Vox Meditantis

What technology would you be better off without, why?

Saturday, 29th November 2025

The question arrived this morning with the particular smugness technology prompts tend to carry – as if asking which tool I’d surrender will reveal something profound about my character, my values, my capacity for principled renunciation. What technology would you be better off without, why? I could offer the expected answer: social media I’ve never possessed, smartphones whose notifications I’ve successfully ignored, the entire apparatus of constant connection I’ve managed to sidestep through a combination of luck, temperament, and being fifty-eight rather than twenty-eight.

But those would be easy refusals, the sort that make abstinence look like wisdom when it’s often just lack of temptation.

The harder truth surfaced this afternoon, standing in the community hub inside Minerva Creek Galleria whilst organisers apologised for closing an hour early. The exhibition – “Switching on the Light,” faith traditions and humanism represented through table-top displays – had drawn so few visitors that continuing felt more like vigil than celebration. I’d arrived at one o’clock, notebook in hand, having read the community forum post with genuine interest: similarities between groups, interesting differences, light as transformation and renewal through dark November nights.

The lights, as it turned out, had been extinguished by the time I walked through the door.

“We thought there’d be more people,” the organiser said, already packing candle holders into cardboard boxes. “But everyone’s shopping, I suppose. Black Friday weekend.” She delivered this with the particular resignation of someone who’d hoped for community and got commerce instead.

I stood in that fluorescent mall corridor – piped Christmas music already colonising the soundscape, retail bags rustling past like urgent weather – and felt the small, specific shame of arriving too late to something that mattered. Not through malice or indifference, but through the accumulated friction of my morning: checking email before leaving, confirming the restaurant reservation for Michael and Linda’s December visit, opening three browser tabs to examine what the view from my already-booked Québec hotel room might actually look like, reading Rajesh’s text about Monday’s schedule, replying to Maggie’s PDF attachment of museum signage proofs.

Nothing urgent. Nothing that couldn’t have waited. Just the digital equivalent of tidying cupboards whilst the house burns – small tasks that feel productive precisely because they prevent you from doing the thing that requires actual presence.

The Technology I Can’t Seem to Quit

The technology I’d be better off without isn’t the smartphone in my pocket or the laptop on my desk. It’s the way I use them – the particular choreography of avoidance that masquerades as competence, the scrolling and clicking and booking that fills the space where feeling might otherwise surface.

Email, primarily. Not as communication tool but as anxiety management system.

I check it hourly when nothing requires checking, scrolling through medical newsletters and pharmacy updates and community bulletins as if one might contain the answer to a question I haven’t articulated. The inbox becomes a form of company – evidence that the world requires my attention, that professional competence has a measurable inbox-zero metric, that busyness equals worthiness.

This morning, before the exhibition, I spent twenty minutes reading an email from a continuing education provider about trauma-informed workshop opportunities in March. Useful information, certainly. But March is four months distant, and the workshop doesn’t require response until January. What I was really doing – what I’m increasingly aware I do – is using the email as permission to delay leaving the flat, to postpone the mild social risk of arriving somewhere alone, to remain in the digital corridor where I’m Dr Bennett answering professional correspondence rather than Catherine showing up to a community event without credentials.

Then there are the booking systems – hotels, restaurants, train tickets – which have become proxy escape hatches.

I have seventeen browser tabs open on my laptop at present. Five are for various Québec hotels I’ve already booked and rebooked twice, comparing room views and breakfast policies with the sort of obsessive attention one might bring to treaty negotiations. Three are restaurants in Philadelphia I’m considering for Michael and Linda’s visit, though they’ve made clear they’d be equally happy with soup at my kitchen table. Four are articles I’ve promised myself I’ll read about museum accessibility practices, bookmarked weeks ago and quietly fossilising. The remaining five constitute archaeological layers – including a theatre listing from October, a recipe for ginger biscuits I’ve since made, a Wikipedia entry about Harbouring Day traditions I can’t remember opening.

Each tab represents a decision deferred, a possibility held open, the illusion of forward momentum whilst remaining fundamentally stationary. I tell myself I’m being thorough, researching properly, keeping options available. What I’m actually doing is avoiding commitment – to the hotel room, the restaurant choice, the article’s argument, the evening’s plan. As long as the tabs stay open, I can remain in the conditional tense, the speculative mode, the careful adjacency to actual living.

The digital becomes a form of dress rehearsal – practising presence without the risk of performance.

When Technology Serves Rather Than Shields

And yet. Because honesty requires the complication.

This week offered gentler uses, moments when technology facilitated rather than forestalled connection.

