From & To Sathish #6 - Page 192

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Dreamy Mood Orchestra - Ai Anata To Yoru To Music

The Rise of Ending Explainers, Explained

From YouTube videos to blogs to TikToks, it seems like they’re everywhere these days. Are they the be-all, end-all of film discourse in 2024?

By Scarlett Harris

The Netflix adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 runaway hit apocalyptic novel, Leave the World Behind, concludes relatably. The movie—directed by Sam Esmail and starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali—sees tween girl Rose desperate to find out what happens in the finale of Friends as the world literally burns around her. Even though there’s a major telecommunications breakdown, Teslas are going haywire, and wildlife is gathering as if in anticipation of Armageddon, Rose must find out what becomes of Rachel, Ross, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, and Joey. Do Rachel and Ross finally get back together? (Yes, even though Ross is a gaslighting softboy.) Do Chandler and Monica have a baby? (They have two, in fact.) What becomes of the iconic purple-walled loft? (Monica and Chandler give it up and move to the suburbs, thus signaling their descent into middle-aged uniformity.) More than just a reference to Gen Z’s pandemic-era obsession with bingeing a show that started 30 years ago this year, it’s indicative of our growing obsession with certainty in a world that’s anything but.

Depending on your algorithm, a cursory glance around YouTube will likely engender an assortment of ending explainers, or videos by pop culture commentators and influencers unpacking the endings of all manner of movies and TV shows. They range from necessary explainers—Mulholland Drive, anything by M. Night Shyamalan—to rote ones. (I don’t think we need ending explainers to understand Hit Man’s basic happily ever after or that Hooper and Brody kill the big bad great white in Jaws, but they exist.) Don’t just take my word for it: According to Google Trends, searches for “ending explained” have doubled in the past five years. And it’s not just visual mediums: Many culture sites have sections dedicated to analyzing outcomes, and it seems like that’s all some publish. Have we lost the ability to think for ourselves, and do we need all possible meanings—however simple or abstract—tied up in a neat little bow? Are our attention spans so shot that we can’t spend a few hours not checking our phones in a movie theater? Or do we need a third party to interpret art for us when everything else about modern society is so fraught?

“Our brains are hardwired to seek patterns and relish that gratifying ‘aha’ moment when all the pieces finally click into coherence,” clinical psychologist Daniel Glazer tells The Ringer. Suddenly, Rose’s yearning to finish the final episode of Friends before, you know, the final episode of humanity makes a lot more sense.

Digital natives like those in Rose’s generation get a bad rap for possessing the attention spans of goldfish, but her dedication to finishing an 86.5-hour sitcom instead of YouTubing an ending explainer is indicative of anything but. For evidence that internet denizens still have attention spans, look to the case of Late Night With the Devil, the breakout horror hit from this year that inspired its share of ending-explained videos and articles. “People have made the effort. People have seen this more than once. They’ve done their research,” Colin Cairnes, who directed Late Night With the Devil alongside his brother, Cameron, says about ending-explained YouTubers. When content creators are creating 30-minute-plus videos that get over a million views, like this The Menu ending explainer by FoundFlix that has 2 million, it’s clear that viewers aren’t just seeking them out because their attention spans were too short to finish the movie!

When it came to Leave the World Behind’s ending, Esmail—who is well aware of the negative feedback related to it—deliberately set it up to stretch viewers’ minds and get people talking. “I wanted you to go to a coffee shop and have a two-hour debate about what it meant and how it felt and how it all connected or didn’t connect at the end,” he says. “Those are the kinds of conversations I lived for as a moviegoer, and that really only happened when movies didn’t tie everything up in a bow.”

Esmail is no stranger to ambiguity, as perhaps his best-known project, Mr. Robot, ended with its audience questioning everything they thought they knew about the show. He says those are his favorite kinds of stories—ones that worm their way into your brain and keep you thinking days, weeks, sometimes years afterward. Remember when you immediately needed to go back and rewatch The Sixth Sense after (25-year-old spoiler incoming) finding out that Bruce Willis’s character was a ghost himself? Or the shellshock you got when Emerald Fennell Psycho-ed her main character during the climactic confrontation of Promising Young Woman? Or Psycho, for that matter?

