Once in a while my smart phone goes rogue through mishap or my intentions. Whatever the delivery method, being entirely distant from an online phone in June 2026 reorganizes mind synapses that spring from heartfelt energy. At once I begin to worry. Who might try to reach me and cannot? I might even open email on a laptop simply to fuss.

And promptly next I recall that living in a small town means I can be reached quickly through coconut wireless. Construes as a healthy gossip, how neighbors communicate on a walk or on a phone line. They still have theirs at least. Have you heard? Karolina cannot be reached via her smart phone. How dumb is that? And then I hear a knock on the house front door, a local messenger sharing news.

Next level living without a phone brings some ease. Feels like a boundary to convey how entirely reachable I am simply not through a smart phone. Find a way. And what turns around is perception on being reached. If not via a smart phone, what is a harmonious way? Usually what happens when I live without my phone (is possible my doubters) I shift living comfortably to focus on life around me. Gifted is better patience for idiosyncratic detail.

I pay attention exquisitely. Offline phone time starts bending in all kinds of wonderfully erratic time uplifts, seldom predictable. When morning begins a day and then evening reflection time happens later, I breathe. Curiosity dance steps I took all during my non-techie day. Finding an outlet to charge my phone not required. I was already plugged in to life fully charged on serenity time waves. Challenging my mindset is to scan across generations of screen time especially to where my teenager-son is, who being 15 years old has a smart phone as a frequent presence in his life.

A few days ago, I wandered over to a vacation location, a living room sofa at his grandmother’s house in Monterey, California. Sitting there Darien was idly staring at his phone—for the last many few hours. I brought a dinosaur with me. Holding the printed newspaper, I ventured carefully. Teenagers. Need I say more? Crossing our generational perspectives on screen time often has lively, brief discussion. His reply focuses on a familiar response, “Not now. I’m on my phone.”

And mine continually wonders aloud, “When will you put the phone away and choose another activity?” These questions are asked easygoing since a specific answer rarely follows and I simply wander onto my next activity paying exquisite attention to life’s rich detail. Self-care first throughout any day is how I praise living away from a phone screen. This afternoon though I devised a strategy that was circuitous.

I’m on “vacation” (logically impossible for solo Mama of a teenager) and so my patience for communicating across the screen divide—one individual has a screen and another does not—has improved the last few days. Evidence enough that I was still holding the newspaper and even had notions to share information from said dinosaur. Some of us live on an edge where others simply never consider going. I’ll take the lead here while you rest easy simply reading an essay.

The circle of circuitous that I kept as my mindset while sitting relaxed in a living room on “vacation” was to meet a conversation individual where he was at—on the phone screen. Meet folks where they live is a helpful life motto I've relied on. I planned to ask Darien a screen-relevant question.

"You won't believe this young artist who posted a short video online,” I began walking on thin ice fearlessly.

“Oh, yeah?” I recognized a yawn and boredom energy double. Teenager physics never explained simply inexplicably happening. Einstein’s relativity theory that time bends likely began after an afternoon he spent with a group of teenagers.

Keeping the newspaper visible on my chair, onward I adventured. “He took a camera and visually created one room folding and disappearing into another. Walls shifting, floors falling. Like that,” I described.

Teenager Darien sprang to life and animatedly was present. Wait, what? A response? The phone put to the side? A conversation potential? Time seemed to drift nonlinearily because I didn’t know what was happening. Don’t over talk the moment, I self-coached. You have three, five, or seven seconds to ruin this moment.

“I saw that video a while ago,” Darien said. Traces of enthusiasm I had not seen in a long while had gathered.

“Oh. What was the video like?” I asked. Congratulating myself that three or four sentences in a row had been accomplished.

Our family teenager went on to describe Hollywood production company A24 offering the video artist Kane Parsons to make a full movie from the video shorts he had been You Tube posting. Backrooms is the fiction feature’s title in theaters now.

“I’d go see that movie on vacation,” he concluded. Incredible I wondered to myself. Reading a quote from the newspaper film review helped me learn diverse modalities. A real-life conversation was happening off screen and I had included a non-screen source of knowledge: a tangible newspaper.

Showing my surprise I did not. Rather I relied on my dinosaur friend, a newspaper film critic who declared the film no horror film at all. Usually, I’m a wimp at scary films and don’t go and Darien doubted I would see Backrooms. Yet the film critic writes that Backrooms is not a fright fest.

After our family went to see the film a few days ago, what I patiently lasered on was each character’s shadow work or any individual’s backrooms of uncertainty. How to live this very current day without yesterday’s shadow? A shadow projects onto a wall from an original source. These vulnerable fears and anxieties often become extreme behaviors projecting onto life like shadows. Origins are a source called life disturbances: ordinary early life calamity called growing up.

