My Disconnected Life

Over the past several years, I’ve lost my cell phone more times than I care to admit. My friends consider me—endearingly, I hope—a clumsy, irresponsible fool. They shake their heads when I admit that voicemails have gone unheard; my mother sighs in shame at the wasted money and the careless child she raised.

To make matters worse, I am also notoriously bad with e-mails. Days can go by as I “forget” to check my mail; if my laptop’s charger isn’t nearby, that’s often reason enough to take a stroll instead of peruse my inbox. And while I’m often embarrassed by my errant behavior, as it has become the enduring joke from my friends, there are times where by foolishnesses has become my escape. Irresponsibility has allowed me to disconnect, and I am all the more happy for it.

It’s difficult to imagine life at Harvard without the Internet, cell phones, e-mail, instant messengers, and every other connectivity device. The proliferation of Blackberrys, Treos, and most recently, Moto Qs, have made our umbilical cords wireless, feeding off our addiction to mother e-mail. But life before these blessed, though burdensome, conveniences did exist. Without daily doses of Dems-talk, Throp-talk, Newstalk, and innumerable other e-lists, it feels as though we would never be informed of campus’ most important (and, alas, unimportant) debates. Procrastination would become more creative, and we would certainly be ignorant of the uncouthly candor that is brought about by impersonal conversation.

Without class e-mail lists, we would actually have to attend lecture to find out when our next assignment was due. Consulting teaching fellows about a troublesome paper would require face-to-face interaction in office hours, rather than the mundane chore of firing off an e-mail. Perhaps even classes would be fairer as compiling 40-page study guides that offer delinquent students the opportunity to sneak by with a B-plus would be much more challenging to coordinate. Keystroke, click, send—the Harvard soundtrack.

But what a liberating relief to be unreachable for a while. Friends often joke about the strange sensation that overtakes them when they suddenly drop their cell phone in the river or leave it stranded in a bar bathroom; just like that, they become a ghost for a day before reconnecting at T-Mobile. For those few pre-millennium hours, the world is a little less imposing. For a second, we are relieved of the obligation to be accounted for at every moment, to be responsive to everyone.

It is during these hours that I realize—all too often, in my case—that it can be nice to take refuge in my own solitude. Uninterrupted by the pressure of constant phone-checking or e-mailing, we are forced to breathe and think and rest. As it stands, it seems unnatural to want to be out of the loop for a bit; people seem unnerved if I explain that I went “missing” for a while because my phone was dead. From what precisely I was missing is unclear; I was enjoying myself by myself.

Yet it was but decades ago that it wasn’t considered curious behavior to want to be alone. There was no opportunity to be instantly available, so alone-time was inevitable. But it seems that now we under-appreciate the virtue of taking time for ourselves. We no longer get away without a look of concern if we aren’t sitting in Lamont with our laptops, refreshing our inboxes, texting our friends, answering our phones, or seeming to care that—for a minute—we were walking around thinking alone.



Perhaps it is a romanticized idea of what the Harvard experience once was, but I often think that I would have been forced—or at least allowed—to take a more thoughtful or contemplative approach to my time here. It has become so expected to be in touch and online that sometimes it seems the only reasonable explanation for a prolonged disconnect is a little bit of irresponsibility. So, the next time I’m sheepishly admitting that I’ve, once again, lost my phone or forgotten to stop by my Gmail, I hope it is understood that it is not just my cavalier attitude towards my Samsung or general unreliability—though, there might be a bit of both. I just want to be alone for a while.



Morgan R. Grice ’06, who was a Crimson editorial chair in 2005, is a government concentrator in Winthrop House.