25 Hours Without Power

This week, a storm hit Austin. Out of nowhere. Ten minutes of wind, a few dramatic tree snaps, and boom, power gone. Internet gone. My dignity, also gone.

It wasn’t even a real storm. It was like a burst. A sneeze. But that sneeze took out entire trees, flooded my street, and apparently short-circuited my ability to function without Wi-Fi.

I had a plan for the afternoon. I’m a creature of habit. I’d snagged a catered curry from the office fridge, which felt like a win. The plan was simple: microwave the curry, scroll the internet, feel alive. But the microwave didn’t work. The internet didn’t work. And most terrifyingly, I didn’t work.

I just sat there. Staring at my dark apartment. Holding cold curry like it was a lifeline. I thought, maybe this is a moment to read a book. But when I looked at my bookshelf, I could not think of anything worse.

The thing is, I really believed I’d be better than this. I’m not someone who’s on their phone all the time. I don’t TikTok in meetings. I’ve read the news. I’ve even been to a museum. But the second the power went out, so did every single coping mechanism I’ve built my life around. My nervous system, it turns out, runs on background noise and snackable content.

So I lay on my bed. Not sleeping. Not scrolling. Just spiraling. Like a Victorian widow but instead of mourning a husband, I was mourning my FYP.

Eventually, I found one single TikTok that had loaded before the outage. It was a “Guess the Premier League Player Based on Their Career Path” video. I got to see the first club and then nothing. The rest never loaded. A mystery without a solution. The worst kind of cliffhanger. I stared at it for longer than I care to admit, trying to reverse-engineer the answer like a lunatic. My final guess was wrong, by the way. I will never know who it was supposed to be. That will haunt me forever.

When the sun set, things somehow got worse. My phone was a brick. The room was pitch black. No lights, no ambient noise, no background YouTube. I didn’t know how to fall asleep. I didn’t know how to be a person. I am 29 years old and I apparently require the voice of Gary Neville at 14 percent volume to drift off. That’s my reality now. Not even talking to me, just existing in the background, mid-debate about whether or not inverted fullbacks are “Woke Nonsense”. I need that nasal Mancunian murmur bouncing softly off my walls like a white noise machine.

I like to believe I’m a resilient person. That if modern society collapsed, I could pivot. Hunt, forage, make a fire. But no. If day one of the collapse includes no electricity and no scrolling, I will simply sit on my couch with this cold curry and give up. I am the weakest link.

And I hate that. I hate how dependent I am on my phone. Not because I think I’m above it, but because it means I’ve lost the plot. There was a time, I’m pretty sure, when boredom was a feature of the human experience. A kind of built-in silence. Now, the second it creeps in, I flinch like I’ve touched a hot stove. I reach for a distraction. And when there’s nothing to reach for, I’m left with myself. And let me tell you, I am not a good hang.

I know this isn’t some revolutionary insight. Everyone’s already written the thinkpiece. Our attention spans are toast. We can’t sit still. We need a third screen just to survive a rerun. But knowing it and feeling it are two different things. And this week, I felt it. Deeply. Uncomfortably. In the dark. With curry in my lap and no idea how to fall asleep like a normal person.

The power eventually came back on. The lights flickered. The Wi-Fi returned. And like some sad little Victorian child seeing color for the first time, I whispered, TikTok?

I immediately resumed my usual digital pacing. Email. Feed. YouTube. Feed again. It felt safe. Familiar. A return to normal. But it also made me wonder, am I actually comforted by this, or just conditioned?

That’s the part that stuck with me. Not the storm, not the curry (that if I ate now would definitely give me salmonella), not the five-second TikTok cliffhanger. The quiet realization that maybe I don’t actually enjoy any of this, I just don’t know what else to do. That somewhere along the way, I outsourced every idle moment to my phone, and now I panic when it disappears. I like to imagine I’m above it all. That I could go analog if I really wanted to. But this week proved otherwise. I didn’t seize the opportunity to read, or reflect, or journal by candlelight. I just pouted in the dark and waited for a pundit’s voice to rock me to sleep.

That being said I like the internet. I like knowing what club someone played for in 2006. I like hearing the thoughts of people I will never meet. Maybe that tension is just baked in now. Maybe this is what self-awareness looks like in 2025. A little panic, a little peace, a lot of phone.

I’m spiritually weak but digitally devout. And I’m fine with that. Mostly.