There is essentially never going to be anything to see on your phone that can’t wait ten minutes.
This just isn't true. I've had medical emergencies and supported friends through emergencies where someone really did need to pick up right away. They're rare, but you do need a system that can handle them.
This is a very insightful post. It makes me wonder about the underlying psychological driver of this behavior.
I would hypothesize that this compulsion is less about a rational fear of an actual crisis and more a conditioned response driven by FoMO. So the urgency sense is more similar to an addicitive-like brain response.
We have been trained by social media and marketing to associate notifications with potentially missing a social update, a relevant piece of information, or a commercial opportunity. The "fear" is not of a disaster, but of social or informational exclusion.
The "what if it's an emergency?" argument then becomes a powerful rationalization. It allows us to justify an impulsive, FoMO-driven behavior (checking the phone) by framing it as a responsible, necessary action.
I agree with and really like most of this post.
There are some things your phone can tell you that are urgent, like someone changing plans at the last minute. But that is not so urgent that you couldn’t wait to pull over.
I think I experience quite a lot of things that are very time-sensitive (though they're rarely important), more time-sensitive than you indicated. E.g. my friend is at the grocery store buying some items for a dinner party we're throwing together. They ask, "Do you have flour or should I buy some? I'm on the checkout line." Or my partner is about to leave the house and asks which bottle of wine to bring as a gift to the party we're going to, and if he waits another few min, he will miss the upcoming train and be late. These things are often urgent on the scale of 1-7 min.
How do you evaluate the cost/benefit of buying more flour than necessary and bringing the wrong wine versus being a slave to your phone at all times?
Personally? In various complicated ways. I wasn't advocating for always attending to such things, just disputing that highly time-sensitive messages rarely come about at all.
With all of these anecdotes, you should ask yourself, what did people do before they had cell phones? Cell phones aren't that old! It's not like the 1990s and early 2000s were some pre-civilizational state where people just couldn't coordinate or make decisions for lack of instant communication across vast distances.
Nice reflections. There is a lot of merit in this, and I think we all know it, like you say. But to be sober though, then yeah, I mean, of course this sense of urgency is prevailing these days. Because
A) We are spoon-fed content 24/7 with artifical urgency
B) To maintain current living standards, especially financial security, you have to increase effort over time, now more than ever.
C) There are, real, major urgencies globally now, and we hear about them live. Not the ever-prevailing disasters and local conflicts, but apocalyptic threats.
How do you escape that? Not by low effort, that's for sure.
Edit: Not sure what's wrong with my comment but sorry if I offended anyone reading it somehow! Is there a style rule I am missing? Anyway, back to the matrix...
I just saw someone on an electric unicycle texting while going through an intersection. Their body was so exposed, so fragile, zipping through that intersection right next to all those cars.
What was so urgent that it couldn’t wait for them to pull over?
I mean, I know the answer is nothing, almost certainly. They just got a notification so they pulled out their phone and then they were on it. Or maybe they were just bored while hurtling through traffic.
Okay but then the question is: Why do notifications feel so urgent?
When we worry about not looking at our phones, what is it that we’re so afraid we’ll miss?
There are some things your phone can tell you that are important, like that a loved one has a terminal illness. It matters that you see that text, but if you’re asleep for eight hours and don’t see it til you wake up, it doesn’t really make a difference.
There are some things your phone can tell you that are urgent, like someone changing plans at the last minute. But that is not so urgent that you couldn’t wait to pull over.
What’s both important and urgent? Natural disasters, maybe? But a bad storm is obvious, and an earthquake is hard to forewarn about.
The thing I always used to worry about was missing a call that something terrible had happened — that someone was in the hospital.
When I was in my second year of college, my mom’s mom — the only grandparent I ever really knew — died. I was in an evening class that I hadn’t told my mom about, studying emergency medical response. My phone was in my backpack, but I happened to check it once halfway through the class, and I saw that I had multiple missed calls from my mom, and a text that just said “Call me. Now.” I stepped out into the hallway, and talked to my mom, who was being driven the four hours to the hospital where her mother was unresponsive.
In a way, this was urgent — I needed to make travel plans for the funeral within the next two days, and my grandmother had wanted me to choose a poem for the program, and my mom just really wanted to reach me in that moment. But the delay of 15 minutes when I hadn’t checked my phone didn’t matter. And when I called my sister, who also needed to make travel plans, it was several hours later (because I’d stayed to finish the class), and no one had called her yet at all. Even though someone was literally in the hospital, dying, there was no to-the-minute or even to-the-hour urgency.
And yet, every text we receive feels so urgent that we let ourselves get absorbed in our phones while our bodies are completely vulnerable amidst a mass of moving cars.
There’s science behind that, of course. People say that ignoring a text message causes the same feeling as ignoring someone trying to get your attention in person. It’s not a smart social move. Of course it gives you anxiety.
People often ask me if we shouldn’t somehow consider one-on-one contact with a specific person who we know to be in a separate, more wholesome magisterium than all the scrolling people do on sites where no one is talking to them in particular. I think it is separate, and it can be more wholesome. But as a friend put it, “I’m constantly using part of my brain worrying about who might be trying to contact me, and it makes it impossible to fully focus on anything else.”
This is a hard problem to deal with. It can work to make sure that everyone who might ever need you urgently (family, close friends, coworkers, roommates) knows to call you if something is genuinely urgent. Then turn off notifications for everything except phone calls. But this won’t work for everyone in every situation.
You know it’s a stupid, needless risk to be texting while you’re in traffic. If you really need to send a text while you’re biking, it’s trivial to pull over to the curb and stop for a few seconds. But people don’t. Everyone else is doing it, after all.
Maybe the example I used wasn’t fair. A parent needs to have their phone on them in case their child has a medical emergency, because the child is their responsibility, in a way that my grandmother was not mine. Plus there was nothing to be done for my grandmother, since she was basically already dead, so that removed most of the urgency.
But there’s a good reason I used that example. The reason is that it is the only time since I got a cellphone twelve years ago that anyone needed to contact me about something of that nature.
Is that just luck? Maybe. But I think the general lesson stands for most people:
There is essentially never going to be anything to see on your phone that can’t wait ten minutes.