“Those movies where everything was answered, it was very straightforward, and everything was explained, you leave the theater, and even if it was a good movie and you enjoyed yourself, I found that I stopped thinking about it pretty quickly after,” Esmail says. What’s even the point?

Speaking to The Ringer from his home in Melbourne, Colin says there’s a fine line between crafting a conclusion that will keep the conversation going and honoring the fictional world of the movie, especially for the vast majority of films that don’t have the support of media conglomerates behind them.

“If you’re operating within that low-budget indie world like Late Night With the Devil is, the onus is on us as filmmakers to do something different and try to surprise and take risks with the way we set up the story, the way we resolve it, the way we end these movies,” he says.

And anyway, Late Night With the Devil’s outcome is pretty definite: It’s revealed that late night talk show host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) literally sold his soul to the devil in exchange for career success, and he kills an apparently possessed girl on live TV. Though Colin does jest that, because of an earlier hypnotism scene, it could have all been a hallucination.

YouTuber Daniel Whidden, who writes, narrates, and produces his own channel, Think Story, where he has more than 700,000 subscribers, believes the acceleration of these videos speaks to the way we consume media now. In contrast to the proverbial watercooler conversation in eras past, because of the plethora of streaming options we have now, everyone’s watching something different.

“Now with dozens of platforms, [like] Netflix, Disney, Amazon, etc., and the ‘binge’ model of consuming media, it makes it difficult to discuss these shows. Suzie from accounting could be on Episode 2 of Squid Game, while Tom in marketing could have binged the whole thing in a day—or he might not even have Netflix at all!” Whidden tells The Ringer. “Thus, they have no one to talk to about their favorite shows and seek out alternate communities and channels.”

It speaks to Esmail’s contention that he wants filmgoers to continue to wax lyrical about what they’ve just seen, a notion that Colin echoes. “As filmmakers we’ve got to wear it as a badge of honor that people have deemed it worthy as a topic of debate,” he says. “That’s what we’re in it for, to elicit a response, hopefully a positive one, but if it leads to division over what it all means, that’s kinda cool too.” It’s just that now, because of the rise of streaming, Netflix-only releases like Leave the World Behind, and the prevalence of VOD, those conversations are happening online.

“You can have that experience [of talking about a movie while] walking out of the film … and then it jumps online for people who haven’t seen it in a theater and have seen it on Shudder or Netflix or whatever it might be,” says Colin. “We set out to make a film that would spark conversation, so whether that happens in a cinema lobby or on YouTube or Reddit, that’s all good.”

In that way, ending explainers are a way to extend community.

“In previous eras, the ability to convene and collaboratively revel in [a] narrative climax was largely constrained by immediate social circles and physical proximity,” offers Glazer, pointing to the aforementioned watercooler theory and the decline of appointment viewing. Sure, the majority of your office or friend group probably watched Baby Reindeer, but you might have binged all seven roughly 30-minute episodes the day it came out, your bestie could be saving it until the weekend, and your work spouse might be waiting to watch it with their actual spouse. On Reddit or the YouTube comment section, you can immediately revel in your IDTA (Is Donny the asshole?) conspiracy theories. “Suddenly, the diverse insights, theories, and analyses surrounding a pop culture plot point radiate from a global array of voices and life experiences,” Glazer continues.

And there are diverse subcultures within those communities, says Whidden, who also posts ending explainers for shows like Bridgerton, which, as you can imagine, draws a very different crowd than “an over-the-top gore movie. This is because of the wide array of content I create. Instead of fostering one giant community, I have a series of smaller communities.”

One subgroup that has felt seen not only by one of this year’s most buzzed-about films, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, but also by the explainers created about it is the trans community. The ’90s-set genre film follows two teenagers, Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), as they bond over their favorite TV show, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer–coded The Pink Opaque. Owen is berated by his father for liking a “girl’s show,” and his identification with one of the female stars of The Pink Opaque can be read as a trans allegory by those who care to see it. For those who don’t, Schoenbrun isn’t interested in their interpretation.

