This story is part of a series on how we make time—from productivity hacks and long walks to altering the function of our own circadian clocks.
Pooping today is a plugged-in, plugged-up project. At least three-quarters of Americans, including 96 percent of members of Gen Z, shit with their smartphones. Straining away, they text, date, and Google "hemorrhoids" at three times the pre-iPhone rate. I have a friend who spends his longer movements calling his mother. Amazon sells hundreds of toilet paper holders with phone shelves. Among the top rated is an aluminum rack touting its "versatile convenience": "the large, wide design not only holds your cell phone, it can be used as a rest for baby diapers, girl used pad … or other accessories."
I used to DM during every BM. Then, one afternoon a few years ago, I slipped into a poop portal. Backpacking through remote wilderness in searing heat, I felt the telltale pang. Coffee, eggs, chorizo, and water were all rushing—screamingly—to the exits. At the nearest rest stop, I dashed into a bathroom so single-mindedly I didn't turn on the lights and collapsed onto the toilet. The immediate release, shrouded as it was in shadow, was cosmic, like waking up from a nightmare, realizing it's Christmas, I'm 5 years old, and can fly. Though I haven't yet been able to recreate every condition, to this day I try to dump in total darkness: no lights, no phone, the gulf between mind and body quaked shut.
The (c)rapture I felt was likely a case of "poophoria," explains Anish Sheth, the gastroenterologist and coauthor of toilet-side staple What's Your Poo Telling You? "Some have compared it to a religious experience, others an orgasm," he says. The exact science is unknown, but Sheth thinks the sensation may result from "a slightly prolonged buildup, an overdistension of the rectum, and immediate collapse by passing a sizable stool, which fires the vagus nerve and releases endorphins." Lights-out pooping, Sheth adds, may "help with a proper rate of exit."
Smartphones only make things harder, threatening bowel, rectal, and mental health, along with hygiene. Phone users tend to spend more time on the toilet, increasing their odds of developing hemorrhoids and other gastrointestinal ailments. "Do the deed and get up," Sheth advises. "After a few minutes, there's nothing productive going on." Also, flushing ejects contaminated water particles about six feet in the air, spraying exposed phones with pathogens like E. coli and staphylococcus. A UK study found 16 percent of cellphones contained fecal matter. Adults on their asses everywhere are swiping through ass-tainted Instagram photos of asses.
How did we get here? "We used to be highly aware of where our shit was going and what it was used for," says Susan Morrison, author of Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics. Tudor Londoners hired "gong farmers" to schlep their droppings to the country, and land owners bequeathed dung heaps in their wills "because shit was worth something." But the proliferation of private bathrooms in the 17th century, as psychoanalyst Dominique Laporte argues in History of Shit, accelerated the rise of individualism and negligence. Today, Morrison says, "we prefer not to confront our shit, and that's dangerous. The less mindful we are of where what we eat goes, the less we consider our impact on the environment."
Sure, it's more polite and discreet to email while excreting than at dinner. Certainly, reading on the toilet, as Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel put it, is an "attempt to preserve the equilibrium of the ego; part of one's bodily substance is being lost and so fresh matter must be absorbed through the eyes." And of course, humans have feared sitting alone with their thoughts long before smartphones came on the scene. In 1952, novelist Henry Miller wrote a 9,000-word jeremiad against bathroom-reading "cowards," claiming "the moment these sorry individuals are not active, not busy, they become aware of an awesome, sickening emptiness in themselves." But now our phones are doing the sickening. To disconnect from 21st-century technology in the bathroom is healthy. To also disconnect from the 19th century and flick off the lights is an urgent return to nature.
Browning in blackness brings ethereal gifts. I am one with the early Homo sapiens who shat in the field by starlight, and with my pre-industrial ancestors who made midnight mud pies between first and second sleep, having nothing to ponder but the majesty of the task at hand. Whether it's 30 seconds of zen or 20 minutes of pyrotechnics, I am at the mercy of my body, as I always am but rarely appreciate. I become acutely aware that anything I gobble—Cornish cuttlefish at Alain Ducasse or a half-eaten McRib from the dumpster—will peristaltically boogie through the digestive tract's 30 feet (longer than the world record long jump), and thanks to the valves of Houston, the puborectalis, and scores of other muscles and glands in exquisite polyphony, emerge on the other end to be purified through invisible miles of pipes and cauldrons and transform into fertilizer for happy grub to gobble. All I have to do in this rigmarole is chew and flush. My bowels vacated, I am flooded with gratitude for my body and for infrastructure.
Zak Krevitt
I am one with the communal toilet shitters of ancient Rome, noticing fellow defecators. (In public restrooms, I just close my eyes. Coworkers don't take kindly to you whispering from your stall, "I must have darkness.") I make discoveries. I've found that the most avid gamers, who tap their touchscreens into submission, are the least likely to wash their hands. I hear men fart, grunt, titter, shuffle, and sigh. It isn't pleasant, but I hear our shared struggle. For a few blind moments each morning, I see that we are one.
I am one. Engaged in pure animal act, I'm reminded that at our most base we can be our most human. With no tiles to count and graffiti to read, I turn inward. There is a sly pleasure in sneaking into daytime darkness, pulling a fast one on society. But the greatest joy is to experience your unencumbered mind when it is alert, the rarest of treats in modern life. More so than with an oxymoronic mindfulness app, I am present. I meditate through a secularized, bastardized version of the Jesuit Examen. I contemplate relationships, failures, and death. (I am among smells of decay.) I make associations. I have ideas. A bowel movement, above all human projects, is the body's way of making time for the mind to roam.
When I leave the bathroom's sacred filth, I plunge back into the vortex, surrounded by screens until slumber. But, having walked into my mind for a moment, I am temporarily a little more purposeful, a little more attuned to signs of life within and beyond the screens, (a lot) less full of shit. Fellow dumpers, follow me to this poophoric pootopia. Follow your breath, follow your bowels. Enter into darkness to ignite your innermost fire. And whatever you do, turn the lights on before you wipe. It's not worth the risk.
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