I bought a real alarm clock.

Here's how it's going. (So long, nighttime scrolling.)

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“Why does your alarm clock sound like a church bell?”

He asked me this on a Saturday morning in 2004, our sleepover disturbed by a rare weekend when I had to be up for something at dawn.

“I don’t know,” I told him, “This clock has three different sounds. I guess I thought the bells were better than the regular BLEHP-BLEHP-BLEHP.”

He groaned and rolled over in the bed. (See? No one likes waking up to that sound.)

Many years later, on the first night I owned an iPhone, he asked me again as I tapped through the many tonal options.

“Will you wake up to the same sound?” He meant the church bells.

I laughed. “I think so. I’m used to it now.”

So used to it, the bells tolled and roused me from sleep for another decade-plus before I could no longer bear to be awakened by them. Not because of the sound itself, but because I no longer wanted to start my day with a small computer, that infuriating, thieving, stupid tiny brick that has stolen so much of my attention and focus every goddamn day, for so many years.

And thus, I recently made a change, an obvious one which sleep and lifestyle experts have nagged us all about for years.

I decided I would leave my phone outside our bedroom at night, charging elsewhere. It would no longer wake me up. It would no longer tempt me from the moment I regained consciousness. It would no longer be part of my morning routine at all.

At the end of January, I told him, “I bought an alarm clock. A real one.”

He nodded, asked me if it was a sunrise one like his, which miraculously wakes him up as it dawns a faux day every morning, while my body has learned to ignore its light completely.

“No,” I said, “Not a sunrise one. But it has lots of sounds to choose from.”

Church bells are not an option on the new clock, but “Gong” is. It sounds like a mix between a sound bath and, well, a gong.

And that’s the sound I’ve awoken to every day since January 27.

And tonight is the night—my first good night with this newfangled thing.

It has to be, now that I’m through the Night One and Night Two jitters. What are alarm clock jitters, you ask? They include:

a.) Total certainty the clock’s internal technology isn’t as trustworthy as a smartphone, and therefore will not ring when it is supposed to.

b.) Learning how to turn on the alarm, which was a misfire on my part Night One. Luckily, because of the first point, I woke up three times that night—the way you do when you’re nervous about missing a flight—including a 6:45 A.M. jolt-awake, which is when I realized the alarm had failed (aha!), but only because of my ineptitude (womp womp).

But this is Night Three, and as I’m brushing my teeth before bed, I am thinking about Athletic Brewing.

Yes, the non-alcoholic beer.

He bought a case the other day and told me he read somewhere that it was a good post-workout recovery beverage. Something about glycogen?

Is that true? I wonder.

Look it up, my brain replies.

I reach for my phone and remember, Oh. The phone has gone to bed for the night, outside. Answering this Very Important Question about non-alcoholic beer will require a trek across the house, with a mouth full of toothpaste.

Let the record show: I don’t care enough to make the trek.

But I examine my thinking. Why is it that the meandering, low-stakes questions jumpstart my urge to check the phone, far more than any urge I have to check apps? Three nights in, and it surprises me—when my phone is gone for the night, I don’t feel the need to check email or Reddit or the New York Times app. Instead, I want the phone so that it can answer every last query that floats through my brain.

I should write about this on Substack, I think. Where’s my phone? I need to email myself a note.

(Oh. Right.)

Later, as I lay in bed letting the questions filter through, an idea strikes. I should find a cute bedside-only journal from Etsy for all the shit I think of or want to research, so I can look it up when I’m reconnected.

I don’t consider the insanity of the very thought—that I want to log every last scrap from my brain. The questions, the passing inclinations, the ridiculous consumer impulses, right there, into my phone.

In fact, where is that thing, so I can write this down?

When I was a child, I had a cream-colored analog clock with a dim, useless light. It was rectangular and kind of oblong too, like an alarm clock from The Jetsons, which makes sense as it was a hand-me-down from my grandmother’s house. I didn’t need the alarm function, because my parents served as my daily wake-up call.

At 9, I graduated to a clock radio with glowing scarlet red numbers on a display the size of an actual brick. I’d fall asleep and wake up to the static of 96.7 KHFI, and I loved it. The snooze button was as wide as a candy bar and gave a satisfying click-clack when you pressed it, which made waking up late for school far too easy.

I didn’t buy a new alarm clock until I went to college—a sleek one encased in smooth pieces of shiny and matte silver plastic, with neon green numbers and three alarm tones to choose from, church bells included. It looked futuristic, the way all digital things did at the dawn of the new millennium.

Until the new alarm clock of 2025, I don’t think I realized how much I missed pressing actual, tactile buttons on a clock each morning. I especially like hitting the ALARM OFF button, as if it’s a START button for the day. Ready, set, go. I cannot overstate how much I don’t miss jabbing at the glass screen of my iPhone, never hitting snooze or OFF on the first try.

