Last week I observed quite sad a scene - a girl, probably teenage, was so deep in reading something on her phone that when getting off the train she even forgot to take her bag with her. Since it’s not in the rush hour, the train was quite empty. So only because of luck that a gentleman had a glance and noticed it, hence he was able to throw the bag to her before the door shut.
You might say that it seems like an extreme case.
But is it really?
Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to see young people walking with their phone just few centimetres in front of their eyes, paying absolutely no attention to anything in the outside environment. The other day I had to stop because of the astonishment when seeing a dad having to pull his son’s shirt from behind to steer him from bumping into people walking in the opposite direction, because all his son could see was the phone screen in front of him.
And if you still doubt whether it’s really happening out there, search on Youtube or Facebook and you’ll see how many videos of accidents caused by young people looking at their phones while driving motorbikes on the road.
...
But when I ponder upon it a bit longer, another question came to my mind:
Can we really blame them?
Now, young generation doesn’t just appear from nowhere, right? And do we have any hint of what is actually happening in their family, the first place they need to learn how to behave?
In 4000 weeks, the author Oliver Burkeman wrote:
By any sane logic, in a world with dishwashers, microwaves, and jet engines, time ought to feel more expansive and abundant, thanks to all the hours freed up. But this is nobody’s actual experience. Instead, life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient. It’s somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven—or ten seconds for a slow-loading web page versus three days to receive the same information by mail
Yes, if there is anything people tend to agree, it is that this crazily fast-paced life is driving them more and more stressful all the time.
Hence, parents, when finishing their working day and go home, feel totally exhausted. It’s not hard to imagine how they would behave themselves at home. In a couple of families I’ve had a chance to observe closely, both mom and dad have a normal 9-to-5 job, and the evening often carries on with dad on the computer with his own entertainment, mom with a phone and an ipad in her own corner, and to make their two children less annoying, they give them a TV, 2 ipads, and 2 of their old phones to play (in case the ipads run out of battery).
So how can these children not become the young people we see on the street with their phone in front of their face?
I don’t know, but the more I observe what’s happening to the young generation, the more I think about a quote from Naval Ravikant:
No exceptions – all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness
After a while, I believe what Naval is hinting at in this quote is that we are actually sacrificing the 3-D world out there for the 2-D world created by the algorithm. Yes, that 2-D world can be more stimulating (because it knows exactly what you like, and what can catch your attention), but at the same time it’s much less real and nuanced. They are living in the real “Matrix”.
And with that, one of the main issues is that they stop observing, in order to learn how to behave in our society.
And that’s a really sad thing to see...
