The Lonely Spaceman on the 9.17 to Waterloo
What I learnt about commuters (and myself) when I stopped looking at my screen
I step onto the 9.17 from Surbiton. I am wearing a spacesuit, and it’s ringing with the sound of my rasping breath. Through my thick visor, I see everyone. But I know there’s no connection to be had with them - no eye contact possible through the glass.
I think we’ve already established that no cartoon birds settle on your shoulder the moment you decide to take a break from your phone.
I’m three weeks into the Phone Free Commute.
So far I’ve dealt with my mind inventing successions of utterly ridiculous reasons to pick up my phone.
Then I found myself drowning in the most embarrassingly unimportant work worries.
(I’ve argued that both these experiences, although not pleasant, could be useful training to help me feel better in the rest of my life.)
But two hours a day is a long time. And in the gaps between those clouds, there’s something else to be seen.
A WEIRD MOMENT ON THE TUBE
I couldn’t name that feeling until a message arrived from a fellow passenger who had seen me in the idiot vest.
Yazmin noticed a man on her train breaking an unwritten rule: he spoke to another commuter. He had been reading a magazine, and he asked an older man next to him what the word “sinewy” meant. The older man snapped back “Can’t you just look that up on your phone?”
Yazmin said hello, and the conversation opened up. It turned out the younger man was trying to memorize a poem. Soon the older man joined in the conversation warmly, “almost like a different character”.
Yazmin describes the three way conversation as the “best interaction she’d ever had with a stranger on the tube. I got off at my stop and felt so alive.”
THE DEAD FIZZ OF THE PHONE
So far I haven’t addressed the elephant in the room - EVERYONE on the commute is on their phones. If they aren’t looking at it, they are listening to it. If there was an elephant in the room, they wouldn’t notice it.
Or if they did, they’d react to the elephant with the same immediate distant irritation that Yazmin noticed in the old man.
It’s not just that commuters are busy, it’s that very perceptibly they are in that distinct mood associated with heavy phone use - a dead fizz in the head.
Long before phones were invented, commutes were a time to sit gruffly behind a newspaper. But newspapers weren’t designed by neuroscientists to keep you hooked. They didn’t create dead fizz
To the old man’s credit, the irritability passed for him faster than it does for me. It’s a feeling I’m increasingly aware I brought home to my family when the evening commute was devoted to scrolling.
And I still notice the mood at home when I dip in and out of screens. I still let the phone pour itself into every tiny gap, every little chapter break in our house.
I wrote about a very dramatic Phone Dad failure with my daughter. But if I had a time machine, I wouldn’t change it. It was a useful moment of insight.
Instead I’d want to hop endlessly in my time machine changing the thousands (tens of thousands) of moments that when someone in my house talked to me and I looked up with the instant irritation that Yazmin saw in that old man.
YOUR CORRESPONDENT LIVING IN THE IN-BETWEEN
The phone is conquering the incidental, liminal moments. It is filling the gaps. And as a result, more and more of life is weighed down by irritation. What does it add up to? Society is trying to figure it out.
As someone who has now spent many, many hours living in the ultimate in-between gap … I have my answer..
Yazmin’s email helped me identify the cold blue light that’s increasingly visible when the clouds of distraction part.
I feel lonely.
I’m in a spacesuit on another planet, I have a thick visor, and everyone I see is at one remove.
It’s very understandable they don’t speak to me given my obvious eccentricity. But my unconscious self is craving some sort of contact, and adept at picking up the microscopic signs of distant irritation that everyone is drenched in.
It’s probably what my kids experienced from me on my worst days.
This feeling is self-inflicted, and so I feel no animosity towards my fellow commuters. I was them last year, and - given my track record - there’s every chance I will be joining them soon.
But I am resentful of their phones.
WHY ON EARTH DO THIS?
My main focus in writing this was to see if there were practical benefits. And I’m aware I’m not selling this.
But I don’t think I can be wrong when I say that going phone free doesn’t feel great immediately - otherwise more people would be doing this.
What I increasingly DO have in my spacesuit is a stronger awareness of my surroundings. There’s no one to connect to, and the planet is harsh and cold. But it’s new to me, and so it’s easy to notice the finer details of it.
Uh-oh, you are thinking. The present moment. Mindfulness. He’s going to do all that.
But I’m not taking it as read that awareness of the present moment is a wonderful thing in itself. On the commute, by the way, it really doesn’t feel that way. A beautiful woodland walk it ain’t.
But despite all of that, I’ve come to believe that being actively present on the commute - training on a train - will be useful to me in the long term and in the rest of my life.
Why I think that is another story. A much happier one. It involves our family dog Jumble, his very naughty behaviour, and a HUGE amount of cheese.
Thanks for reading! This is part of a series written in the early days of my Phone Free Commute. If you want to skip to the 30 day report and read about the (surprising) results of all this, click here.
[Images by AI, words all human]
Somewhat ironically I normally read your Substack on my phone… on my commute. But I love the content 🤩