April 2, 2026 Paid subscribers
Forty Days Without a Phone
What silence revealed about attention, anxiety, and the illusion of connection in the age of algorithms
I posted before I left that I was stepping back from social media for Lent. What I didn’t make a big announcement about was the full extent of it — I put down my smartphone entirely for forty days. Part spiritual discipline, part social experiment. I wanted to see what was still there when the noise went quiet.
Dr. Anne Lembke, in her book Dopamine Nation, calls the smartphone the modern-day hypodermic needle — a delivery device for a dopamine drip so constant and so normalized that most of us don’t even register we’re addicted. My friend Andrew Laubacher has been sounding this alarm for years through his nonprofit Humanality, focused on digital wellness and what it actually means to be human in the age of screens. He uses a striking image: with the smartphone, we are attempting to participate in an attribute of God — omnipresence. We hold all the world’s problems in the palm of our hand, expected to be aware of everything, outraged by everything, responsive to everything. We were never designed for that. And the cost of attempting it, he argues, is a slow erosion of the very things that make us human.