngart’s satirical novel “Super Sad True Love Story,” set in a not-too-distant, post-literate future when the United States has essentially gone broke, China is about to take over the country’s economic assets, and people are addicted to “äppäräti” — a sort of smartphone on steroids — for streaming their thoughts and conversations in a continuous, real-time feed. The story’s main character, during an airline flight, is reading a “printed, bound media artifact” — a book — when he glances up to see the passengers around him, all clutching äppäräti, staring at him with mingled contempt and disbelief.
“Duder,” says one, “that thing smells like wet socks.”
The endless ads on TV for cell phones get on my nerves, too: There’s something especially vapid about the way people seem reduced to children playing with shiny new toys, their faces lit with ecstatic smiles.
Or has the cell phone become a substitute for sex? A study I read about a few years ago found 35 percent of smartphone users reach for their phone first thing in the morning, compared to 10 percent who reach for their partner, while 44 percent of younger users admitted to falling asleep, at least some of the time, with their smartphones in their hands. Is this what the digital age has brought us?
In “Longmire,” the Netflix series about the sheriff of a fictional Wyoming county, the sheriff, Walt Longmire, is also averse to cell phones. One of the show’s running jokes is that he often has to borrow a phone from one of his deputies while on the job. In one scene, a woman he’s developing a relationship with, Donna, suggests he get one himself.
“Why?” asks Walt.
“Because they exist, and they’re convenient?” says Donna.
“I like not getting phone calls,” the sheriff responds.
Is that really why I don’t want a cell phone — because I’m antisocial?
I’ve thought about that. I’m not especially outgoing, and my job requires a regular amount of personal outreach that can sometimes wear me out by the end of the day. I’m not crazy about taking phone calls at night at home, either (it’s mostly telemarketers), and I need a certain amount of solitude in my life. But I don’t think any of that makes me antisocial.
I also know people who are not addicted to their phones, who don’t text or surf the web while driving (or while striding along, head down, on sidewalks), who have balanced lives and simply enjoy the features cells offer. My wife uses hers to take pictures, call or text friends and family, check the weather and a few other things, but that’s mostly it. Seems reasonable.
And I have dipped my toes into the social media world. Not Facebook — I don’t want to share my life with billions of internet users, or Russian trolls who will try to sway my vote — but I am on Twitter through an account at the Gazette.
I’ve considered all these things, but none of them has yet convinced me I need to get a cell. I may be fighting a rearguard action against the digital world, but so far it’s been reasonably successful.
Then again, there have been a few developments at home in the last several months that may be tipping the battle against me.
For one thing, we used to have two family computers I could use if I needed to look at my email or check on important news, like Mookie Betts’ batting average, Donald Trump’s latest tweets, or the scandalous dress Jennifer Lawrence wore to the premiere of her new film. But the computers both died, one of old age, the other of shoddy construction. My kids got laptops and my wife bought herself a Mac, so now I have to go through one of them if I need to get on the web at home (and my kids aren’t around that much anyway).
And now my wife says we should ditch our landline. Most of our calls, as I mentioned, are from telemarketers, to the point we rarely answer the phone unless someone we recognize starts to leave a message. It’s mostly a waste of money, my wife argues; she thinks the cost of cell phone service for me would probably be less than what we pay for the landline.
I’ve also been thinking about how I might stay in touch with my kids if, when they’re older, they move out of the area. Texting might be the best shot, at least to alert them that I’m trying to call them (I sent one to Marissa recently, on my wife’s phone, to wish her good luck on her final exams at college).
So I may have to get with the cell phone program. I can be stubborn, but I’m not inflexible.
And as “Longmire” fans know, even the sheriff gets a cell phone in the end.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com