Stop telling us to switch off – we live in a digital culture now | Suzanne Moore

France is encouraging employees to disconnect from work at weekends but why is the narrative around our online lives so punitive? Being connected is our lifeline

I left my house without my phone the other day and could not be bothered to go back to get it. "Sure, I can be totally disconnected for a day," I thought to myself. "It will be good for me."

It's a long time since I have been phoneless. It's not as if I am a teenager who feels her phone to be a necessary limb, is it? It would surely mean that I would be truly in the moment; not distracted by social-media froth, not needing to know the news as it happens, unable to answer emails or text various offspring my various and inane instructions. Instead, I would be in the world, communicating deeply and authentically with it. Poor world. For I awaited this cliched epiphany of disconnection. I wanted to say that everything was more meaningful now that I was no longer "elsewhere" (ie online). I wanted to feel the moral superiority, or at least maturity, of those people who proudly announce they don't do Facebook/Twitter/Instagram in the same way they once would have announced they didn't watch TV.