A good thing to buy
Everyone knows you shouldn’t sleep with your phone next to your bed. It’s too tempting to look at it right up until the second you turn off the light and pick it up again the instant you wake up, setting yourself up for some fitful sleep and a stressful, distracted morning. But also, everyone uses their phone as an alarm. So how are you supposed to get it out of your bedroom?
You buy an alarm clock! I’m blowing your mind, I know. These last few years everyone has been gradually, then suddenly, realizing that maybe Facebook shouldn’t have disrupted our social lives (and, um, democracy), Uber shouldn’t have disrupted employment law, and WeWork shouldn’t have disrupted offices, just to name a few. Well, phones shouldn’t have disrupted alarm clocks. And this mistake, at least, is in your power to fix. Today. Right now.
Technically, I already had an alarm clock on my bedside table. I think I acquired it sometime around the year 2000, and I have so many bad memories of its alarm going off at 5:30 a.m. all through high school that I couldn’t bear to use that function in my adult life. So it was just a clock. But after 19+ years, its light was fading and its buttons were so sticky I could barely set the time anymore. For the past several months it was 10 minutes fast and I just left it like that, waiting for the next power outage to force me through the struggle of resetting it. It worked just enough to trick me into thinking it was actually useful.
I wouldn’t describe myself as incredibly frugal or anything. But why would I replace something I already owned if it mostly worked? I wasn’t really using it anyway. My phone had an alarm, so whatever. You can see the vicious cycle here—though of course it was invisible to me.
What finally forced the issue was that I recently downloaded the NYT crossword puzzle app and was suddenly squeezing it into every spare minute of my day. Including, and especially, right before I went to bed. I wanted to be reading during that time, like I always had, but I was obsessively puzzling instead. I knew I had crossed a line. I had to get the phone away from my bed. (I probably also have to cancel my crossword subscription—or find a way to do them that’s not on my phone—but one step at a time.)
So we bought a new alarm clock. It’s great! It’s easy to read, easy to set, and it wakes us up. Ahhh, the small joys of capitalism, when you buy exactly what you need and it actually makes your life better. My phone now sleeps in my studio, and I’m back to reading at night. Next on my rethinking-disruption shopping list: a kitchen timer.
Recommendations
This is the alarm clock we bought. But really it doesn’t matter which one you get. They all do the same thing, and they’re all good enough.
“Darkness on the Edge of Cougartown.” Sarah Miller is an insightful and hilarious personal essayist, and this piece about being in a relationship with a man 10 years younger than she is is no exception. (Unrelated to the Elizabeth Warren cougar fanfic the alt right has apparently been writing this whole time!)
“Sorry to this man.” This is from a few weeks ago, which is like ten years in meme time, but forgive me. It’s so funny. Her delivery, her sincerity, the fact that Dick Cheney is now just another indistinguishable old white guy…what a blessed time to be alive.