Tuesday afternoon, Rajesh sent a text asking if I could cover Monday morning’s session – not an emergency, just a calendar conflict, phrased with his characteristic courtesy: “Only if it suits, Catherine. Otherwise I’ll manage.” I replied yes within minutes, glad to help, and realised how rarely I respond that swiftly to personal invitations. Professional competence, it seems, permits immediate commitment in ways that friendship still doesn’t.

Wednesday, Maggie emailed PDFs of the museum signage proofs – sanctuary bench permissions, quiet hours guidance, exit cards for visitors who need to leave difficult exhibits and return when steadier. I opened them on my phone whilst waiting for the kettle, sent back small suggestions about font size and wording, felt the satisfaction of work that matters accomplished in the five minutes before tea.

Friday morning, after the Black Friday queues had begun their usual theatre, David texted asking if I needed rescue from retail madness. I’d been watching the spectacle from Marcus’s doorway, coffee in hand, feeling that particular brand of loneliness that arrives when you’re surrounded by people pursuing something you can’t quite join. I replied honestly: rescue from my own thoughts, perhaps – walk?

We walked the harbour’s full circuit that afternoon in November wind that made conversation intermittent, companionable rather than pressured. At one point he mentioned the museum commitment, noted that rearranging my entire Thursday wasn’t small. I admitted I was terrified and glad in equal measure, and he smiled with the sort of recognition that comes from someone learning the same difficult lesson – that courage and fear seem to travel together lately.

No mention of soup or music. No elaborate invitation requiring careful reply. Just a simple offer of rescue that I was finally able to accept without manufacturing complications, and an afternoon that required presence rather than productivity. No browser tabs. No emails deferred. Just two people choosing to occupy the same cold boards for an hour, letting the harbour do its patient work whilst we discovered we could be insufficient in company without immediate crisis.

That text – brief, practical, kind – represented technology at its best. A small invitation, lightly held, that became an actual afternoon rather than another possibility kept theoretical.

The Experiment I’m Almost Ready For

So perhaps the question isn’t which technology to surrender entirely, but how to interrupt the patterns that turn useful tools into elaborate avoidance systems.

Tomorrow – Sunday afternoon, specifically – I’m attempting a modest experiment: one phone-off block of hours. Not heroic digital detox, not performative disconnection, just a deliberate interval in which the screen stays dark and the alternatives must suffice.

I’ll print the tide tables from this morning’s paper rather than checking them on my phone. I’ll use the recipe cards I’ve been hoarding – Mother’s ginger biscuits, Father’s steady roast technique, the lemon-fennel risotto I’ve finally stopped treating as performance piece – rather than scrolling food websites for something more impressive. If I need the train schedule for the Québec weekend, I’ll walk to the station and consult the printed timetable that still hangs, quaintly analogue, beside the ticket office.

The aim isn’t to prove I can function without technology – that’s a tiresome sort of martyrdom that mistakes discomfort for virtue. The aim is to notice what surfaces in the space where checking would usually occur. Whether the urge to reach for the phone is genuine need or habitual deflection. Whether stillness without digital interruption feels companionable or merely empty. Whether I can sit with Saturday’s small shame – arriving too late to the exhibition, another occasion missed through digital friction – without immediately opening seventeen tabs to plan better attendance next time.

I suspect I’ll discover I’m more tethered than I’d like to admit. That the phone isn’t just communication device but emotional architecture – a way to remain adjacent to my own life whilst appearing productively engaged with it. That email and booking systems and browser tabs function as a particular variety of busyness, the sort I identified Tuesday as my primary irritant precisely because I recognised my own reflection in it.

What Arriving Too Late Teaches

There’s a thread connecting today’s closed exhibition to yesterday’s Black Friday queues to this morning’s question about technology: they’re all asking what claims first attention, what we prioritise when choice requires commitment rather than just commentary.

The organisers at Minerva Creek Galleria had hoped for community – people pausing between errands to notice how different traditions approach light and darkness, finding unexpected commonality in the way humans have always gathered against November’s encroachment. They’d arranged table-top displays with care, printed explanatory cards, shown up between eleven and two on a Saturday when they might reasonably have chosen otherwise.

But the mall’s other pull proved stronger. Black Friday’s manufactured urgency, the promise of deals too good to miss, the seductive logic that shopping equals participation in some larger cultural moment. Or perhaps just the comfortable privacy of consumption over the mild vulnerability of showing up to something unfamiliar, where you might be expected to engage, to reflect, to allow your assumptions about other people’s traditions to be gently complicated.

I arrived too late through my own version of that same calculus – emails first, bookings confirmed, browser tabs tidied, the digital housekeeping that let me feel productive whilst postponing the thing that required actual presence. By the time I’d walked to the mall, the lights were already being packed away, and the organisers were learning the lesson that good intentions don’t guarantee attendance, that community must be chosen repeatedly rather than assumed.

