Is Being Unreachable the New Luxury?

A letter from the Host.

There was a time when being difficult to reach meant you were important. Now it mostly means your battery has died.

Somewhere along the way, permanent availability became the default. We carry a small device around with us that allows almost everyone we have ever met to enter our day whenever they fancy. Your boss can reach you. Your children can reach you. The school can reach you. Your mother can reach you. The group chat can reach you. The delivery driver can reach you. Someone you went for one drink with in 2019 can apparently still reach you.

And because everyone can reach us, there is a strange assumption that we should probably answer. Not necessarily immediately, of course. We are sophisticated adults with boundaries. Perhaps in seven minutes.

There are very few places left where we are genuinely unavailable. You can be on holiday in Greece and still be asked whether you have “two secs” to look at something. You can be having dinner and watch a message arrive on the table beside your wine. You can be in bed, lights off, supposedly finished with the world for the day, and discover that someone has sent you something beginning, “Sorry, just one quick thing…”

It is almost never one quick thing.

We used to leave

That is the strange part. We used to physically leave places and, in doing so, become unavailable to them. You left work and went home. You left the house and nobody knew precisely where you were until you came back. You went on holiday and people accepted, quite remarkably, that they might not hear from you until you returned.

There were entire stretches of ordinary life in which nobody could get hold of you. And nothing collapsed.

Now we leave, but remain digitally standing in the doorway. One eye on dinner, one eye on the inbox. Watching television while answering WhatsApps. Walking somewhere lovely while listening to a voice note we didn't particularly want to receive. Even rest has become strangely interruptible.

And women, perhaps especially, are very good at being interruptible. We notice, respond, remember, check, send the thing, answer the question. We make ourselves available because it often feels easier than not being available, particularly when other people have become accustomed to our availability.

The result is that you can technically have an evening to yourself while somehow never quite being alone.

Perhaps luxury has changed

For a long time, luxury was largely about access: access to the best table, the private room, the faster car, the beautiful hotel, the person everybody else couldn't get an appointment with.

But perhaps one of the great luxuries now is the opposite: inaccessibility.

A closed door. A phone on silent. An afternoon nobody can book. Dinner without your phone on the table. A walk during which absolutely nobody knows where you are. An hour that hasn't already been claimed by another person before you've even reached it. Maybe even the wildly decadent act of seeing a message and thinking, I'll answer that tomorrow.

Imagine.

Because there is something extraordinarily luxurious about not being required for a while. Not because you don't love the people who need you. Not because you've become selfish or detached, or one of those people who announces a “digital detox” from a villa in Ibiza. Simply because constant access to you comes at a cost.

Every notification asks for a tiny shift of attention. Every message opens another little tab in your head. Every “while I've got you…” gives someone else a few minutes of a day that was already fairly heavily subscribed. Individually, none of it looks particularly significant. Collectively, it can leave very little of you uninterrupted.

You are allowed to disappear occasionally

Perhaps we need to become a little less impressed by how available we can make ourselves. You do not have to answer simply because somebody has asked. You do not have to explain every delayed response. You do not have to turn every empty hour into an opportunity to catch up. And you are allowed to have parts of your life that nobody else can enter on demand.

That isn't withdrawal, bad manners or failing to keep up. It is simply remembering that your attention belongs to you before anybody else gets to borrow it.

So perhaps the next status symbol isn't another reservation, handbag, retreat or impossibly beautiful hotel room. Perhaps it's an afternoon with nowhere to be, a phone you haven't looked at, and the delicious knowledge that, for the next little while, nobody can get hold of you.

How luxurious.