Hallelujah! As someone who is not owned by, controlled by and manipulated by a cellphone seemingly permanently attached to one’s hands, I thoroughly rejoiced in your article, @Danielle . I do not own a cellphone and a cellphone does not own me.

On an unseasonably warm day recently I went ‘downtown’ and sat on a bench just watching people for about half an hour. During that time there must have been at least 200 people walk past me on the sidewalk. Out of all those people there were only two who walked by without their heads bent down looking at a cellphone as they walked. Only two!

It was downright surreal. I felt like I was in some sci-fi movie about some bizarre futuristic society in which people shuffled about like robots completely unaware of the world around them. Except it wasn’t in some bizarre society. It was in America. And it wasn’t in the future. It was in the present.

It was then that I reaffirmed my insistence on living without a cellphone.

My adult daughter calls me a Luddite for not having a cellphone. I disagree with her but I’m impressed that she even knows that word. When I mention to relatives, friends or acquaintances that I do not have a cellphone they look at me like I’m some kind of radical anarchist or someone being hunted down by the men in white coats. They look at me like I’m Amish or something.

But I’m not a Luddite. Even though I’m not a cellphone junkie I must admit that I am still a technology junkie. Heck, I spend between 7 and 13 hours a day on my laptop computer. If you truly want to torture me all you have to do is take away my internet connection.

But the thing is, my laptop sits atop my desk in my apartment. It never goes anywhere. I may spend hours on it each day but when I leave my apartment and go out into the real world I am completely, thoroughly disconnected from the fake world of the internet. When I leave my apartment I actually enter the real world. And I stay there until I return home and turn on my laptop.

So yes, I’m an addict, too. But I’m not as addicted as everyone else. Thanks to not having a cellphone, I am able to disconnect and enter the real physical 3-D world out there that everyone else is becoming more and more disconnected from. I simply have to leave my apartment. I can go for walks around town or to the nature trail without my neck being craned down in total obedience to a hand-held device that has taken over the lives of the planet’s human population.

I can see and hear the birds. I can notice the leaves being blown off of trees in the autumn. I can see the flowers in spring. Since I’m not always looking down I can see the faces of fellow human beings. I can look up at the clouds and the geese flying in V-patterns across the sky. I can look up at the silent architecture of buildings. And I can notice the collective behavior of a species taken out of the paradise in which it lives and sucked into a fake, robotic reality.

I luxuriate in that real world. I find peace and solace and vitality in it. But with each passing year I find myself more and more alone in that world as the rest of my species has left that world for that futuristic sci-fi world in which humans have become automatons ruled by devices held in their hands.

Your article, Danielle, has left me feeling ever so slightly less alone. Thanks.

Hallelujah.