Phantom vibrations

Today I was thinking that there’s… pardon, give me a moment, someone is sending me a message. Reaches into pocket. … Wait, there’s nothing there? Then where’s my… oh. The phones are on the desk. Not my pocket at all. And they didn’t receive any messages. I could have sworn I felt a message arrive though. What even is this. I spend a lot of time here talking about the negative effects of ubiquitous, always-on communication and the slabs of glass in our pockets that make this possible. It’s sometimes quite useful, but it comes with a lot of baggage I’m increasingly unhappy about. But lately it’s as though my body is having a physiological reaction to notification fatigue. I know people who’ve had phantom vibrations in their pockets for years, but it’s only started affecting me in the last couple of years. It’s creepy. I didn’t sign up for this. How do I turn these phantom vibrations off? How do I opt out? I figure that if we can invert sound waves to create noise-cancelling headphones,…