THE COST OF NOW: Not Every Bell Deserves An Answer
Your phone vibrates.
What happens next?
Not what should happen.
What actually happens?
For a lot of us, there is a tiny movement towards it.
A glance.
A thought.
Who is that?
What do they want?
Is it important?
Sometimes you don't even pick it up.
The notification has already done its job.
For half a second, whatever had your attention no longer has all of it.
That's quite a remarkable amount of power to hand to a sound.
Especially when you have absolutely no idea what caused it.
Could be your wife.
Could be the school.
Could be a client.
Could be someone reacting to a photograph.
Could be an app reminding you that a jumper you looked at three weeks ago is now 12 per cent cheaper.
Same vibration.
Wildly different importance.
Yet the first stage of the response is identical:
Something wants me.
I wrote an entire parable about this.
In The Man Who Collected Silence, the villagers live among bells.
Originally, the bells are useful.
They ring for things that genuinely matter.
Fire.
Danger.
Urgent news.
Travellers arriving.
Then other people discover the power of the bell.
Merchants use them.
Storytellers.
Performers.
Anyone who wants attention.
Eventually bells ring for things that are important, things that are interesting, things that are new and things that merely want to be noticed.
The villagers carry small catchers so the signals can follow them everywhere.
Over time, they become uncomfortable without them.
Sound familiar?
The deeper idea was never:
Bells are bad.
It was:
What happens when every bell acquires the right to interrupt whatever came before it?
I think that question matters even more when we move from attention into urgency.
Because the modern problem isn't simply that more bells are ringing.
It's that we have forgotten that ringing and deserving an answer are two completely separate things.
A signal is not an instruction
This seems almost insultingly obvious.
Your phone makes a noise.
That's information.
Someone sent something.
An application changed state.
An event occurred.
It does not contain a universal command:
STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
And yet our devices are extraordinarily good at making information feel behavioural.
Buzz.
Look.
Ping.
Check.
Red circle.
Clear.
Unread count.
Open.
Incoming call.
Answer.
We have turned signals into little action prompts.
Some of them need to be.
If my daughter's school rings unexpectedly in the middle of the day, I'm answering.
If a client calls during a situation where we've agreed I'll be reachable, fine.
If my wife messages me something genuinely urgent, I want the technology to reach me.
The problem is that the device often has no idea what deserves priority either.
It simply relays.
The judgement still belongs to me.
Or at least it should.
Notifications can cost attention even when you don't answer them
There is experimental evidence for this.
Cary Stothart, Ainsley Mitchum and Courtney Yehnert studied what happened when people received mobile-phone notifications while completing an attention-demanding task.
Participants did not need to pick up the phone or interact with it.
The notification alone was enough to significantly disrupt performance.
The researchers suggested the signal could trigger task-irrelevant thoughts and mind-wandering even without subsequent device use.
That's fascinating because it destroys one of our favourite little lies.
“I didn't answer it.”
Maybe not.
But part of you did.
Your attention answered.
For a moment.
That's the hidden power of the bell.
It can change what you're thinking about without obtaining your permission to become the thing you're thinking about.
This does not mean notifications are evil
Again, we need some restraint.
Notifications are useful.
Very useful.
They tell us:
your train has changed,
your daughter messaged,
your payment failed,
your taxi arrived,
your house alarm triggered,
someone needs you,
your appointment is tomorrow.
A world without signalling would be less convenient and sometimes less safe.
The issue isn't whether bells should ring.
The issue is whether every signal deserves the same access to us.
Researchers studying digital wellbeing increasingly describe exactly this tension.
Mobile technology can increase autonomy by allowing people to access information and relationships regardless of time or location.
The same connectivity can challenge autonomy when devices and social expectations continually redirect attention or make disconnection feel difficult.
Mariek Vanden Abeele describes this as a mobile connectivity paradox: technology supports autonomy while simultaneously creating new pressures over when, where and whether we connect.
That is much more interesting than:
Phone bad.
Phone good.
The device gives me power.
