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I wake up and my first thing is: where's my phone?
Not "where am I" or "how did I get here." Where's my damn phone? Because that's what I've turned into now, I guess. Someone whose first reflex upon waking is to grab a device and begin soaking up other people's ideas before I've even had an original thought of my own.
But there is no telephone. There is no nightstand. There is only me in some mothball-scented, cedar-scented bed looking up at wood beams. The panic hits immediately, that hollow feeling in my belly as though I have lost something irreplaceable.
I'm in a cabin. This is a relentlessly analog space. No plugs anywhere. No whir of electronics. No tiny red lights flashing in corners. It's so silent I can hear my heartbeat, which is profoundly unsettling because I'm accustomed to an undercurrent of background noise: air conditioning, cars, the TV of the neighbor through paper-thin walls.
Outside the window: trees. No cell towers, no power lines, no human life anywhere except for this cabin that seems to be in some sort of pocket universe where there never was an internet.
I spend the first hour being completely useless. I look in every single corner for nonexistent outlets. I flail my arms around looking for the motion sensors that will turn lights on. I look at the walls for hidden panels because surely there's some sort of modern infrastructure beneath this rural veneer. There isn't.
Reality is sinking in and it's not idyllic. It's not some peaceful refuge from society. It's terrible. No idea what time it is. No idea where I am. No way of telling anyone that. No way of phoning for help. No way of ordering takeout or looking up directions or getting advice from the internet on what the fuck to do in this area.
I'm addicted. Say it. I'm a digital addict and someone's just cut me off cold turkey. My thumb has a life of its own and makes scrolling motions on my thigh. I keep reaching into pockets for a phone that doesn't exist. I compose tweets in my head and feel this weird emptiness when I remember there's nowhere to send them.
The first day is agony. Not like there isn't anything; there's canned goods, there's water, there's protection. It's agony because I've got no one with whom to share my thoughts for the first time in perhaps ten years. No podcasts to hear, no things to read, no feeds to scroll. Just me and the inside of my own head, a much more untidy place than I ever realized.
Without the stimuli, my brain starts to play tricks on me. I hear things that I normally tune out; wind rustling through leaves, some bird calling the same song over and over again, water running somewhere off in the distance. You find that silence isn't actually silent. It's full of tiny sounds that you only hear when you're not drowning them out with digital noise.
I try to build a fire because it's common sense. I've seen people do it on TV, how hard could it be? It ends up being fucking impossible. I frantically rub sticks together until my hands are bleeding and the only reward I have is splinters and rage. No YouTube tutorial to explain where I'm going wrong. No Google to inform me that I'm doing everything wrong. Just me and wood and complete incompetence.
I snack on tin crackers and it's the oddest meal I've eaten in years. No scrolling between bites. No watching video between bites. No background TV. Me, crackers, and the sound of my own chewing, which is much louder than it should be. Food is better when you are actually present for eating it and not using it as a fuel for when you are consuming content.
Night falls and I have never known darkness before. Not the simulated darkness of a city bed under streetlights and glow of LED signs, but actual darkness where you cannot see anything literally. It is brutal and terrifying and somehow lovely. I lie there staring at nothing, listening to sounds I don't recognize, alone in my life than I have ever been.
But something else happens on the second day. There is still panic, but it is subdued. I am no longer incessantly reaching for my phone. I am no longer in my head crafting posts on social media about everything that I see. I am just. here. Present in this single place at this single time instead of attempting to be in seventeen separate virtual spaces simultaneously.
I finally succeed in starting a fire by sheer brute repetition. When the flames do finally catch, I'm inordinately proud of myself. It's such an easy thing, humans have been making fire for thousands of years, but I haven't really done anything with my own hands for so long that even this little triumph feels enormous.
The quiet starts to change. Instead of feeling it as a void, it starts to feel like room. Room to think without interruption. Room to let my thoughts ramble without immediately Googling whatever fleeting notion happens to strike me. Room to become bored, something I have not experienced in years because the moment boredom looms, I pull out my phone and flood my brain with stimulation.
I find the stream on the third day, having walked through trees that all seem to me like copies. The water is freezing cold and perfectly clear and has no taste that ever came out of a faucet. I sit next to it for an hour just watching water move over rocks, and I catch myself for the first time in years just experiencing something without first considering how to film it or Instagram it.
No Instagram story of coming in contact with nature. No tweet about digital detox. No Facebook update about discovering oneself in the wilderness. Just me and moving water and the insidious perception that I've been living at a remove, always documenting and sharing instead of just feeling.
I miss the convenience desperately. The luxury of knowing anything at any moment, of calling anyone instantly, of never having to sit with a question for longer than a few seconds. But beneath the missing, there's something I didn't anticipate: relief.
No emails = no worrying about response times. No social media = no comparing my life to other people's highlight reels. No news = no constant barrage of information about things I can't control anyway. No notifications = no interruptions, no divided attention, no feeling of always behind on some never-ending scroll of digital demands.
By day four, I'm sitting and not doing anything. Not mindfully or meditating or focusing on gratitude. Just sitting in one place without trying to optimize the experience or turn it into content. It feels odd at first, like I'm lazy or wasting time. But at some point it starts to feel like something I needed to remember how to do.
I remember things I'd forgotten. What reading is like without checking my phone between chapters. What conversation is like when no one is staring at screens. What it's like to be looking forward to meeting someone without instant commemorating the experience. What thoughts are like when you let yourself just sit with them instead of posting them.
The forest is not magical. It is just forest. But it is also completely not bothered with my internet existence, and that is liberating. These trees don't care about how many people follow me or what I posted last week or whether I'm up to date on the most trending things. They just are, steadfastly and unobtrusively, on their own terms completely irrelevant to click-through rates or viral content.
I'm not going to dramatize this as some sort of epiphany. I still want my phone. I still want hot showers and functioning internet and the ability to order food without having to track it down. But what I know now, what I didn't know then, is that I can survive without constant connection. I can have thoughts that do not immediately become tweets. I can observe without reducing things to content.
The world I left behind; the constant messages, the pressure of keeping up, the feeling of always falling behind on some intangible treadmill of online responsibilities, it's all still waiting for me out there. But maybe I'll engage with it differently. I'll remember that my worth isn't measured in likes and shares.
When I come back to civilization, chances are I'll grab for my phone immediately. The temptation will be too strong, the habit too conditioned. But I'll also carry with me: the understanding of what it's like to be really present, to think without having the urge to share those thoughts immediately, to be in one place at one time without the constant pull of digital somewhere else.
The cabin taught me that I'm more than what I appear in the virtual world. That quiet is not something to fill but rather something to relish. That inaccessibility isn't an emergency but sometimes a blessing.
And that's worth more than all the bars of signal in the universe.