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.