I Plugged In a 1987 Answering Machine for My Mental Health and Now My Entire Family Has Filed a Missing Persons Report

Let me set the scene. It is a Tuesday in March. I am standing in front of a folding table at a garage sale in Akron, Ohio, staring at a cream-colored hunk of plastic with a cassette tape inside it, and I am experiencing what I can only describe as a spiritual awakening. The sticker on it says $11. The woman running the sale tells me it still works. I buy it with the energy of someone who has just solved a problem they did not previously know they had.

The problem, I had decided, was availability. I was too reachable. Too tethered. Every notification, every buzz, every little red badge screaming at me from the corner of an app — it was all slowly dismantling my capacity for peace. I had read approximately four articles about the importance of 'analog living' and watched one YouTube video about a man in Vermont who only communicates via handwritten letters and keeps bees. I was ready.

The answering machine, I told myself, was the solution. People would call. I would not answer. The machine would take a message in that warm, crackly, pre-digital way. I would listen when I was ready — on my own terms, at my own pace, like a person who has their life together. It felt romantic. It felt intentional. It felt, if I'm being completely honest, extremely cool.

It was not extremely cool.

The First Casualty: My Mother

My mom called on a Wednesday at 2:47 in the afternoon. I was home. I watched the phone ring with the serene detachment of someone who has achieved inner stillness. The answering machine picked up. I had recorded a message in my calmest voice: 'Hey, you've reached GoTillman. I'm probably outside or reading or just being present. Leave a message and I'll get back to you when the time feels right.'

She left eleven messages in four hours.

By message three, she had moved from mildly confused to audibly concerned. By message seven, she was listing emergency contacts. By message eleven, she had called my neighbor Linda, who she does not know, using a number she found on a neighborhood Facebook group, to ask Linda to physically check if I was alive. Linda knocked on my door while I was making pour-over coffee and feeling very zen about everything.

I answered the door. Linda stared at me. I stared at Linda. We had never spoken before.

'Your mom thinks you're dead,' Linda said.

I was not dead. I was just slow-living.

The Philosophical Problem Nobody Warned Me About

Here is the thing about deliberately missing calls in 2025: it reads, to everyone in your life, as a crisis. We have spent twenty years training the people who love us to expect instant responses. Seen at 3:04. Delivered. Read receipts. The entire infrastructure of modern relationships is built on the assumption that you are, at minimum, glanceable. The moment you remove yourself from that infrastructure, you do not seem peaceful. You seem like you are either furious at someone or actively being held against your will.

My friend Darnell texted me — because of course he texted me, the answering machine does not intercept texts, a flaw I had not fully considered — to ask if we were 'good.' We were good. We had not spoken in four days, which, before smartphones, would have been completely normal. Now it was a relationship event requiring acknowledgment.

I tried to explain the answering machine to my coworker Priya over lunch. She looked at me the way you look at someone who tells you they've started making their own cheese. Interested, briefly. Then concerned. Then quietly hoping you won't offer them any.

'So you're just... not answering your phone?' she said.

'I'm answering it,' I said. 'On a delay. Intentionally.'

'That's just being unavailable,' she said.

'It's mindfully unavailable,' I said.

She ate her sandwich.

Nostalgia Is Just Stress Avoidance in a Vintage Coat

Here is what I have learned, three weeks into my answering machine era: the appeal of old technology is not really about the technology. Nobody is genuinely nostalgic for rewinding cassette tapes or the mechanical clunk of a receiver. What we are nostalgic for is the permission those technologies gave us. Permission to be unreachable. Permission to exist without being constantly audited for our responsiveness. The answering machine did not create peace in 1987 — it just didn't have the infrastructure yet to demand anything more.

We are not trying to go back. We are trying to escape forward, using retro aesthetics as cover, because saying 'I bought a vintage answering machine' sounds considerably more whimsical than saying 'I am overwhelmed by the volume of human contact in my life and I need everyone to stop.'

Both are true. Only one of them fits in a linen-toned Instagram flat lay.

The Machine Stays, Though

Despite everything — despite Linda, despite my mother's spiral, despite Darnell's feelings check-in, despite Priya's sandwich — I have not unplugged the answering machine.

I did call my mom back and explain the situation. She was quiet for a moment and then said, 'So it's like a hobby?' I said yes. She said, 'Like your sourdough phase?' I said it was nothing like my sourdough phase. She said, 'Okay, but I'm putting Linda's number in my phone just in case.'

Fair enough.

The machine sits on my kitchen counter, next to a plant I am also trying to keep alive as an act of intentionality. It blinks when there's a message. There is something genuinely, embarrassingly satisfying about that blink. It does not demand anything. It just blinks. Patient. Unhurried. Eleven dollars of pure, crackly, low-stakes peace.

Is it solving my stress? Unclear. Is it creating new stress for everyone around me? Absolutely, measurably, yes.

But for approximately forty-five minutes on a Wednesday afternoon, while my mother was leaving her fourth voicemail and Linda was still deciding whether to knock, I sat in my kitchen and drank my coffee and did not know any of that was happening.

And it was, genuinely, the most rested I have felt in years.

So. The machine stays.