It also gives everyone else a route to me.
Agency sits in deciding what comes through.
We have outsourced prioritisation to arrival order
This might be one of the strangest things we do.
You are working on something you previously decided matters.
Then another thing arrives.
Now the new thing gets evaluated simply because it arrived.
That gives incoming information a peculiar advantage.
The thing you were already doing had to earn its place.
You planned it.
Chose it.
Started it.
The new thing merely needs to appear.
Email.
Message.
Notification.
Call.
Someone at the door.
Now your original priority has to defend itself again.
Why?
Nothing about the newness of a request proves greater importance.
Arrival order is not a prioritisation system.
Yet an enormous amount of modern life is effectively run on:
Last thing in becomes next thing considered.
That is a terrible way to direct attention.
The world is very good at producing bells
There is almost no cost to creating one now.
Message.
Send.
Email.
Send.
Tag.
Mention.
Assign task.
Invite.
Forward.
React.
Call.
Every one of these actions can generate a signal in another person's life.
Sometimes many signals.
One email can trigger:
phone notification,
watch vibration,
desktop banner,
unread badge,
email count,
perhaps another reminder later.
The sender performed one tiny action.
The receiver's environment can turn it into a small campaign.
That asymmetry is worth noticing.
It is incredibly cheap to ask for somebody's attention.
Which means the recipient needs some way of deciding whose requests actually purchase it.
The bells have become personalised too
The bells in my book are deliberately timeless.
They carry no modern technology.
No apps.
No screens.
No algorithms.
The point was that readers could recognise whatever version existed in their own world.
Modern bells are arguably more powerful because they are personal.
A village bell rings for everyone.
Your phone rings for you.
Your name.
Your interests.
Your friends.
Your customers.
Your work.
Your particular anxieties.
The signal arrives with social context already attached.
Someone I know wants me.
Someone at work wants me.
Someone has reacted to me.
That makes ignoring it psychologically different from ignoring a distant bell.
It can feel personal.
Rude.
Risky.
We aren't simply filtering information.
We're negotiating relationships.
This is why “just turn everything off” is too simplistic
Interestingly, research supports that nuance too.
Nicholas Fitz and colleagues conducted a randomised field experiment with 237 smartphone users.
Participants either received notifications normally, received them in batches, or had them withheld entirely.
Batching notifications three times per day produced several positive outcomes, including reports of feeling more attentive, in a better mood and more in control of the phone.
But completely eliminating notifications did not simply make everybody wonderfully serene.
That group experienced more anxiety and fear of missing out.
That is such an important finding.
The answer is not necessarily silence.
The old man in The Man Who Collected Silence is not wise because silence is morally pure.
He has learned to distinguish.
That's different.
The goal isn't to hear nothing.
It's to stop granting equal authority to everything you hear.
We don't need fewer bells as much as better judgement
Some signals genuinely deserve to interrupt you.
Others deserve attention later.
Others deserve none at all.
That requires discrimination.
This is urgent.
This matters, but not now.
This is useful.
This is merely interesting.
This is someone else's preference.
This is an automated system trying to bring me back.
This can wait.
This has nothing to do with me.
Delete.
There is agency in those distinctions.
Without them, every signal enters the same queue and simply competes on volume.
I think we've accidentally moralised responsiveness
Quick reply?
Good person.
Attentive.
Reliable.
Caring.
Professional.
Slow reply?
Ignoring me.
Disorganised.
Rude.
Not committed.
Not interested.
Sometimes those judgements are fair.
If I repeatedly fail to answer clients for a week, there is probably a service issue.
If my wife sends an important message and I habitually ignore her, the problem isn't philosophical autonomy.
But response speed is a remarkably weak proxy for whether somebody cares.
They may care enough about the thing in front of them not to interrupt it for you.
That's a different kind of respect.
Every answer trains the bell
This is where behaviour becomes interesting.
A message arrives.
You answer instantly.
Another arrives.
Instant.
Another.
Instant.
What are you teaching the sender?
Perhaps nothing consciously.
