I recently almost died. I was walking across a highway overpass that cuts through Center City while listening to music on my earbuds. Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” was on, which was good enough, but I wanted something else. I was doing the digital version of going up and down the dial when I didn’t see an SUV barreling down the highway off-ramp.

It was only when I looked up from my phone that I realized I was about a foot from dying. The SUV came to one of those stops where there’s a loud screech and the car kind of zig-zags side to side in order to avoid hitting you. The driver honked at me and seemed to scream a profanity. All I could think to do is point at the light, which was red — like it excused my distraction. But I felt awful. I nearly died trying to find some good music, a better dopamine hit.

It’s exciting to imagine this becoming a broader cultural moment — going phone-free as both a status marker and a way to reclaim our joy and attention in life.

It’s nearly impossible to find anyone over 15 years old walking the city these days without a device. No phone on them, no earbuds in their ears. I don’t blame them. I understand the inclination to boost your walk with a call, a podcast, some music. I do it most of the time. But I also know that when I just walk without these add-ons, I experience the city differently, and my mind functions on a better level. Without a digital distraction, I can sometimes think up a whole Substack post, start to finish, like I did this one, while walking.

I thought about this recently when I read a piece by former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy about “wasting time” with other people. His point is that we should resist the urge to be productive all the time — that in wasting time we build community.

Yes, part of the issue here is about having free time to spend with others, but it’s also about how we’re multi-tasking all the time — not at our desks but in public space.

The difficulty of unplugging

I was walking downtown without any pods in the other day, and I ended up walking behind my neighbor, and we both paused at a street intersection as traffic went by. It was easy to slip into conversation. If she’d seen my earbuds in, I don’t know if she would’ve asked how I was doing, or just waved and let me go on my way, assuming I was busy. There’s something about looking unoccupied that makes you easier to reach.

But the problem with being offline while you’re out in public isn’t just about missing connections, it’s about perpetuating a kind of urban infrastructure that is constantly pushing us back to our apps. It’s a strange conundrum — as a parent of young kids whose screen time I’m trying to limit and whose requests for a device I’m trying to deflect. How can we make the analog option viable if there’s an expectation to have a phone on you at all times?

I remember growing up in New York in the pre-phone 80s and 90s, and you could stop by a payphone if you needed to reach someone. Kids could call their parents anywhere — you could even tell people the name of a restaurant or doctors’ offices you were going to next to reach you or leave a message. Payphones are long gone, as is the sense of interdependence to connect with others.

Stores had signs that said “safe haven” for anyone who needed help — a place kids could walk into and be taken care of. The program was initiated in the 1970s by the Parents League of New York to ensure kids had a safe place from street attacks — and probably a way to make a phone call. Now many of those same doors have signs saying juniors under 18 need an adult to accompany them. Kids are supposed to be off phones, without connection to their local retail, and stay out of trouble unsupervised. Or parents spend thousands of dollars to put their kids in sports programs to keep them occupied. What kinds of options are these?

But it’s not just a problem for our youth. As Owen Haacke in Next City has argued, smartphone dependence is creeping into essential services we need to function in society — transit schedules, workplace clock-ins, clinic check-ins, grocery discounts, government ID verification.

I’ve run into this myself. I was recently running some errands and realized that I couldn’t pick up a package without my phone to scan a QR code. My family went to a public fishing event along the Schuylkill and was asked to sign a waiver by scanning a QR code. In a Substack note Rachel Cohen Booth lamented that you can’t go to a sporting event anymore without downloading an app first.

Haacke in Next City goes a step further and says that we should preserve the right to exist without a smart phone, following the way that the ADA mandates that everyone has a right to physical access to places.

I’ll admit I’ve had mixed feelings on similar issues, such as Philadelphia’s law requiring businesses to accept cash, not just cards. I figured a private coffee shop wanting to run cashless should be its own choice about efficiency. But when a public school requires an app to get student updates, a parking authority requires an app to park, or a stadium subsidized with government money requires an app to access tickets, that’s a public agency deciding that a piece of public life is now conditional on private technology. Government-run entities have a real obligation to keep an analog option alive — and show the way for others.

Or maybe the private sector is leading here. Yondr — the company behind the fabric pouches that lock your phone at the door — started with comedians trying to stop bootleg recordings, then spread to arena tours, listening parties, and now Broadway. Ask anyone who’s been to one of these shows and they’ll tell you the same thing: it’s better. People look up, clap instead of filming, talk to people next to them.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce took a similar instinct to its extreme at their wedding this July, requiring guests, vendors, and even the police working the event to surrender their phones for the entire weekend. The ultimate luxury was to have people’s undivided attention and be off their phones for a few days.

It’s exciting to imagine this becoming a broader cultural moment — going phone-free as both a status marker and a way to reclaim our joy and attention in life. But we’re not going to Yondr-pouch every place and I get why the city wants people to stop paying for parking with coins.

Still, there’s value in thoughtfully providing analog infrastructure to ensure that the city still works for people without smartphones — especially our school-aged kids. We can’t expect parents and schools to be the ones to tell kids to put down their phones when everyone else is requiring us to pick them up.

Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter, The New Urban Order. Sign up for the newsletter here.

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