I am not going to argue that you should get a landline. There is no landline in this flat and there will not be one. But I have been thinking about what the landline had, and about the fact that we discarded it without ever naming what we were discarding.
It was attached to a place, not a person
This is the whole thing. Calling a house was calling a house. If you were out, you were out — not “out but reachable”, not “seen at 14:02”. Unavailability was the default state and required no explanation, no status, no apology.
Everything since has been a slow erosion of that default. The mobile made you reachable anywhere. The smartphone made you reachable by anyone. Read receipts made your unavailability visible and therefore accountable. Each step was a convenience and each one moved the burden of proof: it used to be on the caller to catch you, and now it is on you to explain why you were not caught.
What I actually do about it
Small, unheroic things. Notifications off for everything except calls from about nine people. Read receipts off everywhere they can be turned off. The phone charges in the kitchen overnight, which means it is not the first or last thing I look at.
And a habit I recommend more than any setting: reply slowly on purpose, even when you could reply immediately. Not out of games — out of establishing, gently and over months, that you are a person who answers within a day rather than within a minute. People adjust. They adjust much faster than you expect.
What I miss, honestly
Not the phone. The permission.