But patterns form.
This person is fast.
Reachable.
Responsive.
You are also teaching yourself.
Signal equals response.
Eventually the loop becomes so familiar you barely experience a decision between the two.
There is a bell.
Then there is action.
That's precisely the point in the parable where choice disappears.
Not because anyone locked the villagers' catchers to them.
The final realisation is that they were tied on with cord.
They could remove them.
They had simply become afraid not to.
The control wasn't mechanical.
It was learned.
Habits are powerful precisely because they remove decisions
Normally that's useful.
Teeth brushed.
Seatbelt on.
Door locked.
No philosophical inquiry required.
But there is a downside when the automatic behaviour is:
Notification.
Check.
Boredom.
Check.
Uncertainty.
Check.
Pause.
Check.
You have now automated the allocation of your attention.
Agency requires the decision to reappear somewhere in that sequence.
Signal.
Pause.
Decision.
Response.
Or not.
That tiny gap matters.
We can check without being notified
This sounds embarrassingly simple.
Email can exist without telling you each time email exists.
WhatsApp can contain messages without announcing every one.
News continues happening when the app doesn't alert you.
You can go to the information rather than requiring the information to continually come to you.
We actually have some experimental evidence that changing checking patterns can matter.
Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth Dunn randomly assigned 124 adults to check email less frequently during one week and as often as they wanted during another.
During the limited-checking period, participants reported lower daily stress.
They were receiving roughly similar amounts of email.
What changed was the frequency with which they repeatedly went to it.
That's a subtle but important idea.
You do not necessarily need less communication.
You may need a different relationship with when communication enters your attention.
There is a difference between being reachable and being interruptible
This distinction has become central to how I think.
I am reachable.
My family can contact me.
Clients can contact me.
People can email me.
Message me.
Call.
I haven't disappeared into a cabin in the woods.
But reachability does not have to mean:
every incoming communication receives immediate access to my cognitive state.
Those are different service levels.
Reachable:
The information can get to me.
Interruptible:
The information can determine what I think about next.
Modern technology encourages us to collapse them.
We don't have to.
You can choose office hours for attention
We understand this concept with physical businesses.
Open.
Closed.
Nobody stands outside a closed bakery at 2am screaming:
“But the bread is physically in there!”
The business is unavailable.
Digital systems erased opening hours.
The inbox is always open.
The messaging app is always open.
Your phone is technically open.
That does not mean you have to be.
Perhaps attention needs opening hours too.
Not necessarily rigid ones.
Just deliberate periods where you choose to receive.
Then periods where things can accumulate without becoming immediate.
The message still exists.
Nobody has been harmed.
It just hasn't become your next thought yet.
There are bells we create ourselves
This is important because blaming technology is too easy.
Sometimes there is no notification.
I check anyway.
Phone out.
Anything?
Email.
Anything?
LinkedIn.
Anything?
News.
Anything?
The bell has moved inside.
That is partly why simply disabling every external signal does not guarantee peace.
The 2019 notification-batching study found completely suppressing notifications could increase anxiety and fear of missing out for some participants.
We've learned to expect the possibility of something.
So we go looking.
This is why attention is not solved purely through settings.
Settings help.
But eventually there is a psychological question.
Why do I keep wanting to know whether something else wants me?
That's harder.
Perhaps being needed feels good
There is a flattering side to bells.
Message from client.
Someone needs my expertise.
Colleague calls.
They value my judgement.
Email arrives.
I'm involved.
Notification.
Someone responded.
We often talk about interruption purely as annoyance.
But signals can be rewarding.
They can communicate status.
Belonging.
Importance.
Relevance.
That is why escaping them is not as easy as deciding they are distracting.
For years, being needed was tightly wrapped around my identity.
The fixer.
The person who knew.
The person who would answer.
The person who could solve it.
Ignoring the bell wasn't merely leaving a message unanswered.
It challenged the identity underneath:
What if I'm not the person who always responds?
That was much harder to change than a notification setting.
