I hope this post does not disturb you

Omnipresent connection has reached its limit.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

For everyone I owe texts to. —Kate

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I am very bad at responding to text messages. When I was 13, a friend told me that you had to let 15 minutes pass before responding to a text from a boy. We’d literally set a timer, and only after the ding! could we send the “nm, hbu?” reply I’m sure he had been clamoring for. 

But that rule did something to my brain. Even though there’s an 80 percent chance my phone is in my hand when I receive a text, I feel like I can’t respond right away. So I wait. And forget. And then realize, shit, it’s been weirdly too long. And now there’s a lump in my throat whenever I think about responding because I’ve let way too much time pass. (The longest I’ve ever neglected a text? Twelve days.) 

Every year, my new year's resolution is to respond to texts in a timely manner, and every year I fail. But being unreachable may be coming back into vogue, thanks to the (anecdotal) rise of “Do Not Disturb.” 

“The way that in the modern world we now all have our cell phones on ‘Do Not Disturb’ all the time, we’ve gone back to something,” actor and comedian Brian Jordan Alvarez said in a recent TikTok. “It’s like we’ve gone back to a time before phones.”

@brianjordanalvarez @brianjordanalvarez ♬ original sound - Brian Jordan Alvarez

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“Do Not Disturb” is under the “Focus” section of your iPhone settings, and has customizable settings for “Personal,” “Sleep,” “Work,” or just a blanket button to turn all notifications off. Crucially, it tells people who text you that you have notifications silenced (the texter can hit “notifiy anyway” if they’re feeling spicy or dying). 

While it would probably help with my texting anxiety, I do not have my phone set to “Do Not Disturb.” I do selectively mute group chats and people when they’re getting out of hand. But my boyfriend recently went full-time “Do Not Disturb,” and it turns out it’s not just because he’s trying to be annoyingly unreachable when I need to know if we have parmesan or if I should pick some up—52 percent of people who responded to my Very Scientific Instagram Story Poll responded “yes” to “Is your phone on ‘Do Not Disturb’?”

“I hate notifications they make me feel like my phone is in charge of me!” one DND user explained. Most cited feeling overwhelmed by other people.

“I need to not get text alerts all day it’s too distracting!” another person wrote. 

“My notifications are constant, so ‘Do Not Disturb’ lets me review them when I want,” said another. 

Some people use the setting only when they are sleeping, and others said it helped them manage their ADHD. My personal favorite of the reasons: “I put the setting on when I got my phone and I don’t feel like figuring out how to turn it off.”

For a while, I had a buzzing, underlying fear that social media and technology was going to keep accelerating, keep growing, and eventually infiltrate every aspect of our lives until there was some kind of horrific breaking point. But the truth is, of course, turning out to be much less dramatic. Society doesn’t actually just blindly follow the whims of technology. TikTok made everything short-form and threatened to “ruin” attention spans—and in response, people are actually leaning back into long-form content on YouTube. The constant texts, notifications, and other features on our phones that make us feel like we need to be overwhelmingly available at all times have instead led to people just … turning them off. 

Read: The YouTube-aissance

“I use [DND] like an away message,” one respondent said. “[It] tells people I’m not answering right now.” 

Now Apple just needs to let us customize our “Do Not Disturb” notices so we can use overwrought song lyrics in them—then we’ll really be back in the good old days of technology.