> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://disconnected.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The anxiety of being unreachable - URL: https://disconnected.ghost.io/the-anxiety-of-being-unreachable/ - Published: 2026-09-22T20:52:59.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-22T20:52:59.000Z - Author: Henrique Caldara It's Monday morning and my kids are playing together in the living room - they're still on school holidays for another week. They should have gone to the day care centre today, but they're skipping it because of a doctor's appointment around noon. It's my first day back from holidays, my inbox has hundreds of unread emails and my Slack is bursting with people reaching out to me. I'm not in the mood to deal with any of that. Holiday memories are still fresh in my mind, and I'm slightly depressed from getting back to reality. I start with the spam email. Cleaning up the trash makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something. When I'm almost done with the junk email I start hearing the sound of high-pitched screams coming in from the living room. The kids woke up before 6am, which means they're already hungry again. It's almost 10am, I drop whatever I'm doing and head into the kitchen to make some popcorn and leave them watching TV while I'm supposed to be watching them. For the next couple of hours I switch between attending meetings and cooking lunch for the kids. Slack messages are left unanswered as the kids rush into the room, begging me to play a round of Uno with them. I'm supposed to be watching the kids and working at the same time, and I'm doing neither properly - I hate these days. We leave at noon to the doctor's appointment. I have too many unanswered notifications, some of them important. I'm too anxious to leave home with just my Nokia, so I also bring the iPhone with me. I don't know how to navigate the city without Waze. Even though I've been living in Luxembourg for over five years, there's a very limited number of places I can go relying just on my own memory. I have a notion of where the doctor's office is, but I'm not confident I can get there without help. I'm using the offline map, as the iPhone has no SIM card in it. Without live updates on traffic information, I take a very unusual route, which is probably the shortest, but definitely not the fastest. Not knowing what time I'll arrive adds to my anxiety. Even though I can't control traffic, knowing my estimated time of arrival usually brings a soothing (though inexistent) sense of control. Despite everything, we manage to get there on time. We're immediately welcomed by the doctor's assistant, who guides us to a room where she'll gently weigh and measure the kids before we meet the doctor. While she's busy with the kids, the scale and the measuring tape, I stealthily sneak a paperclip from her desk into my pocket. Once she's done, she tells us to go into the waiting room. And then we waited. Kids get bored easily, so I had to find a way to keep them entertained. First I told them to play with some of the toys available, then I read them a few books and eventually I was telling them to go across the room pretending they were crocodiles, flamingos, frogs and pretty much any other animal I could think of. Adults get bored easily too. So I took the paperclip out of my pocket, stretched one end of it until it became a straight line and used it to open the SIM tray in my iPhone. I then took the SIM out of the Nokia, placed it into the tray and was finally able to respond to all the messages that had been waiting for me. I didn’t feel helpful, important or meaningful after replying to all those messages. I was just left with this sense of relief from getting back to those people, ticking the “to do” boxes and moving on to the next task. I was feeling guilty for not being constantly online and available to people at work. That's a strange feeling, one I didn't have when I stopped using Instagram or WhatsApp 24/7\. I think it comes from knowing that my friends and family aren’t constantly needing me, while at work, with thousands of people, there will always be someone needing help with something “urgent”. That Monday happened two weeks ago. I kept switching the SIM card between my two phones until Wednesday that week. Since then I've been carrying only the iPhone with me. I didn't download YouTube or Instagram again, so that's a good thing, but I did see my phone usage go from roughly an hour a day when I was on vacation to almost three hours now that I'm constantly carrying it in my pocket again. I’m no longer listening to the birds and the sound of cars while I’m walking my dog, but I don’t necessarily see going back into podcasts as a bad thing. I don't struggle anymore to get into the gym, and I get to avoid traffic when driving around town. Most importantly, I haven't gone back to social media. There's still a lot going on at work, and I don't feel comfortable being unreachable at this stage. I started this experiment thinking I was trying to get rid of social media, but I'm beginning to realise that I'll also have to figure out how to deal with the anxiety of being constantly online for work. It's harder to disconnect when the thing keeping you always on is also paying your bills.