Some bells are deliberately built to feel important
An unread badge is not neutral.
A red circle suggests unfinished business.
A vibration creates salience.
A push notification exists precisely because somebody designing the system decided information inside the app should escape the app and enter your environment.
Again, that can be useful.
But it is worth recognising what the feature does.
It moves the timing decision.
Without notification:
You choose when to enter the app.
With notification:
The app proposes when you should think about it.
You can reject the proposal.
But the proposal has already occurred.
Stothart and colleagues' experiment is so interesting for exactly this reason.
Participants did not need to answer their phones for performance to be disrupted.
The signal itself had cognitive consequences.
The bell doesn't have to win the whole battle.
Sometimes making you look towards it is enough.
This is not only a phone problem
Your inbox can be a bell.
A colleague appearing at the door.
Slack.
Teams.
Your calendar.
A dashboard.
Breaking news.
Someone saying your name from across the room.
A customer escalation.
A child asking for you.
Some bells are human.
Some entirely legitimate.
The principle remains the same.
A signal asks for consideration.
It does not automatically determine the verdict.
Children make this wonderfully obvious
“Dad.”
“Yes?”
“Dad.”
“What?”
“DAD.”
“What?”
“Look.”
And sometimes what I absolutely must abandon everything to witness is Amelia holding a felt-tip pen.
Apparently a good one.
This is parenting.
Children have no particular concern for whether their interruption meets adult criteria for importance.
Nor should they.
Sometimes I look.
Sometimes:
“One second, sweetheart. I'm just finishing this.”
That's a completely normal boundary.
The request exists.
I love the person making it.
And I still decide whether now is the right moment.
Why do adults find that distinction so much harder with devices?
Not answering immediately is sometimes a form of respect
If I'm speaking to you and my phone goes, I have a choice.
You.
Or the unknown possibility inside the phone.
Every time I immediately look, there is a tiny message embedded in the behaviour:
Whatever just arrived might outrank what is already here.
Again, sometimes it does.
Emergency.
Child.
Something important.
But if that is the default, the person physically with you never fully owns the conversation.
They are holding your attention conditionally.
Until a bell makes a better offer.
I don't like that.
It's one reason phones don't belong at our family dinner table.
Not because screens are inherently toxic.
Because I don't want everybody outside the room to have a permanent invitation into it.
Attention needs hierarchy
Family emergency.
High.
AIB debris discovered on a live asbestos site where people could be exposed.
High.
A client asking a routine question.
Important, but perhaps later.
LinkedIn telling me someone viewed my profile.
I suspect civilisation can continue.
Without hierarchy, the device becomes absurd.
A marketing notification can create the same physical buzz as a message that genuinely changes the day.
The hardware doesn't know.
You do.
That's the job.
The village forgot the hierarchy too
In the foundational design for The Man Who Collected Silence, the bells begin rare.
Because they are rare, they mean something.
People stop.
Listen.
Respond.
Then the signalling system expands.
Merchants use it.
Performers.
Politicians.
Storytellers.
Eventually the bells ring for anything capable of gathering attention.
Important things become indistinguishable from immediate things.
That wasn't really a story about phones.
It was about signal inflation.
When everything can ring a bell, ringing the bell ceases to prove importance.
That's where we are.
There is a difference between urgent and interrupt-worthy
This distinction is useful.
Some urgent things should interrupt.
Some can wait five minutes.
Some important things shouldn't interrupt at all.
Suppose a report is genuinely needed by 4pm.
Urgent.
Does that mean somebody should interrupt me every twenty minutes asking whether it's finished?
No.
The deadline matters.
The interruptions make meeting it harder.
Urgency tells us when the outcome matters.
It does not automatically tell us how attention should be managed until then.
We often confuse those.
Sometimes ignoring the bell is the fastest way to complete what actually matters
This is obvious in deep work.
Write.
Notification.
Check.
Return.
Message.
Reply.
Return.
Call.
Answer.
Return.
You can spend an entire afternoon “working” without sustaining enough continuity to finish the thing the afternoon was for.
