So I turned the house upside down until I found that old Samsung... which proved, after I plugged it into an old car-charger (the original charging cord was long gone) to be dead as a doornail. Could I get a new battery? A new cord? What kind of SIM card went into that thing, anyway? And Lord, it’s ugly ... the stiff spine of my dumbphone resolve was beginning to weaken.

And then I read about the Punkt MP 01. It’s not ugly. And its only communication abilities are calling and texting. And my mom wants to know what I’d like for Christmas.

My MP 01 arrived just before Christmas, to my mom’s relief, and it’s a nice phone, though wildly overpriced unless you have a major jones for Swiss design. It’s not nearly as heavy as an iPhone, so it felt a little flimsy to me at first, but I’m getting used to it. Readjusting to old-school texting, using number keys and the predictive-text algorithm T9, has not been fun; and my wife’s emoji-heavy texting style has had to be curtailed. (The decision to dumb down has consequences for other people, I guess.) I find that I now call her more and text less, since calling is so much easier. Probably my favorite thing about the Punkt is that it has to be charged about once a month. This blows my mind after so many years of anxiety about low iPhone battery levels.

But far more interesting than the phone itself is the marketing strategy employed by Punkt to promote it. Both on their website and their Twitter account they relentlessly press the message that to use a Punkt is to “disconnect,” to “detox,” to be “offline.” Well, no. If people can reach me, and I can reach them, by call or text, then I’m not really disconnected, am I? But in a “you are your phone” environment, calling and texting can certainly feel like disconnection.

And for many of us — almost everyone in the Punkt demographic — the anxiety of being disconnected is strong enough that Punkt doesn't even try to sell the MP 01 as your main phone. Consider some of these suggestions from their Tips and Tricks page:

Turn on call forward: Direct incoming calls from your smartphone to your MP 01 when you need to make/receive calls rather than reply to emails or notifications.

Use with your iPad: The MP 01 is the perfect companion to a business tablet, which ensures safe typo-free email replies and is ideal for those seeking a break from the ‘always‐on’ lifestyle.

Twin SIM: Ask your operator to duplicate your existing SIM so you can take/make calls with the MP 01 on your smartphone number when you’re out with friends and family.

Perfect secondary device: For those who need to reply to emails and check documents outside the office, the MP 01 is a perfect secondary device (personal phone) in addition to their smartphone (work phone).

Temporary “disconnection” is the best they hope for. But those of us who preordered are given every encouragement to take the phone seriously—to treat it as an eminently desirable object and the use of it as a powerful signal. In the box with the phone I found a Punkt tote bag, some Punkt postcards, a big MP 01 poster, and a copy of Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. All important tokens of my new detoxified digital lifestyle.