In this way, Backrooms depicts two central characters who relive shadow work through exploring “backrooms,” a literal place symbolic of maze-like human fragility, the persistent furniture in our minds we need to discard for a lighter living—an honest being accountable for a good life. Like authentic energy to raise a family.

Families who are in a daily mentoring called being a good-enough parent for a youth soon to adventure into adult independence live in a time warp. As a Mama I easily remember through the last 15 years, recalling thousands of moments to design simple support and connection. Today is healthily not this. Support and connection, yes. Simplicity? Each moment is a family workshop in progress. During these times I stay flexible to be laser present in an exact moment. Conflict happens though and usually over how to live present without a screen presence.

Mind you, teenager Darien is a kind, funny, and smart youth for sure and also chooses intentional lethargy when a subject does not interest. For example, when I suggested traveling to New Mexico for camping over a five-day time stretch, he decided on no. Where I found irritation and anger was that compromise simply looks like an option from my perspective. What I saw was his deciding compromise was not an option in this time-warp. I honored Darien’s request to not go New Mexico camping.

Curiosity has me wonder how a youth finds exploring the outdoors apprehensive while next being energetic to watch Backrooms. What I discern is smart phone tethering to backrooms dimensions—a camera panning from one floor to the next floor below and another beneath and further still into the basement and a few several more cascading one away from the next (an actual movie scene). On one smart phone floor level we have a movie’s timeline intentionally set in an era when smart phones did not exist. And Parsons has a nostalgia for “back then.” The brief 9-minute video that 78 million viewers found riveting captures this historical context in set details like carpet and furniture store styles. But modern viewers resonate with current life anxiety and uncertainty and Backrooms provides comfortable distance to go there safely just being in the audience. A cozy reprieve from being on a smart phone.

Another smart phone floor level is that the movie’s entire existence arrived into being because smart phone enthusiasts had been watching. Hollywood producers watched the screen watchers sign on actively to Parsons’ screen presence. A full movie already had a built-in audience, so A24 Productions found him in high school and offered funds to make a feature length film based on Parsons original short videos. And my teenage son Darien was quick to share his knowledge of Parsons process that he had actively followed on his smart phone. When I even mentioned the movie’s title after reading Amy Nicholson’s film review in The Los Angeles Times, he reacted right away.

Makes good sense that contemporary youth curiously wonder how living might have been without continually staring at a phone screen. But this smart phone floor level is not naïve. Nicholson reminds us that “like so many other Gen Z kids, Parsons is nostalgic for a pre-smart-phone era he never knew.” Backrooms setting takes place in the 1990s when floppy discs and cassettes and VHS remained active.

Nicholson asks a poignant question: “when young people look toward the future, what do they see?” At 20 years old Parsons’ life experience inspired him to depict a “banal maze to find an uncannily mature story about loss and stagnation, about how our self-serving narratives barricade us from emotional growth.” Nicholson guesses that youth listen to adults all around them signaling exactly these stresses. Intuitively they understand and accounts for why Nicholson claims Backrooms is not a horror film perse and rather a “surrealist painting in motion, the equivalent of staring at Salvador Dali’s wasteland of melting clocks until it makes gut sense.” Whether in Dali’s 1930s, a movie set’s 1990s depiction, or today’s 2020s a continuity thread continues across time to bravely wonder how will my life go?

In the same dinosaur newspaper where I read the film review, a few pages later was an interview with novelist Ann Patchett. Her recent work titled Whistler is earning reader popularity and from an author who does not have a smart phone. She answers her land line in person. She emphasized in an hour-long interview reflecting and guessing on her work’s success over decades is because she keeps familiar themes: kindness and courage and love. Technology is an aside to wrenching human emotion during life’s ritual failure or what character Mary Kline in Backrooms calls the loop, a neural pathway where we keep repeating behavior patterns, casting the shadow side of ourselves, having a need to healthily resolve what hurts. Timeless work for every one of us.

An ultimate floor level that tethers anyone on a smart phone and anyone choosing time for outdoors is going there without any screen presence. In a quiet space to be in nature we experience a novel mindset—our own neural pathways offline. Might account for why teens find going without a smart phone challenging. Growing up to know your mind and responses and observations is a peaceful process—and often unnerving. Takes practice and curiosity and eventually wanders into being fun to accept how time often narrows to an observing moment while being outdoors. Simple, encompassing and more than enough to watch off screen.

Returning from a day away from my phone screen I notice the world kept going and who knew? What I return with is an entire new world of spiritual uplift for having taken in all around me while paying exquisite attention. Teenager Darien believes that being creatively present on a road trip for camping outdoors implies a disconnect too unfamiliar. How does one thrive in new nature environments without familiar screen time?

Simply that being offline from a smart phone, immersed in outdoors nature is a series of life-energizing hours well-invested. No screen necessary to travel there. Evolves into an offline time bending where days are stretched in surrealist Dali clock like ways—unpredictable, unlikely, and yet making gut-sense all the time.