Then work runs late.
Now the day feels overloaded.
More urgency.
More messages.
More catching up.
The bells didn't merely consume attention.
They helped create tomorrow's urgency.
This is why attention management and time management were never really separate subjects.
Attention determines what your time becomes.
The old man doesn't destroy the bells
This is probably my favourite aspect of the parable.
He does not launch a campaign.
Doesn't smash catchers in the village square.
Doesn't declare bells evil.
Doesn't tell everyone they need a silent retreat.
He lives differently.
He tends his garden.
Repairs things.
Carves wood.
Listens.
The bells still exist.
He simply stops treating them as sovereign.
That matters.
Because freedom from every external claim is impossible.
The world will ring.
Clients will call.
Children will shout.
Algorithms will notify.
News will happen.
People will need you.
The aim cannot be the absence of signals.
It has to be better authority over the response.
“I blame the part of me…”
The line at the centre of the old man's lesson is:
“I blame the part of me that believed every bell deserved an answer.”
He doesn't blame the bell.
That was deliberate.
Because blaming bells alone leaves us powerless.
If the problem is entirely outside us, the solution requires the outside world to change first.
Good luck with that.
There will be more notifications.
More content.
More ways to contact us.
More AI-generated communication.
More personalised signals.
More things designed to be relevant enough to earn a glance.
Waiting for the bells to become considerate is probably not a serious strategy.
Agency has to live somewhere else.
But this should not become another individual-responsibility cop-out
There is a danger here too.
“Just choose not to respond.”
Fine.
Unless your boss penalises you.
Unless your role requires immediate response.
Unless the platform has been deliberately designed to exploit predictable behaviour.
Unless your income depends on lead response time.
Unless your client contract creates legitimate availability obligations.
Technology, institutions and power shape the choices available.
Vanden Abeele's digital-wellbeing framework is useful precisely because it treats connectivity as an interaction between individual, device and context, rather than blaming everything on either technology or personal willpower.
Agency is not pretending systems don't exist.
Agency is recognising where choice remains inside them and improving the system where it doesn't.
Sometimes the system should filter before the human has to
This may be one of the better design principles.
Why should your brain decide whether every app notification matters?
Turn most off.
Why should every email appear instantly?
Check in batches.
Why should every workplace problem reach the managing director?
Build escalation routes.
Why should customers use the emergency contact for ordinary queries?
Separate channels.
Why should family messages compete with promotional notifications?
Different settings.
Good design reduces the number of unnecessary decisions reaching attention in the first place.
That's not avoidance.
It's architecture.
Batching is interesting because it changes who chooses when
The 2019 notification study fascinates me for this reason.
Three batches a day performed better on several outcomes than either the continuous default or complete silence.
Not every signal was removed.
They were contained.
The information still arrived.
But arrival no longer happened at random moments throughout the day.
That's a fundamentally different relationship with the bell.
Not:
Never ring.
More:
Ring when I've decided I'm listening.
I think there is something profound in that.
Perhaps we need attention appointments
We schedule meetings.
Exercise.
Dentists.
Client work.
Why not incoming communication?
Email at ten.
Again at three.
Messages when there's a gap.
Notifications from only the people or systems that genuinely need interrupt privileges.
Then information stops behaving like weather.
It becomes something you choose to enter.
This won't work for every role.
Some jobs require continuous situational awareness.
Some people need constant updates.
But many don't.
We've simply adopted the communication architecture anyway.
Interrupt privileges should be earned
Imagine your attention has permissions.
Level one:
Can reach me whenever necessary.
Family.
Emergency contacts.
Critical systems.
Level two:
Can reach me, but not automatically interrupt.
Clients.
Colleagues.
Friends.
Level three:
I will go looking when I choose.
News.
Social platforms.
Email newsletters.
Most apps.
Level four:
Why the fuck does this even have permission to notify me?
Probably half your phone.
That is not anti-technology.
It is access control.
We wouldn't give every person who knows our email address a key to the front door.