“As a trans filmmaker, I’m not really that interested in the legibility of the work to a non-trans audience because I think a lot of other people are going to think about that for me,” Schoenbrun tells The Ringer. And they have, in copious ending-explained clips on YouTube and TikTok. Even publications like Time, USA Today, and Vanity Fair have weighed in on the deliberately (pink) opaque subtext of I Saw the TV Glow, raising questions about the state of culture criticism when writers are asked to rehash conclusions rather than tackling what leads up to them. (Schoenbrun, for their part, doesn’t see much distinction between the two forms.)

“When I end a movie, I’m looking for something that can continue to linger and poke at and ask the questions that the movie is trying to ask,” says Schoenbrun, who also directed the 2018 documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination and 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the latter of which shares thematic similarities with I Saw the TV Glow. “I prefer, in my own art, making things that are ambiguous. Not just for the sake of ambiguity, but because the work is talking about complicated things that I’m trying to reckon with.”

Like Esmail and the Cairnes brothers, Schoenbrun ultimately sees ending explainers as a good thing, enjoying the ones made about their own work.

“If somebody really is racked emotionally by my movie and reads an ending explainer post, to me that’s a nice thing,” they say. “I don’t think that’s the be-all, end-all of how we process art right now. It’s part of how we process art right now. Hopefully they’re at the beginning of that process. That sort of long-term engagement with art as we and as times changed is something that no one internet post could ever stop.”

The term “be-all, end-all” also comes up in my conversation with Esmail, who is the most tentative of all the people I spoke to about ending explainers. He admits he’s of “two minds” about them: If he’d come of age during the internet and online fan culture, he says he might have been creating that content as an extension of his own interest in filmmaking. However, “the part of the ending explainer culture, or I should say online fandom culture, that I don’t appreciate,” he says, is the part that doesn’t allow for dissent.

People with different opinions will get piled on or troll just for the hell of it. And as we’ve seen in the case of the newer Star Wars movies and diverse Marvel casts, minority creatives—and, one can assume, the minority content creators who cover these movies—in many cases experience harassment and are forced offline. (For his money, Whidden, who is a white man, hasn’t observed much of this in the comments of his videos. “I try to be courteous and respectful and tend to ignore the odd toxic comment,” he says.)

Esmail also believes that there’s less willingness to sit with the questions—and the uneasiness—that cryptic endings provoke than there was, say, 50 years ago. “If you go back to the ’70s, a lot of movies ended in an abstract, abrupt way, and I just happened to be a fan of that—it haunts you and lingers months and years after you’ve seen it.

“There’s something in the culture now where films need to be a little more self-contained,” he continues. “That saddens me because there is a joy to not being told all the answers and having to sit with your thoughts and feelings about it. And even getting frustrated with it!” As viewers certainly did with the abrupt ending of Leave the World Behind.

“We as a culture need easy answers now because the world has gotten incredibly complicated. We don’t want to turn to movies that just offer us more questions and ambiguity. Especially a movie like mine, where I’m directly commenting on the world we’re living in now,” he says.

“I think because of what’s going on in the world, it’s important to do and provoke those kinds of questions.”

From a psychological point of view, Glazer sees ending explainers as tempering that anxiety. “For those of us conditioned to having a world’s worth of information constantly at our fingertips, simply sitting suspended in ambiguity for an extended stretch can start to feel uniquely unsettling,” he says. “I’m certainly not suggesting we necessarily want the easy way out every time. But our collective patience for persisting in uncertainty has undoubtedly been whittled away by our era’s blistering pace. Comprehensive explanations and answers provide ballast—hanging in interminable limbo just doesn’t feel emotionally stabilizing.”

