Low-Battery Anxiety Is Real. So Is the Solution

Recently, a battery caught fire in my kitchen. When smartphones start dying, people get weird: They head home immediately, swipe cables from coworkers’ desks, demand chargers from random strangers or places of business, and generally act so thoughtlessly that a false story about a girl unplugging her grandpa’s life support to charge her phone seemed plausible enough to go viral. “The basic purpose of the mobile phone is to allow people to be in two different places to communicate instantly, eliminating the human anxiety about loneliness,” she says. “But if you use your mobile phone to avoid in-person relationships, you create communication dependency.” So it’s extra traumatic when the phone dies—there go your relationships. Battery anxiety isn’t entirely unreasonable—the tech people rely on daily is objectively not great.