Nophubbing

this past week
(on Thursday night i think)
i dropped my phone in a jug of water

It seemed fine immediately after that, but the next day it started spazzing and showing a weird triangle with a battery inside and then it died somewhere toward the afternoon

Anyway
basically i am phone less

I use my mum's old iphone but i don't have any contacts on it
and it has no whatsapp or instagram because apparently the model is too old (damn apple, marketing ruse to make you constantly upgrade...)

So all i can get are mostly incoming calls or texts, and the rest of the time i use it for music only (I've been having Vampire Weekend on almost constant replay... BADUM i see a mansard roof through the trees DUM BUM BUM BADUM i see a salty message written in the eaves....)

And the funny thing is
having no phone is
beautifully
magically
wonderfully

liberating

i don't have that constant buzzing in my pocket, no more 'i just need to check whatsapp in case...'
I know i don't have anymore obligations to reply to this and that since i have the convenient excuse of a waterlogged battery
and so responsibility to respond to people has just disappeared and i love it

i've been walking around phoneless and it's strange seeing people so stuck on their phones
almost like a strange universe or a sci-fi movie i'd never realised how absorbed people are
i used to walk around with my head stuck in a book and people thought i was weird and a bookworm (which i was) but now everyone is a phoneworm!
Sometimes i wonder if this is just yet another phase in history, if one day our descendants will look back and think of how horrible this dark age of technology was, sort of like the holocaust (exaggerating the suffering and pain and all but i can't help but think there's a sort of cold, clinical severing of emotion and relationships and organic joy that this addiction brings which, amplified on a global scale, is probably of the magnitude of the holocaust)

i'm probably getting a new battery some time this week

i don't know if i'll be happy or slightly regretful about my re-entrance into the hyper connected world of whatsapp

but i know that now i'm definitely not going to be so attached to my phone
i won't keep it in my pocket anymore, it'll be in my bag
no checking it during break times as far as i can help it

because now i'm free the bond i don't really relish the idea of going back

(note added later: though i think it'll be exciting to see just how many whatsapp messages pile up...)