"It might be urgent"

The buzz might be anything. It might be the school. It might be your mother. It might be the boss, and if it's the boss it might be the one message that needed an answer in the next five minutes. The belief is that staying available is responsible, and that the peek is what availability costs.

Get out the list from chapter 1. If you did a week of it you'll have somewhere between ten and fifty peeks written down, and next to each one what it was. I'd guess, and it's a guess, that none of them needed an answer in the next five minutes, and that most of them didn't need one in the next hour. A parcel. A group chat. A friend asking if you're around. The boss saying call me when you can, which contains its own answer. The urgency was in the buzz, not in the message, and the buzz sounds the same for everything.

The one genuine emergency the law recognises is the 999 or 112 call when it's unsafe or impractical to stop, and that's the one you'd make, not the one you'd receive. Anything else that's truly urgent survives the four minutes it takes to reach a lay-by, and if it doesn't, it wasn't a message you could have done anything about at fifty anyway. The news will manage without you is about a similar belief with the headlines, and Sorry I'm late is about the optimism that turns four minutes into a thing you haven't got.

What the itch is actually about is the itch. The phone can wait makes the case in full, and I'll only summarise it. The urge to look isn't a response to the content of the message, which you don't know yet. It's a response to the buzz, and it's the same urge that has you picking up the phone in a queue or on the sofa. In the car the urge has borrowed the word urgent, because it needed a reason that sounded like yours. But you didn't peek because it might be urgent. You peeked because it buzzed, and then urgent was the story.

So the answer to "it might be urgent" isn't "it never is". It's that you can't tell from the buzz, that the drive is short, and that anyone who genuinely needs you in the next five minutes will ring twice, which the drive setting lets through. Chapter 19 is about telling people that, so the belief doesn't have to keep doing the work.