Yet many of us effectively give every application permission to knock loudly from inside the house.
Not every bell deserves an answer
Some deserve immediate response.
Some deserve thoughtful response.
Some deserve delayed response.
Some deserve no response.
The skill is not silence.
It is judgement.
That is where attention becomes agency.
My own agency reference document contains the line:
“Attention makes agency possible.”
You cannot improve a system you never notice.
You cannot choose differently if the incoming signal automatically becomes behaviour.
The bell rings.
Notice it.
Then choose.
That's the sequence.
There is freedom in allowing something to remain unanswered
This is something I had to learn.
An email can sit there.
A message can remain unread.
A question can wait.
A request can be considered tomorrow.
Someone can want something from me without immediately receiving me.
Nothing catastrophic happens.
Sometimes people solve the problem themselves.
Sometimes the issue stops mattering.
Sometimes the answer becomes clearer.
Sometimes the only thing that happened was that I finished what I had already decided deserved my attention.
That shouldn't feel radical.
It does.
The fear of missing something important keeps us answering everything unimportant
This may be the cleverest thing about modern signalling systems.
Most signals are not critical.
But some could be.
So we monitor the entire stream.
The possibility of importance gives unimportant signals access.
What if the school rings?
What if Mum needs me?
What if the client has a genuine issue?
Fair.
The answer isn't necessarily checking everything constantly.
It's designing a route by which genuine importance can reach you without everything else impersonating it.
That might mean calls from favourites ring through.
Different channels.
Emergency numbers.
Clear client protocols.
Family rules.
The same principle organisations use in good incident-management systems.
Not every event becomes a major incident.
There is escalation.
We need to protect the meaning of the bell
If every bell demands action, genuine bells become harder to hear.
This is true culturally and personally.
When everything is urgent, urgency loses meaning.
When everything notifies, notifications lose meaning.
When everyone can interrupt, interruption no longer proves importance.
The solution isn't louder signals.
It is fewer signals with clearer significance.
Healthcare has wrestled with analogous problems through alarm fatigue, where excessive signalling can make it harder for humans to distinguish actionable alarms from the surrounding volume.
Our everyday notifications are not medical alarms and shouldn't be treated as equivalent.
But the design principle travels rather well:
A signal is useful partly because it is selective.
Silence is not emptiness
This was another idea beneath the book.
The old man gradually discovers things the bells had hidden.
Not supernatural things.
Ordinary things.
Birds.
Wind.
Thought.
Conversation.
His own attention.
The design document contains the line:
“Silence asks questions the bells keep buried.”
I still like that.
Because constant signalling does more than add noise.
It can prevent other questions becoming audible.
What was I thinking about?
Do I actually want to do this?
Is this important?
Why am I rushing?
Could this wait?
What does my daughter want to tell me?
Am I tired?
Do I even agree with the thing I am doing?
Signals provide answers to one question:
What wants your attention?
Silence creates enough room to ask:
What do you want to give it to?
Completely different question.
The goal isn't a silent life
I don't want one.
I like people.
Clients.
Family chaos.
Information.
Technology.
Podcasts.
Messages.
News.
Ideas.
Interesting things happening.
The point isn't building a life nothing can enter.
It is building one where entry is not the same as command.
A full life will contain bells.
Probably lots of them.
The problem begins when all of them become equal to whatever you had chosen before they rang.
We keep asking how to manage notifications
Maybe the deeper question is:
Why have notifications acquired decision rights?
A red badge shouldn't decide.
A vibration shouldn't decide.
Another person's impatience shouldn't automatically decide.
A new email shouldn't decide.
The arrival of information should be one input into your judgement.
Not a replacement for it.
This series began with urgency
Everything due yesterday.
Messages needing instant replies.
Customers expecting speed.
Technology saving time and expectation consuming it.
Artificial emergencies.
Availability.
AI increasing capacity.
All of it eventually arrives here.
Because urgency only has power when it can capture attention.
A deadline nobody notices has very little behavioural effect.
