How to Be Human

Take a walk on any given day these days, and instead of staring at your phone, try looking around. If you want to do this on hard mode, leave the phone at home if you can manage. You may notice that many people are engrossed in whatever is going on on their own devices, as opposed to existing in the reality around them.

I’m a simple person, and to me this is perplexing. Many people complain about loneliness, difficulty making friends, troubles with dating, and yet they are so absorbed in their own little metaverses that they don’t even notice the people around them.

From my own observations, most of the time the people who are walking around staring at their phones tend to be scrolling through Instagram (or equivalent) mindlessly absorbing ads. On the subway I see this a lot, which is odd to me because the subway is a great place to people watch. Whatever is happening on Instagram is probably not going to be as interesting as the reality around you.

These days is challenging to even walk around outside without having someone bump into you because they’re not looking where they’re going. I have had countless near misses with people who are walking around staring at their phones, and in a few cases I’ve had people walk into me because they were so absorbed in their phones. In some instances their phones went flying.

You also see a lot of people walking around with their phones in their hand at all times, even if they’re not necessarily looking at it. It may be that they don’t have pockets, or perhaps they just don’t know how to exist without headphones and a phone in their hand. Boredom is pretty cool, people should try it out.

There are also those who feel the need to take pictures of everything they see, while failing to simply…enjoy the experience. If you’re going to go see Van Gogh’s Starry Night, you should definitely take your own photo of it because the incredibly high resolution photo on Wikipedia is not as good as your own! You came all this way to go to the MoMA, might as well let everyone on Instagram know about it.

I suppose I’m the odd one, because I don’t see the appeal of staring at your screen instead of existing in the reality around you. As a simpleton, I think I’ll stick with reality, but there must be something real special about the multiverse that makes everyone incapable of disconnecting from it.