Sentimental as I am, I think about the old alarm clocks that woke me for so many days of my life. I don’t know what happened to them. It’s possible the clock radio is languishing in my mom’s house in Austin. The church bell one? If I had to guess, it was chucked into a giveaway box circa 2012, not long after the iPhone swept into my life.

I wonder if its new owner chose to wake up to church bells, like me.

Every damn night without fail, the questions are ceaseless.

What time will it rain tomorrow? Is there a reservation available for Saturday? Did I respond to those texts? What are people saying about the latest episode? What were the comments on that article? What did the president do now? Why does this muscle in my neck hurt? What is the anatomy of the foot? What was that one essay I had bookmarked to read again? Remind me, how do I clear my sinuses if I have a cold? Did that agent respond? What is the history of fire in California? What happened to that one blogger I liked from 15 years ago? What did Emma Stone act in before Easy A? What other books did that author write? What year did that event happen, and what is the entire history leading up to it?

WHY DO I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS?

I realize: This is what the phone has done to me.

Because it’s not just the volume of questions, but how my brain craves an immediate answer. Why wouldn’t it? When all of your questions can be answered immediately, endlessly, you can think of as many as you want. I like to think I am a curious person by nature, someone who lives and dies by learning as much about anything and everything as possible, and yet—this is something else.

What is this really about, I asked myself around Night Six, This infinite AMA of banal questions?

Maybe this is where our collective anxiety comes from. If so much of the world is knowable in an instant, then not knowing is a recipe for uneasiness. Maybe this is what I’m doing, what we’re doing—asking the computers to answer our questions about the unknown so we can mute our fear and worry and discomfort, when the true unknown is, of course, unknowable.

When I was a kid, wonderings that crossed my mind often remained a mystery, what with my Compaq that took ten minutes to reboot and dial-up that led me to an AOL interface. Answers unattainable, I used creativity to fill in the blanks, or exercised patience until I could ask someone else, or if it was important enough, would eventually research it at the library, or pop in a CD-ROM and ask that for an answer (which had to satisfy despite always being woefully incomplete).

Not knowing kept me hungry.

Here are three other things I have noticed since January 27:

• I snap awake at the sound of my alarm, but in a way that’s different from the phone. Thinking about it now, my iPhone alarm elicited dread. My clock does not. I think it’s because I like the sounds better, and certainly I like the tactile feel of a real snooze button versus pawing at my phone screen over and over again.

• I am 100% getting more sleep. And I am finally reading more books before bed. On the flip side, I don’t miss looking at my phone in the mornings. I don’t know what I was thinking all these years—dancing from app to app to app is the absolute worst way to start the day.

• But mostly, despite the changes, it’s incredible how much my brain craves the stupid phone! Even though I am so limited with what I can do on my phone at this point—there is no Instagram on it, I deleted the Substack app—my mind still looks for distraction in the evening, something to numb.

It makes me wonder—has the phone permanently rewired my brain? Did parenthood create some kind of unending anxiety that keeps me on edge, asking questions and wondering? Is all of this because of boredom? Or rather, lack of boredom, at least on the face of it, since smartphones manage to keep us from being bored while also being bored out of our minds. It means never facing the things we don’t know or understand, holding the uncomfortable wedge of them in our bodies and in our spirits. It means never laying in bed with our college boyfriend, snoozing the church bells on a Saturday, giggling through blissfully unaware pillow talk because there is nothing within arm’s reach that could distract us.

When I was 11 or so, I begged my mom for my own phone line. There was a plug in my room—wait, no, it’s called a jack, right?—and back then, it was normal to have a jack next to an outlet. I found an old corded phone in the hall closet one day and plugged it into the jack, just to see what would happen. The long, dull hum of the line sounded. I might not have had my own line, but I had a phone.

After that, I liked going to Best Buy and examining the cordless phones. It was the late 90s, so they all seemed to have electric blue buttons and smooth curves that belied technological advancement. (900Mhz? Rocket me to the moon, why don’t you!)

And I can still remember a few phone numbers, like 459-2222. (If you are from Austin, you’re in on that one.)

Today, my daughter refers to a phone as something that takes photos, looks up answers to anything, tells us the weather on demand, plays videos of anything she can imagine, or beams in her extended family so she can pretend to be shy when their faces appear on the screen. She has never heard a dial tone in her life. Her classroom has an old rotary phone in one play area; on the first day last year, she didn’t know what to do with it.

As I lay in bed the other night, noting the time on my new alarm clock—which for the record, I love, and I’m never going back—I wondered if she will ever memorize a single phone number longer than 9-1-1. If, when she is grown, she will remember the freedom of lying still in the dark and conjuring a question, then drifting off, satisfied with the unanswerable, the wondering itself the thing that calms, her question floating off into the ether like a wish.

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Image Credits: Artur Voznenko, Hailey Reed, Abdul A, Devin Kaselnak, Elena Koycheva, Philbo, Andrew Draper, New York Public Library (1, 2), Xavi Cabrera, Ahmed, Yoann Boyer, Ben Kolde