A customer request matters when it enters someone's priorities.
A notification becomes disruptive when attention moves.
The ultimate scarce resource was never simply time.
It was the ability to decide what time receives.
The bells will get louder
I think that's likely.
AI will make communication easier to generate.
Personalisation will improve.
Systems will become better at deciding which signal is most likely to make you look.
More devices will be able to reach us.
More services will know when.
There is little reason to expect the external environment to spontaneously become less effective at requesting attention.
That could sound depressing.
I find it clarifying.
Because perhaps we can stop making peace and quiet dependent on everyone else behaving differently.
The bells ring.
Fine.
The final realisation was always choice
The foundational idea behind The Man Who Collected Silence was:
“The bells never truly controlled anyone. People simply stopped choosing when to listen.”
That isn't literally true in every modern context.
Power exists.
Obligation exists.
Systems can constrain.
Some bells really do demand a response.
But as a philosophical principle, I still think it matters.
We often surrender more choice than the situation actually requires because responsiveness became habitual before we stopped to examine it.
The email exists.
That doesn't mean now.
The message arrived.
That doesn't mean now.
Someone wants an answer.
That doesn't necessarily mean now.
The notification appeared.
That means almost nothing until you know what it is.
There is a small gap between the bell and the answer.
That's where your life is.
Not every bell deserves an answer
Some absolutely do.
That's why bells exist.
But others deserve to wait.
Some deserve to be silenced.
Some deserve to be checked later.
Some deserve a deliberate no.
Some were never yours to answer in the first place.
Perhaps the most important ability in a world built around signalling is not becoming better at responding.
It's recovering confidence in not responding automatically.
The bell can ring.
The world can want you.
Something can arrive.
And for a moment, nothing has to happen.
You can finish the sentence.
Listen to the person.
Watch your daughter.
Think.
Work.
Walk.
Sit.
Then decide.
Because the bells will always ring.
The question was never whether we could stop them.
It was whether we still remembered that answering was supposed to be a choice.
Sources And Further Reading
Adam Fox, The Man Who Collected Silence, The Old Man's Lesson And Final Realisation.
The old man does not blame the bells. His central line is: “I blame the part of me that believed every bell deserved an answer.” The final design establishes that the catchers are not physically locked to the villagers and that freedom comes from deciding which signals deserve attention.
Adam Fox, Agency Reference Material.
Establishes the relationship between attention and agency used in this essay, including the principle that “Attention makes agency possible” and that people need enough attention to notice and challenge the systems shaping their behaviour.
Cary Stothart, Ainsley Mitchum and Courtney Yehnert, “The Attentional Cost Of Receiving A Cell Phone Notification”, Journal Of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception And Performance (2015).
The experiment found that receiving a phone notification significantly disrupted performance on an attention-demanding task even when participants did not interact with the phone. The authors suggest that notifications can generate task-irrelevant thoughts and mind-wandering.
Kostadin Kushlev, Jason Proulx and Elizabeth Dunn, “‘Silence Your Phones’: Smartphone Notifications Increase Inattention And Hyperactivity Symptoms”, CHI (2016).
In a study involving 221 participants, people reported greater inattention and hyperactivity symptoms during a week when notification alerts were maximised and phones kept within reach than during a week in which interruptions were minimised.
Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth Dunn, “Checking Email Less Frequently Reduces Stress”, Computers In Human Behavior (2015).
In a two-week within-subjects experiment involving 124 adults, limiting email checking was associated with significantly lower daily stress compared with unrestricted checking. Participants received and answered broadly similar amounts of email, illustrating that communication volume and communication-checking frequency are distinct questions.
Nicholas Fitz, Kostadin Kushlev, Ranjan Jagannathan, Terrel Lewis, Devang Paliwal and Dan Ariely, “Batching Smartphone Notifications Can Improve Well-Being”, Computers In Human Behavior (2019).
A randomised field experiment involving 237 participants compared normal notifications with several batching approaches. Delivering notifications three times per day produced improvements on several measures including reported attentiveness, mood and control, while completely suppressing notifications was associated with greater anxiety and fear of missing out.