While Rose might not be able to watch an ending explainer about the series finale of Friends, she does ultimately get her wish. The much-maligned climax of Leave the World Behind sees Rose stumbling on an apocalypse bunker stocked full of canned goods, bottled water, and a physical home media library with—you guessed it—the box set of Friends. Instead of looking for her family to alert them of this safe haven, Rose immediately pulls the last season from the shelf and slots in the disc on which “The Last One” exists in perpetuity, however long that might be. Leave the World Behind’s parting shot is Rose’s wide grin filling the screen as she is lulled into contentment by the signature dulcet guitar strains of the Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You.” In that ending, Rose is anything but inquisitive, but Esmail’s intention was to leave us questioning—or at least seeking comfort in the communities that continue this discourse, wherever that might be—at the watercooler, the theater lobby, the coffee shop, the bar, or the comments section.

By Scarlett Harris

Scarlett Harris is a culture critic and author of A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment. You can read her previously published work on her website and through her Substack, The Scarlett Woman. Follow her on X at @ScarlettEHarris.

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There’s a modern belief that talent or effort can carry anyone to the top. It’s a myth that’s especially harmful to men

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No One Knows How Big Pumpkins Can Get

A decade ago, the world’s heaviest pumpkin weighed 2,000 pounds. Now the 3,000-pound mark is within sight.

There are two Michael Jordans, both widely regarded as the Greatest of All Time. One is an NBA legend. The other is a pumpkin. In 2023, the 2,749-pound Goliath set the world record for heaviest pumpkin. Michael Jordan weighed as much as a small car and was even more massive—so broad that it would just barely fit in a parking space. Like all giant pumpkins, its flesh was warped by all that mass—sort of like Jabba the Hutt with a spray tan.

It is hard to imagine how a pumpkin could get any bigger. But you might have said the same thing about the previous world-record holder, a 2,702-pound beast grown in Italy in 2021, or the world-record holder before that, a Belgian 2,624-pounder in 2016. Each year around this time, giant pumpkins across the globe are forklifted into pickup trucks and transported to competitions where they break new records.

Michael Jordan set the record at California’s Half Moon Bay Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off, considered the Super Bowl of North American pumpkin-growing. The first winner of the competition, in 1974, weighed just 132 pounds. In 2004, the winner clocked in at 1,446 pounds. “At that time, we thought, Gee whiz, can we push these things any farther?” Wizzy Grande, the president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, an organization that establishes global standards for competition, told me. Yet in just another decade, the record passed the 2,000-pound mark. “We’ve zoomed past that now,” Travis Gienger, the grower from Minnesota who cultivated Michael Jordan, told me. For champion growers, there’s only one thing to do next: try to break 3,000.

Giant pumpkins aren’t quite supersize versions of what you find in the grocery store. All competitive pumpkins are Curcubita maxima, the largest species of squash—which, in the wild, can grow to 200 pounds, about 10 times heavier than the common Halloween pumpkin. But decades of selective breeding—crossing only the largest plants—has created colossal varieties.

Virtually all of today’s champions trace their lineage to Dill’s Atlantic Giant, a variety bred in the 1970s by a Canadian grower named Howard Dill. Very competitive growers source their seeds from one another, through seed exchanges and auctions, where a single seed can be sold for thousands of dollars, Michael Estadt, an assistant professor at Ohio State University Extension who has cultivated giant pumpkins, told me. Seeds from Gienger’s champions are in high demand, yet even he is constantly aiming to improve the genetics of his line. “I’m looking for heavy,” he said.

Yet even a pumpkin with a prizewinning pedigree won’t reach its full size unless it’s managed well. Like babies, they require immense upkeep, even before they are born. Months before planting, at least 1,000 square feet of soil per pumpkin must be fertilized and weeded. Once seedlings are planted, they have to be watered daily for their entire growing period, roughly four months. No mere garden hose can do the trick; each plant needs at least one inch of water a week, which allows the pumpkin to gain up to 70 pounds in a single day. The fruit and leaves must also be inspected at least once daily for pests and disease—no small feat as their surface area balloons. Quickly spotting and excising the eggs of an insect called the squash-vine borer, then bandaging the wounded vine, is paramount. One day, you might have a great pumpkin, “then boom, the next day, all of the vine is completely dead,” says Julie Weisenhorn, a horticulture educator at the University of Minnesota who has grown giant pumpkins—named Seymour (744 pounds) and Audrey (592 pounds).

