The Guardian view on switching off: seize the day – your smartphone can wait

Spring has come to the UK. The weather invites us to feel it on the skin and not through a window or a screen. Get out there into it, and go there without a phone – unless you’re walking in the mountains and might need to contact the emergency services. For the rest of us, being without a phone is not in itself an emergency, even though it might feel like one at first. Phones do provide us with helpful information all the time. They keep us oriented in the physical world, and position us in the social world, albeit while sharing all this with advertisers. But life was possible without them even as recently as 10 years ago, and sometimes it is worth a visit to that lost age when maps were made of paper and video was something people watched together.

There are two reasons at least for trying to make time away from screens this bank holiday. The first is that it is, and ought to be, a true break from work. Anyone who works in an office knows now that email, messaging and phone calls mean that both the office itself and the people who want to deal with it can follow you anywhere, at any time. There is never a moment when you can feel that you have actually accomplished everything that could reasonably be expected.

The German car company Daimler has an admirable holiday email available to employees, which informs the sender that their email will be deleted; if it is really important please try a colleague or resend when the holiday is over. This will work largely because few things will still seem urgent in a fortnight’s time, and that is a message in itself worth remembering. There is a French law mandating that large companies should have a policy allowing employees not to be chased by work email after office hours.

These efforts are of course vulnerable to sabotage. Really ambitious people will never sign up to them and the less ambitious ones will feel obliged to keep up, since ambition and permanent discontent are meant to be virtues in a culture of non-stop productivity and side-hustles even when the day job is done. The paradox is that constant interruptions from email and other messages are just as disruptive of work as they are of everything else. An atmosphere of constant distraction, as if there were electronic toddlers tugging at your attention all day, makes any kind of thoughtfulness more difficult.

This is just as true even for people who can summon the self-discipline needed to disconnect entirely from work when they have a holiday. The second reason for turning off phones at these times is that they so easily become fountains of distraction from and dissatisfaction with the world around us even when we’re supposed to be relaxing. When the phone is not demanding that we pay attention to the performance of others, it seems to demand that we perform our own emotions rather than experience them. Like the old-fashioned tourist’s camera, it swaps the immediacy of experience for an anticipation of its memory. The urge to share is sometimes the urge to show off.

This weekend, put your phone down and leave it there a while. Grab the world with both hands instead and get them dirty: garden, make something, or cook a meal; eat without photographing it first. Lose yourself in the present around you.