Yesterday morning, in a frantic dash to beat the 8:30 a.m. coffee queue, I committed a cardinal sin of the 21st century: I left my phone charging on the nightstand.
I didn’t realize it until I was halfway to work. The first symptom was a lightness in my pocket, a strange lack of gravitational pull on my right thigh. Then came the phantom vibrations—a tragic ghost limb for the digital age. Mild panic set in. How would I listen to podcasts? What if someone needed to send me a cry-laughing emoji?
But as the minutes ticked by, something extraordinary happened. I became an accidental anthropologist, a time-traveler from the distant past—specifically, the year 2004.
The Commute: Instead of scrolling through a vortex of bad news and marginally funny animal videos, I was forced to… look out the window. I saw things. A house painted a startling shade of purple. A dog wearing a denim jacket. A human being, just standing there, thinking. It was surreal. I tried to “double-tap” the view to like it. My finger just smudged the bus window.
The Line-Up: At the coffee shop, the true test came. The barista asked for my rewards number. I stared at her, blankly. “I… don’t have it. It’s in the pocket-sized computer I left in the 21st century.” She sighed the sigh of someone dealing with a village idiot. As I waited, I witnessed other humans. They were all staring into tiny glowing rectangles, their thumbs moving like hyper-caffeinated spiders. It looked less like a cafe and more like a cult induction ceremony. I felt a sudden, irrational urge to tap someone on the shoulder and whisper, “The clouds today are quite cumulus, aren’t they?” just to see if they could process non-pixelated information.
The Great Unknown: Need to know the capital of Rwanda? Tough luck, Benin City. Want to calculate a 15% tip? Welcome back to JSS 2 math, where the answer is probably “about three-fiddy.” Had an awkward social interaction? Normally, I’d immediately text a friend a dramatic re-enactment. Instead, I had to just… live with the awkwardness. Let it marinate. It was character-building, and I hate building character before 10 a.m.
The Withdrawal: The shakes started around 11 a.m. I instinctively reached for my pocket no less than 47 times. I caught myself trying to “check my phone” while holding a turkey sandwich. My brain, desperate for dopamine, started offering up its own notifications: Remember that embarrassing thing from 2012? PING. What’s the name of that actor, you know, the guy from the thing? PING. You should be productive right now. ERROR. SYSTEM FAILURE.
By the end of the day, I had accomplished strange, archaic feats. I made eye contact. I started a conversation with a stranger about the weather and meant it. I remembered how to be bored, which is just your brain’s way of saying, “Fine, I’ll come up with something creative if you stop distracting me with cat videos.”
When I finally returned home and reunited with my sleek, black rectangle of light, I felt a mix of reverence and resentment. I scrolled through the notifications: 3 emails, 2 texts, and 17 alerts from apps desperately trying to sell me things I’d once looked at for 3 seconds.
The experiment was over. I was back. But part of me, the part that saw the denim-clad dog, remained in that simpler, quieter, slightly more confused time.
My advice? Try being Amish for a day. Leave your digital lifeline behind. You’ll be terrified, then bored, then weirdly peaceful. And you’ll have a great story to tell… as soon as you get back online to post about it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have 137 unread notifications to attend to. My people need me.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 