The tweezers finally bit into the sliver of walnut, and with a sharp, stinging tug, the splinter slid out of my thumb. I stared at it for 22 seconds. It was a tiny thing, no longer than a millimeter, yet it had dictated my entire range of motion for the last 52 minutes. As a grandfather clock restorer, my hands are my eyes. If there is a hitch in the movement, a jagged edge in the escapement, or a microscopic burr on a gear, the rhythm of time itself falters. I wiped the blood on my apron and looked at the 122-year-old longcase clock standing before me, its brass weights hanging like heavy, silent pendulums of potential energy. It’s funny how we spend our lives trying to keep things on time, yet the most beautiful moments I’ve ever experienced happened when I had no idea what time it was, or even where I was standing.

Last year, I found myself in the center of Rome, standing within the shadow of the Colosseum. But I wasn’t looking at the stone. I wasn’t feeling the weight of two thousand years of history pressing down on the dirt. Instead, I was staring at a glowing rectangle in my palm, scrolling through 312 Yelp reviews to ensure the carbonara I was about to eat was the ‘optimal’ choice for my soul. I was terrified of a 3.2-star experience. I was paralyzed by the possibility that there might be a better pasta 12 minutes away. This is the sickness of the modern traveler. We have optimized the serendipity right out of the world. We have replaced the joy of discovery with the anxiety of the blue dot on a digital map, hovering over a pre-rendered landscape that leaves no room for the accidental.

Sometimes I think about the gears in these clocks. They are physical, literal connections. If one tooth is broken, the whole system stops. Our digital maps are the opposite; they are illusions of connection. They tell us where we are in relation to a satellite, but they don’t tell us where we are in relation to the baker who just pulled a loaf of bread out of an oven 2 meters behind us. I’ve caught myself doing it too. I’ll be in a new city and I won’t look up for 12 blocks because I’m so focused on making sure the blue dot stays on the blue line. It’s a digital leash. We aren’t travelers anymore; we are cursors being dragged across a screen by an algorithm that thinks it knows what we want based on our previous search for ‘best artisanal coffee.’

I once spent 22 days in the French countryside without a working phone. I’d love to tell you it was a conscious, meditative choice, but the truth is I just forgot my charger and was too stubborn to buy a new one for 42 euros. The first two days were a panic. I felt like I had lost a limb. I didn’t know where the nearest pharmacy was, and I couldn’t check the weather. But by the 12th day, something shifted. I started looking at the moss on the north side of trees. I started asking locals for directions, which led to a 2-hour conversation with a woman who had been making goat cheese in the same shed since 1972. She didn’t have a Google Business profile. She didn’t exist to the blue dot. And yet, her cheese was the most real thing I had tasted in a decade. I’ve always been a hypocrite about technology. I hate how it detaches us, yet I’m the first person to complain if the shop’s Wi-Fi drops while I’m trying to source a specific 12-gauge spring from a supplier in Germany. Precision is a double-edged sword. You want it in the clock’s movement, but you don’t necessarily want it in your afternoon.

The Unseen and Unrated

The irony is that the technology itself isn’t the enemy; it’s our subservience to it. We use connectivity as a shield against the unknown rather than a safety net for the bold. We check our phones 102 times a day because we are afraid of missing a notification, but we don’t realize we are missing the actual physical world. Connectivity should be the thing that allows us to look up, not the thing that forces us to look down. When you know you can find your way back to your hotel, you should feel more comfortable wandering into the dark. It’s about the shift from ‘where am I?’ to ‘what is this?’ The goal of travel shouldn’t be to arrive at the destination with the best photos; it should be to arrive back home with a slightly different version of yourself. That only happens when you let the world surprise you. You need a way to navigate that doesn’t feel like a digital cage. You need the freedom to be reachable without being tethered.

That’s why I finally consulted the HelloRoam eSIM guide before heading out to find rare clock parts in distant villages; it provides that quiet background security that lets me put the phone in my pocket and actually look at the architecture. It’s the difference between a tool and a master.

The Commodity of Experience

I remember working on a clock that had been submerged in a flood in 1952. The wood was warped, and the iron was rusted shut. It took me 82 days to get the heartbeat back into that machine. There was no manual, no YouTube tutorial for this specific model. I had to feel it. I had to listen to the metal. Travel used to be like that. You had to feel the city. You had to listen to the rhythm of the streets. Now, we want everything pre-digested. We want the ’12 best things to do’ before we’ve even stepped off the plane. We’ve turned the world into a commodity to be consumed rather than a mystery to be inhabited. It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s the difference between a life and a resume. I’ve made the mistake of planning every 22-minute block of a trip before, only to realize at the end that I couldn’t remember the smell of the air or the sound of the wind. I just remembered the interface of the app I was using.

We need to regain our capacity for boredom. Serendipity lives in the gaps. It lives in the 12 minutes you spend waiting for a bus that may or may not come. It lives in the wrong turn that leads you to a bookstore with a cat sleeping on a stack of first editions. But our phones have eliminated the gaps. Every spare second is filled with a refresh, a scroll, a check. We are the most informed and least observant generation in history. I see it in my shop all the time. People come in to see the clocks, and they spend the first 2 minutes taking a video of the pendulum swinging. They aren’t listening to the sound-the deep, resonant ‘thrum’ of a 12-pound weight doing its job. They are seeing it through a screen. They are once again optimizing the experience instead of experiencing it.

The Courage to Be Lost

I think about that splinter again. It was a physical reality that demanded my attention. It was uncomfortable, yes, but it was honest. Maybe that’s what we need in our travels. A little bit of discomfort. A little bit of ‘I don’t know where the hell I am.’ We need to stop being terrified of the 3.8-star bistro. We need to stop trusting the algorithm more than our own eyes. The world is much larger than the 5.2-inch screen in your pocket, and it’s much more beautiful when it isn’t being rendered in real-time by a server in California.

Next time you find yourself in a new place, try an experiment. Walk for 12 minutes in a direction the map doesn’t suggest. Buy a coffee from the place that doesn’t have a single review. Sit on a bench and don’t take a photo for 42 minutes. You might find that the world hasn’t been mapped as thoroughly as you thought. You might find that there is still some magic left in the parts of the map that aren’t highlighted in blue. And if you get lost, well, that’s usually when the story actually starts. You can always find your way back eventually. The clock keeps ticking, whether you’re looking at it or not, so you might as well spend those seconds looking at something real.