Comedian Pete Holmes, star of HBO's Crashing, spoke to WIRED for its "User Behavior" series about how he keeps his phone use unusually low and why he believes we are all on the verge of "slowly walking away" from our devices. He argues that much of modern digital life amounts to "manufactured urgency" that people perpetuate by taking it seriously, and he presents his own habits as proof that one can hold down a career and a life while largely ignoring the pressure to stay constantly connected.

Holmes uses an iPhone Air, which he favours partly because it sold poorly and looks distinctive, and keeps his average daily screen time to around an hour and 15 minutes. His tactics include running the phone in greyscale, pinning the screen-time widget to his home screen, keeping no social media apps installed, and routinely marking texts as unread. He reports 80 unread texts and more than 55,000 unread emails, framing this backlog as a deliberate stand rather than negligence. An AI optimist, he nonetheless predicts that AI-driven disinformation flooding inboxes will push people back towards in-person contact, and he also discusses his mix of Spotify and Apple Music and his 2022 MacBook Air.