Day one without notifications was fine. Kai turned off every alert on his phone at 6 AM on a Saturday, which was strategic because nothing important happens on Saturdays. He placed the phone face-down on the kitchen counter and made breakfast. Eggs. Toast. Coffee. The holy trinity of people pretending they have their life together.
The silence was interesting. Not peaceful, exactly. More like the silence in a movie right before something explodes. His hand reached for the phone four times during breakfast. He counted. Four times in twelve minutes. His hand had its own agenda and it did not include mindfulness.
By noon he had reorganized his kitchen cabinets, cleaned behind the refrigerator for the first time in what might have been ever, and discovered that the back of the fridge had its own ecosystem. A jar of something that had once been pesto stared back at him with the quiet dignity of a thing that had accepted its fate long ago.
Day two was different. Day two was when the phantom vibrations started. His phone was on the counter, silent, inert, doing absolutely nothing, and yet his pocket buzzed. Not his real pocket. The memory of his pocket. His thigh was hallucinating notifications from a device that was three rooms away. This, he thought, is what addiction looks like when it wears khakis.
He went for a walk. Walking without a phone felt like leaving the house without pants. Not dangerous, exactly, but deeply exposed. He had no map, no music, no ability to photograph his lunch and share it with people who did not care. He was alone with his thoughts, which turned out to be mostly about whether anyone had texted him.
Nobody had. He checked when he got home. Zero notifications in twenty-six hours. This was either a sign of a successful experiment or evidence that nobody thought about him. He chose to believe the former. The latter had implications he was not ready to process on a Sunday afternoon.
Day three brought clarity. Not the spiritual kind. The mundane kind. He noticed that his neighbor had a dog. He had lived next to this person for two years and had never seen the dog because he was always looking at his phone while walking to his car. The dog was enormous. It was the size of a small horse. How had he missed this.
He noticed other things. The bakery on the corner changed its window display every Wednesday. The crosswalk signal near his apartment made a sound like a bird, which he had always assumed was an actual bird. The sky, on certain evenings, turned a color that did not have a name but probably should.
On day four he turned the notifications back on. Not because he wanted to. Because his boss sent a courier to his apartment to ask why he had not responded to a message marked "urgent" that turned out to be a question about the font size on a presentation. The font was fine. It was always fine. Nobody has ever had a genuine emergency about font size.
But something had shifted. He left most of the notifications off. He kept the ones that mattered, which turned out to be about four. Four things in the entire digital universe that actually required his immediate attention. Everything else could wait. Most of it could wait forever. The dog next door barked in what he chose to interpret as agreement.