Good morning. If decreasing dependence on our phones feels impossible, we might benefit from considering what we’d want to fill the space that they occupy.
Hanging upIn 1996, my colleague Pam Belluck wrote about a 17-year-old so addicted to the internet that he spent “more than six hours a day online and more than an hour reading his email.” More than an hour on email! It seems quaint now. Pam documented the phenomenon of “netaholism” and the support groups that were emerging to help people resist the whine of their dial-up modems. Here in 2026, our efforts at remediation of our own screen dependence are meeting with mixed results. Most states now have laws to keep phones out of classrooms, but students are destroying the lockable pouches where their devices are stowed. A Wirecutter writer tried to downgrade to a BlackBerry, only to find that life without maps and banking apps was unrealistic. But! There’s hope! Even if that hope comes via methods that seem extreme. “What used to be innocent enough — checking social media to see what our friends were up to — has escalated into a battle of wills in which there can emerge only one victor: man or phone,” my colleague Madison Malone Kircher wrote recently. She reported on Brick, a device that locks down your phone and requires you to tap it against a plastic square in order to reinstate access to certain apps. Desperate times, desperate measures. People are repairing to the woods, building full-scale replicas of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond — no plumbing, no electricity, definitely no Wi-Fi. One modern transcendentalist’s dwelling has just a kerosene lamp, a desk and research materials to keep him from using Google. “It naturally makes me not want to check email impulsively,” he told The Times. Sometimes it feels as if our phones are our captors, and we’re in perpetual search for a device or a detox that will release us. We’re constantly negotiating: I’ll keep my devices out of the bedroom. I’ll wait 15 minutes after waking before checking social media. No matter how reasonable our efforts to decrease dependency, however, there’s frequently an element of deprivation involved. More effective, perhaps, are solutions that fill the empty space. I have a friend who reads in the morning before checking her phone, another who meditates. Replacing checking your phone with something else seems like a step in the right direction. You can’t have your phone for this period of time, but you can have this other very satisfying activity. It sounds like the way you’d bargain with a child, but for many of us, our relationship with our phones is not so different from a child’s with a blankie. My colleague Callie Holtermann reported recently on a group of students at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., who undertook a six-day tech fast. This led them to insights that seem elementary to anyone who remembers life before phones, but profound when you consider how commonplace it has become to be present but not really there. “When I’m in a situation where I have nothing to do, I cannot find someone to hang out with other than the people who are around me,” one student reported. “In not being able to communicate over distance, I have to be more invested in communicating where I am.” It seems simple: communicating where we are. But how often are we truly invested in that? How often can we say we’re not at least partly invested in communicating elsewhere, only half-aware of what’s happening before us? The organizer of the tech fast told Callie about a previous project to establish a tech-free dorm at St. John’s. Over time, the project’s focus shifted from being “anti-tech” to “pro-community.” Yes! That feels like an important distinction as we try to unshackle ourselves from constant phone checking. Rather than frame our plight as what we’re against, rather than focusing on what we are cutting out, we might frame it around what we’re seeking: community, connection, presence. It’s easy to list all the ways in which screen dependence detracts from our lives, but we don’t often articulate what becomes possible on the other side. I’ve taken to picturing moments and events without phones. What would this scene look like if we couldn’t beat a digital retreat as soon as the conversation lagged? What would this car ride, this bar, this meeting, this lying-around-on-a-Saturday-afternoon look like if no one were checking their device? First, it feels a little weird — all that empty space. But then you get to imagine what would fill it. It’s an interesting thought exercise. What do we want our lives to look like? How do we bring the benefits of the cabin in the woods to our everyday routines? As a scholar of American Transcendentalism put it to The Times, “The whole point for Thoreau was a deliberate experiment in simplifying our wants — what we think we want — and trying to get to the heart of what it means to live a full life.”
War in Iran
Politics
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Travel in the Middle East has been largely paralyzed since the war began. More than 29,000 flights to or from the region have been canceled, and some airspace is still closed. Iran’s retaliatory attacks have hit hotels in Dubai and the airport in Abu Dhabi, causing anxiety among those trying to leave. Flights are slowly becoming more available, but thousands of travelers remain stranded. Since Middle Eastern airports are a linchpin of international travel, the disruptions have also rippled to more distant places, such as Australia, India and Indonesia, that rely on connections. We’ve heard from more than 100 readers affected by the disruptions, many of whom have improvised expensive, often complex itineraries to escape the conflict zone. Jay Miller, a 45-year-old doctor from New Orleans who got stuck in Qatar, described his planning as “a surreal calculus,” weighing the risks of missiles against his evaporating flight options. He eventually hired a car to drive to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he boarded a flight to Ethiopia. If all goes well, he will be back home today. European countries, including Italy, France and Britain, arranged flights beginning early this week to evacuate their citizens. The U.S. government had been urging travelers to call a hotline, which mainly provided basic information about security conditions and commercial flights. Yesterday, though, the State Department began offering charter flights — including one in a New England Patriots plane. — Christine Chung, travel reporter Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more.
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