I Know the Last Man Without a Cell Phone

The smart phone isn’t twenty years old and has already rewired our lives—our behavior, our expectations, even the way we pay attention. It has remade our mental landscape much, as a century ago, the automobile remade the physical one.

Which is one of the reasons I treasure my friendship with Adrian: he has never owned a cell phone. Never. Not an iPhone, not a BlackBerry, not even a Nokia.

I should clarify that Adrian is not a man who “doesn’t have a phone” because an assistant six feet behind him has one. He genuinely does not have a mobile phone. He is living, effectively, in a parallel world.

“It’s entirely thanks to NEVER having had any type of portable device that I managed to get away with this,” he told me. “Once you start it’s totally impossible to go back. I’m sure if I’d had a giant Wall Street-style brick phone or a tiny flip one, I would never have managed to fight the osmotic slide into the whole Smart era.”

This has, at times, been annoying for his friends.

Adrian once came to visit us in Amagansett from Brooklyn. He took the train but didn’t realize he needed to change at Jamaica. Train announcements seem to have dwindled because it is increasingly assumed that every traveler is being personally shepherded across the earth by a small glowing screen.

Not Adrian.

He missed the connection, ended up somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, found his way to a bar, asked somebody for directions and eventually devised a wildly circuitous route to Amagansett.

He arrived three hours late, having finished his book, entirely unperturbed.

This is the maddening thing about Adrian. The inconveniences that the rest of us regard as overwhelming evidence that he desperately needs a phone don’t seem to convince him at all.

“I cannot imagine anything more annoying than being at the constant command of this omnipotent device, obeying like a slave its every vibration and demand.”

He has never texted. He has never purchased anything from Amazon. He refuses to let people look anything up in his presence—and can usually come to the answer.

When I asked what he does when he gets lost, he seemed almost confused by the question. He rarely gets lost, he said, because he looks at a map before leaving and writes down his route on a piece of paper.

Oh.

If he does get lost, he asks someone.

“Of course.”

“That’s the whole point of being out and about,” he told me. “‘Finding your way’ in every sense.”

I cannot remember the last time I asked a stranger for directions. Or the last time I went anywhere without knowing precisely where I was and how long it would take me to get there.

Apple knows where I am at all times. So does my daughter, who regularly tracks my movements and apparently enjoys watching her mother, reduced to a little blue dot, scuttle across eastern Long Island.