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I ignore any calls that are not from my contacts. If it's important they'll leave a message. I have DND on at night. Calls and messages from my wife have separate sounds and exception from DND.
This should be the default on new phones. I enabled it the first time I got a call at 3AM from one of my clients. Many people just have no respect.
All my phones have always been on DnD, I don't even know how my ringtone sounds.
Mine is currently the intro to Give Me the Night by George Benson, in case anyone wondered.
Wow. Don't change the setting back! Never!!
Or your phone would be blocked forever with downloading all these missed notifications...
;-)
I did a similar but more generalised thing since long ago, when I got my first pager (pre-mobile) in '95. I made myself a solemn promise that I would gratuitously and unapologetically use silent-mode, DnD, etc (including more recently auto-DnD every late-afternoon-to-mid-morning, even on weekends, when it became a thing) to live an almost exclusively asynchronous life. I almost never answer direct phone-calls too, often even for many of the recognised numbers. My modus operandi is this:
If it's a real emergency a call might be unavoidable, but if it's just typical-urgent it could be an SMS (key part of that acronym is Short) which I would see relatively soon. Alternatively a sensitive/private urgent requirement could be fulfilled via Signal. Otherwise email (pgp-encrypted if it has to be private) which I usually catch up with every day or two. Also I disable all non-critical realtime app-notifications entirely. Additionally whenever someone calls/emails me with an "opportunity" requiring "immediate response because they need a confirmation by yesterday!!!!1" I know that means the work is going to be like that too (absent time-management or time-discipline, bouncing between crises in parallel) so my go-to response is along the lines of "Thanks, but such a shame it's so last-minute - it would be impossible for me to properly consider this against the rest of my schedule and decide responsibly whether I could do it. I hope you find someone."
I didn't choose that for the sake of being antisocial, I chose it because I felt that "flow state" and "focus-retention while tackling complex problems" are extremely precious resources, and also increasingly rare. Most (not all) of the time if you don't push back to protect that then others won't voluntarily protect yours for you, because a lot of people only respect their own time, mental-bandwidth and priorities, and not those of others. I found that batching tasks together to grind through them in bulk without interruption is not only useful at work, but in most of the mundane/administrative parts of life too, because it minimizes the destructive effect of context-switching.
I discovered a very astute validation of this in an essay by Paul Graham "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
I kinda do this. I've found that I drift away from everyone. I don't respond in real time. I don't want to interrupt anyone for idle conversation.
Not sure I'd really recommend, but I can't seem to help drifting away from people. Only people in my life are my wife, kids, and people my wife keeps in my life, which includes my own folks.
It's lonely when I stop to think about it. Which mostly I don't, but when I do.... it sucks. And I think I'm accidentally raising my kids to be the same way.
Smart man.
I mean, you can set DND to be on at certain times so that, short of an emergency that is sent tagged as such, you won't get notifications during certain hours of the day or night. Y'all don't need to get all bohemian self righteous with the whole "I've disconnected from the world through my phone and have never looked back". Seriously, get over yourself. We all have our crosses to bare and DND is a great feature for some "leave me alone" time but there's no need to become a virtual hermit in order to have some peace and quiet.