And still, that is just unplugging as tourism, not unlike visiting a spa with a raw-vegan menu and daily yoga classes or attending a writers retreat that brings you breakfast in a basket every morning and someone who cleans your room. Dead-zoning is dabbling in an idealized world as a vacation from your normal hyperstimulated life, but to truly live in such a world is not feasible for most anyone. As when renting a cottage in Provence for a week, you can only pretend.
Finding an actual dead zone is surprisingly hard. It takes not just money but also effort to get to tree houses in Central America or mobile camping sites in national parks. And I don’t long to go off into the woods as a way to unplug . I am not 2026’s Henry David Thoreau going to Walden Pond. I don’t want a sojourn; I want this as a lifestyle. I find myself fantasizing about being a nun, but even nuns have podcasts now.
There are the few and the brave who really put dead-zoning into practice in their daily lives. I always think about a normal woman with a normal job who once lived in the same building as me. She had neither a cell phone nor an answering machine. Her explanation was that, if someone needed to reach her, they would call her landline, and if she was available, she would happily pick up, but if she was gone, they could call back or email her. That woman was truly unbothered, a term tossed around online, but the literal act of not being bothered is impossible for most people beyond the quirkiest, like my onetime neighbor, or maybe Fran Lebowitz.
Unavailability as a lifestyle choice is ultimately for the few. Just a few days ago, Harry Styles told Radiohead’s Thom Yorke in an interview that his laptop has been dead for six years and he doesn’t know where his charger is. I normally have positive feelings toward Styles, just as I would for anyone who loves Italy and looks great in Celine. But that tossed-off comment made me feel like starting a formal boycott of his music and maybe even expanding it into a class war. Styles has essentially bought his freedom and is bragging about it, in a roundabout way. It’s wealth that gives someone the sheer ability to ignore the tyranny of availability. Those who have it get to break the social contract and call it a lifestyle choice.