Growers can keep pushing the pumpkin weight limit by ensuring that a plant isn’t pollinated by a variety that has subpar genes. To do so, they hand-pollinate, painstakingly dusting pollen from a plant’s male flowers into the female ones. This usually leads the plant to bear three or four fruit, but only the most promising is allowed to survive. The rest are killed off in an attempt to direct all of the plant’s resources toward a single giant. In the same vein, wayward vines are nipped, and emerging roots thrust deep into the ground, in hopes of harnessing every last nutrient for the potential champion.

Still, some factors are beyond anyone’s control. The weather can literally make or break a pumpkin. Too much rain can cause a pumpkin to grow too quickly, cracking open its flesh, which would disqualify it from competition. Too much sunlight hardens the flesh, making it prone to fractures. It’s not uncommon for giant pumpkins to have custom-built personal sunshades. North America’s giant-pumpkin capitals—Half Moon Bay, Nova Scotia, and Minnesota—have nature on their side, with low humidity and nighttime temperatures. Cooler nights mean less respiration, which means less wasted energy.

Yet nature bests even the world’s champions. This year, Gienger couldn’t break the record he set with Michael Jordan; he blames cold and wet weather, which made it harder to feed micronutrients to his pumpkin, Rudy. (At 2,471 pounds, it still won the Half Moon Bay competition.) And no matter how big a pumpkin grows, it needs to pack a few extra pounds for the road: Once they’re cut from the vine, they rapidly lose their weight in water. A pumpkin can drop roughly 10 pounds in a single day.

All of the experts I spoke with believe that 3,000 pounds is within reach. “It’s still an upward trend,” said Grande, who noted that a 2,907-pounder has already been recorded, albeit a damaged one. Pumpkin genetics are continually improving; more 2,000-pounders have been grown in the past year than ever before, according to Grande. Growers are constantly developing new practices. Each year, the Great Pumpkin Conference holds an international summit for growers and scientists to trade techniques (last year’s was in Belgium, and this year’s will be on the Green Bay Packers’ Lambeau Field). Shifting goals have precipitated new (and expensive) methods: Carbon dioxide and gibberellic acid are being used as growth stimulants; some pumpkins are fully grown in greenhouses.

The reason giant-pumpkin weights increased 20-fold in half a century is the same reason runners keep running faster marathons, that skyscrapers keep clawing at the sky, and that people spend so much on anti-aging. To push nature’s limits is a reliably exhilarating endeavor; to be the one to succeed is a point of pride. Food companies, in particular, build their entire businesses on developing the biggest and best. Wild strawberries are the size of a nickel, but domesticated ones are as huge as Ping-Pong balls. Industrial breeding turned the scrawny, two-and-a-half-pound chickens of the 1920s into today’s six-pounders. There’s still room for them to grow: Strawberries can get as big as a saucer, and the heaviest chicken on record was a 22-pounder named Weirdo. But foods sold commercially are subject to other constraints on growth, such as transportation, storage, processing, and customer preference. Unusually big foods are associated with less flavor, and their size can be off-putting. When it comes to food, there is such a thing as too big.

Giant pumpkins, by contrast, have a singular purpose: to become as heavy as possible. They don’t have to be beautiful, taste good, or withstand transport, because they are not food. When companies develop boundary-pushing crops and animals, that tends to be an isolationist enterprise, shrouded in secrecy. But in the giant-pumpkin community, there is less incentive to guard seeds and techniques. Most competitions are low-stakes local affairs, and nobody ever became rich off giant pumpkins, not even Howard Dill.

Breaking records is largely seen as a communal effort. “The secret to our success is that we are a sharing community,” Grande said. In a few contests, the investment is worth it—the Half Moon Bay prize for world-record-breakers is $30,000—but “it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme,” Estadt told me. People do it, he said, “for the thrill of the win.”