Tomorrow, in the phone-off hours, I won’t be able to use digital tasks as transitional ritual. If I’m avoiding something, I’ll have to notice the avoidance directly rather than disguise it as productivity. If I’m lonely, I’ll have to sit with the loneliness rather than scroll it into temporary distraction. If I’m uncertain whether to reach out to David or Jenny or anyone whose company might require the risk of actual feeling, I’ll have to sit with the uncertainty rather than defer it into another evening of careful planning.

The Gentler Path Technology Sometimes Permits

Before I stack the phone face-down tomorrow and attempt the experiment, I should acknowledge what digital connection has permitted this autumn – the small ways technology has facilitated rather than forestalled the very presence I claim to be practising.

Rajesh’s texts about schedule swaps have been brief, practical, kind – the sort of professional choreography that sustains clinical work whilst acknowledging we’re humans coordinating care, not merely service providers managing capacity. His willingness to absorb Thursday hours so I could commit to the museum project made possible the ongoing threshold I wrote about yesterday: choosing to be seen as Catherine, the woman learning to design sanctuary spaces, rather than remaining solely Dr Bennett in her protected consulting room.

Maggie’s PDFs arrive with the efficiency of someone who understands that good design requires iteration. She sends signage proofs without commentary, trusts my eye for language that balances welcome with permission, incorporates suggestions without needing praise for the incorporating. The digital document becomes a form of collaborative making, the sort that respects time constraints whilst building something more generous than either of us could manage alone.

David’s text yesterday carried a particular quality I’m learning to recognise: attention without pressure, care without ceremony. He wasn’t asking for a relationship progress report or requesting a decision about where things are going. He was simply noticing the day’s peculiar chaos and offering himself as alternative, trusting I’d respond honestly. My reply had felt like a small grammar of progress, the sort of honest want I’m still learning to voice without immediate qualification. That the exchange arrived via phone rather than through more formal channels somehow suited its lightness, its lack of scaffolding, its assumption that showing up to each other has become ordinary enough not to require elaborate architecture.

These uses of technology – brief, practical, invitational – feel like they’re in service of connection rather than substitution for it. They’re the logistics that make presence possible, not the performance that prevents it.

What Sunday Will Test

Tomorrow afternoon, when the phone goes dark and the browser tabs close and I’m left with paper and kettle and the Victorian flat’s patient rooms, I’ll discover whether I can inhabit stillness without immediately filling it. Whether solitude without digital interruption feels like restoration or just another variety of avoidance, this one disguised as intentional practice.

I suspect the first hour will feel performatively virtuous – look at me, choosing presence, resisting the digital pull, living deliberately. The second hour may reveal how much I’ve come to rely on the phone as external nervous system, the constant low-level input that prevents actual feeling from surfacing. The third hour, if I can sustain it, might begin to teach me something about what I’ve been avoiding beneath all the careful planning and booking and tab-collecting.

Perhaps I’ll discover I’m afraid of stillness not because it’s uncomfortable, but because it might reveal I don’t actually need all the elaborate architecture I’ve built. That the seventeen browser tabs and the hourly email checking and the compulsive booking system consultations are forms of credentialising – proof that I’m engaged, considering, planning, moving toward something – when what’s actually required is the more difficult work of being precisely where I am without immediately engineering the next careful step.

Or perhaps I’ll discover that three hours off the phone is a modest experiment that will teach me modest lessons, and that’s sufficient. That not every insight needs to arrive with transformative force, that sometimes learning to sit still for a Sunday afternoon constitutes its own quiet progress.

The harbour is darkening now – earlier each evening, November performing its efficient work of teaching us to measure light carefully, to notice when it’s present rather than assuming its constancy. Tomorrow will test whether I can measure my own attention with similar care, whether I can arrive on time to the small exhibition of my own life rather than perpetually scheduling better attendance whilst the lights go out.

The technology I’d be better off without isn’t in my pocket or on my desk. It’s the way I use it – as permission to remain adjacent, to practise presence without performing it, to keep seventeen versions of possibility open whilst committing to none of them.

Tomorrow, for three hours, I’ll close the tabs. Let the possibilities collapse into whichever Sunday afternoon actually arrives. See what surfaces when the digital corridor closes and there’s only the Victorian rooms, the harbour sounds, the recipe cards, and whatever Catherine shows up to meet them.

Consider it an experiment in arriving on time – to the afternoon, to myself, to the small lights still burning whilst I’ve been checking whether there might be brighter ones elsewhere.

The organisers are packing away candles I never saw lit. Tomorrow, perhaps, I’ll learn to tend my own.

Catherine

---

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.