Mariek M. P. Vanden Abeele, “Digital Wellbeing As A Dynamic Construct”, Communication Theory (2021).
Develops a model of digital wellbeing in which mobile connectivity can both support autonomy and challenge it. The framework emphasises interactions between individual behaviour, device design, social context, availability expectations and broader cultures of connectivity rather than reducing outcomes to either personal weakness or technology alone.
Recent methodological review of digital-intervention studies, Nature Reviews Psychology (2025).
Highlights the growing experimental literature examining interventions such as notification batching and notification disabling while warning that causal claims about digital technologies and wellbeing remain methodologically difficult. Different interventions can produce different or even countervailing effects.
Research Gaps
A notification causing momentary attentional disruption does not prove serious long-term harm.
The Stothart experiment establishes that notifications alone can impair performance on a particular attention-demanding task. It does not establish that every notification produces significant real-world impairment or that receiving ordinary notifications causes chronic attention problems.
The research does not support the idea that all notifications should simply be disabled.
The 2019 batching experiment found benefits from predictable batching, while participants receiving no notifications experienced increased anxiety and fear of missing out. Later literature also reports mixed findings from notification-reduction interventions. The appropriate design is likely to depend on person, purpose and context.
“The bells” are a philosophical metaphor, not a psychological construct.
The essay deliberately maps the symbolism of The Man Who Collected Silence onto notifications, messages, interruptions and wider demands on attention. Research can support individual mechanisms, but it does not empirically validate the metaphor as one unified model.
Attention capture is not equivalent to behavioural control.
A signal can attract attention or create task-irrelevant thoughts without forcing a person to act. Individual goals, habits, context, social expectations and self-control all influence whether a notification is subsequently checked or answered.
Notification effects vary by content and relationship.
A generic app alert, a family message, a work escalation and an emergency warning may have radically different psychological significance. Treating all notifications as equivalent would hide much of what determines whether interruption is appropriate.
The role of self-interruption needs deeper treatment.
People often check devices without any external notification. Disabling signals may therefore reduce externally prompted interruptions without eliminating habitual checking, online vigilance or internal urges to seek new information.
Repeated responsiveness shaping other people's expectations is plausible but not fully quantified here.
The essay argues that consistently answering quickly can teach colleagues, clients and friends to expect future responsiveness. Research on social norms, telepressure and availability supports this general mechanism, but there is limited direct longitudinal evidence measuring how one individual's response pattern changes another person's exact expectations over time.
The analogy with medical alarm fatigue should be used cautiously.
Clinical alarms operate in safety-critical environments and excessive false or non-actionable alarms can have serious consequences. Everyday notifications are not equivalent. The transferable principle is limited to the idea that signalling systems become less useful when too many low-value signals compete with high-value ones.
Digital autonomy is partly structural rather than purely individual.
Workers whose employment depends on rapid responses, carers who must remain reachable and people operating safety-critical systems may have very little freedom to decide when signals receive attention. Advice based solely on individual choice risks overlooking power and role obligations.
There is no universal ideal checking frequency.
The email study compared restricted and unrestricted checking under particular experimental conditions. It does not establish that everyone should check email three times per day. Some roles require continuous updates, while others can tolerate much longer intervals.
Batching notifications may not generalise across all users or platforms.
The 2019 experiment used a particular sample, mobile operating environment and intervention design. Current devices, applications and communication norms differ, and later studies have found mixed outcomes when disabling or modifying notifications.
The relationship between notifications and wellbeing remains complex.
Mobile communication can provide social support, safety, flexibility, useful information and genuine autonomy. Research on digital wellbeing increasingly rejects simple dose-response claims in favour of models that account for what people are doing, why, with whom and under what conditions.
The essay's deepest claim is normative.
Science can investigate the cognitive effects of signals and communication patterns. It cannot determine which interruptions morally “deserve” a person's attention. That judgement depends on values, responsibilities, agreements and consequences.