Couples In Bubbles
What’s with couples in public places reading on their phones instead of having an intimate conversation? Touching a screen isn’t nearly as fun!
Cell phone dependency and overuse are taking the oxygen and warmth out of human interaction.
The Waiting room cell bubble. Today I’m sitting opposite a young married couple who have not spoken (or acknowledged the other is still breathing) for 60 minutes. Their fingers on their phones have never stopped. Keep in mind, I am the only person in the huge waiting room with them, and I wouldn’t have heard their small talk anyway.
As I observed the bubble couple, I began thinking of my other outings last week. Our country is truly in trouble, socially.
The restaurant cell bubble. Last week we had a long, leisurely meal opposite a young couple who never interacted with forks in the right hands while punching their cells with the left hands. It was disturbing. They apparently didn’t look at each other, the waiter, or the food. They were like robots. As we walked out, I felt like they were aliens in a bubble, not real live humans.
Enough said? It’s happening in homes, public places, on walks with children and dogs. The humanity vs cell phone issue is a real problem for unity at home, in the office, and in the world. What kind of humanity is enriched by lack of eye-to-eye communication and civil discourse? Thank you for the phrase, Joyce Vance!
So, is this one of the reasons why we have so many young and old people depressed? Is it any wonder that we have so many feel lonely, detached? Though they blame their despair on Covid isolation, I disagree. It seems to me that these bubble souls have self-imposed loneliness on themselves with their cell phones long before Covid hit.
Unless all the cell towers would shut down, I don’t see any hope for bubble couples or bubble families. If you know how to break cell phone addiction, you’ll save humanity from itself.
There are growing numbers of people aspiring to escape the cell bubble -they call it unmachining and creating an embodied reality, and they have some pretty good ideas -see School of the unconformed recent stacks about seeds
The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
The mobile phone masts will not be pulled down. Luddites never stopped anything! People will not stop staring at their little screens. Something that once seemed like a technological miracle is fast becoming civilisation's curse, socially as addictive as smoking and as damaging as alcohol.
The sad thing is that the more we use these things the more lonely and isolated we all become.
So while I agree wholeheartedly with what Diane and others have said, we need to use our imaginations to search out for a solution. But in so saying, my imagination completely fails me!