You can tell how tired someone is of the always-online life pretty easily. When they get home, watch the distance between the phone and the body. The people who love being connected never let the thing leave them be it pocket, palm, face-down next to the fork.

Everyone else sets it down the way you drop a heavy backpack after a long day of walking. My wife does not set her phone down so much as launch it. From her hand to the far corner of the room, the phone travels from indispensable to litter in under a second.

I've come to resent the smartphone, which is an embarrassing thing to admit, because I used to be a believer. I researched every new model. I switched between i OS and Android just to taste each new future as it arrived.

I lined up for the first i Phone at 3 a.m., stood in the dark to get a glimpse of the thing itself. I remember being genuinely moved when the Apple Store employees clapped for me. In hindsight this is mortifying, roughly on par with the year I dyed my hair blonde and shopped at Hot Topic.

Now the smartphone is a tax. I get to choose my tax collector be it Apple, Samsung, Google, Nothing, Fairphone, but I don't get to choose whether to pay. In Denmark I'm expected to carry the Aula app for school, the Rejsekort app for trains, Mit ID to prove to the state that I am me, and e-Boks for official messages from the government and its authorized friends.

The offline option exists the way the wheelchair ramp exists at certain train stations: installed after the fact, satisfying a regulation, pitched at an angle no wheelchair on earth can climb. We are all expected to pretend grandma can make it up, and to act only mildly surprised when we find her at the bottom again. So every few years I buy the identical slab of metal and glass.

I admire the color for a moment, because color is the only decision left to make. The last honest pleasure in a new phone is peeling the plastic film off the screen after which the box contains nothing of interest. I put the slab in a case so durable I never see the color again, restore from backup, and everything the old slab knew migrates, whole and continuous, into the new one.

A soul transfer, over Wi-Fi, in ninety seconds. I feel nothing for the old slab, despite years of daily intimacy. I hand it off or sell it and never think of it again.

I understood something had gone wrong in me the first time I dropped the phone and didn't mind. I was standing in my living room, mid-negotiation of a play date over Whats App, when an email arrived from my mother and a calendar alert reminded me I'd never scheduled the dog's vet appointment. It was as if the phone simply left my hands on its own.

It hit the floor with that specific thonk of expensive object meeting laminate. When I picked it up and saw that the screen had survived, I was a tiny bit sad. After that, I couldn't stop seeing everything I ...