Today, I want to talk about the phantom phone buzz. Everybody walks around with a computer in their pocket and it is always pinging. It is constant messages, calls, breaking news, the score of the big game, and so many more notifications. Our devices use tiny little jolts to get our attention. They want to make sure we don’t miss any trivial information. As a result of this Pavlovian training, we often feel notifications that aren’t really there. The phantom phone buzz is real and we have all felt it. It’s in your pocket, you felt the buzz, and you checked. This process leads to disappointment because it was nothing. It was a fake buzz. Today, it came full circle. I was at work and I thought I felt the phantom phone buzz. I assumed there was no point in checking. It couldn’t have been a real buzz. The joke was on me. I had missed a call from a friend.
