Has it honestly come to this? Coffee shops that essentially block and disable your phones so that you have no choice but to converse with others in person? Sadly, it has. And this Bermuda Triangle of a coffee house in Vancouver isn’t the first of it’s kind. Well, actually, the Faraday Café in Vancouver is the first edifice to repel wireless signals (and therefore all calls and texts to and from your phone), but there are many other contraptions out there that claim to help wean people from the clutches of nomophobia (the fear of not having access to mobile technology, as crazy as it might sound). There are nifty little pouches you can buy on Amazon for cheap and which block all incoming and outgoing signals.

Some workshops out there teach people to create the pouches and there’s even a fashion line by Trident gum that does the trick. A recent global JWT Trend Report adds credence to this movement, finding that one out of every five Canadians wish they could turn out distractions, while 68% want to be more mindful of the “here and now.”

Hmm, to think, all of this work and money going into blocking signals when there’s a button that does it for free. It’s called Airplane mode, people, you should try it sometime. Works like magic.

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