Not using a phone taught me what a phone is really for. It’s not for communicating with other people, getting directions, reading articles, looking at pictures, shopping for products, or playing games. A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive. This is what all its functions and features ultimately achieve: cameras deliver you from time, GPS abstracts you out of space, and an all-consuming screen that keeps you a constant safe distance from yourself.

Run to your little walled garden, stick your fingers in your ears. The phones are bad, they’re apocalyptically bad, but can you even understand the world if you’re not constantly on your phone?

Take this, and transpose it to a society where social pressures force everybody to wear VR headsets. Oh how far we have yet to fall.