Filed under: attention, digital
April 17
I was sitting in a waiting room this morning.
Rows of people. Heads bowed. Faces lit by the pale blue glow of their phones. Thumbs moving almost without thought—scrolling, tapping, swiping. A brief smile at a meme. A flicker of irritation at a headline. A video watched just long enough to be replaced by the next one.
No one seemed to be reading anything that asked for patience.
No one was writing anything that required care.
We carry, in our pockets, access to more knowledge than any generation before us. Centuries of thought. Art. History. Argument. Wonder. All of it compressed into a smooth rectangle of glass.
And yet, in moments like this, we use it to practice skimming our own lives.
Not because we’re careless.
But because we’re trained.
Trained to move on before something teaches.
Trained to react instead of sitting.
Trained to prefer the quick spark over the slower, steadier work of attention.
The cost doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive as a warning or a bill. It shows up quietly as a thinning. A mind that struggles to stay with one thing. A restlessness that feels normal because it’s shared.
Time doesn’t disappear. It splinters.
I put my phone away and looked out the window. Just looked. The light on the pavement. A car passing. Nothing remarkable. And somehow, that felt like choosing something real.
This was written later, away from the internet, in a notebook before it was critiqued by auto correct.
It felt important to say that.