All of the pumpkin experts I spoke with acknowledged that there must be a limit. But nobody has any idea what it is. Four thousand pounds, 5,000—as far as growers can tell, these are as feasible as any other goal. Every milestone they reach marks another human achievement, another triumph over nature. But even the most majestic of pumpkins inevitably meets the same fate: devoured by livestock, and returned to the earth.

About the Author

Yasmin Tayag is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

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Some People Love to Scare Themselves in an Already Scary World

I Can’t Tell If I Actually Want a Relationship, or I’ve Just Been Programmed to Think I Do

I don’t really know when planning my week started to feel like playing a high-stakes game of Tetris. Like last Thursday, when I wanted to go and see The Outrun with a friend, but I knew that would mean I had to work out on Friday night instead of Thursday evening, and I was meant to go to the pub on Friday night with some uni mates—but I wasn’t sure about doing that either, really, because I had been planning to visit the Van Gogh show at the National Gallery on Saturday, and what if I was too hungover after the pub to actually make it? Thinking of all of the possibilities, I started to panic.

Instead of feeling less pressure to do and see everything the longer I live in London, I feel like I have more and more of a need to prove that I’m cool, that I’m living well, that I’m making the most of every second of every day. I put so much more effort into doing things that will sound good when I describe them later than into doing things that will actually make me happy. My parents are like this, too; on holidays growing up, we’d trudge for miles down rocky cliffs to find the least touristy, most secluded beach, only to discover that it was pebbly and the sea too rough to swim in.

It’s an issue that impacts every area of my life. Like, do I actually want a boyfriend, or do I just think I should have a partner because it’s weird for someone my age to be alone? I was at the gym last week, and I was daydreaming about having a big, muscly boyfriend who would spot me during sets, but then on the way home, I thought about how he’d inevitably come back to mine afterwards when I was hungry and tired and probably just wanted to be by myself, and then we’d have to decide what to watch together because I don’t think he’d be keen on the vlog I like about this girl in Manchester called Madison who spends her days queuing up for matcha and walking around.

I opened up TikTok the other day, and there was this lady in her 50s saying: “I hope you’ve already learned this, but start paying attention only to how your life feels to you, and forget completely how it looks to others.” But how do you actually shift into that mindset? My friend Moya is always telling me that I lack confidence in my own desires, that I should value my own gut instinct more instead of constantly second-guessing it. If a guy approaches me in a club and I ignore him because I’m having fun with the girls, I’ll think about him for days afterwards, fantasizing about how great he probably was and how I won’t ever meet anyone like him again, even though I have absolutely no idea what he was actually like and had a good night out without him.

I have a bit of free time at the moment while my agent looks over my next book. I was focusing so hard on finishing it that I didn’t really think about what I would do after I’d submitted a first draft, so instead of making plans, I’m trying to just take each day as it comes. On my first day off, I tried to go to Eltham Palace, but my train got diverted, so I walked to the Horniman Museum instead, because why not?

It didn’t matter where I was, really. It just felt good to be outside in the sun, wearing this leather trench I have that only works for this specific type of October weather. Wandering around aimlessly, looking at the rabbits in the museum gardens and the views of Forest Hill, I felt like I was in a trance, like all the creases in my brain were smoothing out. Afterwards, I decided to skip the gym because I was tired and got a halloumi wrap on the way home instead. The guy put £5 on the card machine but then deleted it and put £3, which might just be the price but I’m pretty sure he fancied me. Afterwards, while I sat on a bench to eat, I wondered whether it was fated that my day turned out as perfectly as it did, but I don’t think so. I think I sensed what I wanted, that I’m beginning to realize I know better than anyone else what’s right for myself. It might not have looked like the most exciting day to anyone else—but it felt like it to me.

By Annie Lord

Annie Lord is a dating columnist for British Vogue and the author of Notes on Heartbreak.

I spent 72 hours without a phone. It led me to a terrifying realisation

“Every time I was left alone, which is when I’d usually check my phone, I instead just stared numbly into space

It happened while I was on a plane to Zagreb. My phone started randomly glitching out. And then it just… died completely. I maniacally jabbed at the screen, which—shockingly—didn’t help. Oh well, I thought, tucking the phone away. Life goes on. But that was before the reality of my situation truly sank in: without a phone, I eventually realised, I’d have no boarding pass, no email access, no banking app, no contacts, no map or Uber app, no way to tell the time. Without my phone, I’d have nothing. And I was hurtling towards another country. About to spend 72 hours in Croatia without a phone.

The first 12 hours were spent in a state of logistical panic. Luckily I was with a relative who could contact my partner, who was able to hack into my email from Germany (a long story) and locate my boarding pass. So I knew I’d get back okay. And then I borrowed money from various sources. So I knew I’d be fine in that regard. But still, I had no phone, for—did I mention?—72 hours. Which would be the longest I’d gone without that little light-up box for at least a decade. And as anyone who’s lost a phone will know, the sensation was a bit like giving up smoking, in that I had no idea what to do with my hands. I found myself absentmindedly pressing at the blank screen, just to feel something.

You don’t need me to tell you how long we all spend on our phones, but here’s a rough idea: recent statistics show that people check their phones on average 58 times a day, and spend around four hours 37 minutes scrolling per day (which works out to around one day per week). I feel like there was a point in time—maybe around the early 2010s, just as iPhones became ubiquitous—in which everyone was panicking about smartphone usage. But in recent years, conversations around tech addiction have dampened somewhat. Not because it’s no longer concerning—it is—but because it’s too late. Ten-year-olds have iPhones now. They’re our constant companions. To try and curb smartphone usage on a widespread or genuinely impactful scale would be like banning alcohol: impossible.

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But anyway, back to Zagreb. Once the logistics of my return had been sorted, I tried to relax and enjoy this new phone-free world. It was uncomfortable, obviously. Every time I was left alone, which is when I’d usually check my phone, I instead just stared numbly into space. If I saw something I liked, I couldn’t take a photo of it, so I had to remember it with my brain. I had zero idea of what was going on in the news, or if anyone was trying to contact me, which felt like a phantom itch. Before I went to sleep, which is when I would usually have scrolled through Instagram, I had to simply close my eyes and mentally scroll through my own memories. I couldn’t listen to podcasts, so instead I just sat with my thoughts.

By the second day, however, I actually started to get used to it. It’s astonishing how quickly your body adapts, and before long, I’d just accepted the fact that I had to find new forms of entertainment, like reading or perusing museums or chewing on a huge plate of dim sum and really savouring the taste. While I’d love to say that this was the part where I really discovered myself and learnt to live a more mindful existence, I can’t say that was the case. I really missed having a phone. But it was comforting to know that, at least on a brain-body level, I could function without being constantly attached to a device.

What was much harder was navigating the world more generally. This is not a world that’s built for a phone-free life. Without a phone, taxis have to be booked at actual ranks (which are few and far between). You have to check maps in order to get to a location. If, like me, you use two-step verification, you might find yourself locked out of everything, meaning you have to transfer money physically via the bank. It’s frightening just how reliant much of our daily lives are on this tiny digital entity that could fail us at any moment, and it’s scary how often it does. On the way home, I had to buy a paper train ticket, and remember the easiest route back. It was a bit like how I imagine the ’90s, except without everyone else living the same way. I didn’t once get stranded, but what would have happened if I had?

I bought an iPhone the following morning and immediately plugged back into the world. In the 72 hours prior, I hadn’t come to any major revelations about spending less time on my phone. In fact, I wanted to spend even more time on there: scrolling! Googling things! Absorbing pointless information from “online”! Everything I’d missed out on before.

But what I was left with was a strange taste about the wider world at large. The realisation that, even if I wanted to spend less time on my phone, I actually couldn’t. None of us could. We’re locked into this life, on a purely admin level, for good, and there’s no easy way to navigate out of it.

By Daisy Jones

This article first appeared on vogue.co.uk