When Your Face Is Stuck in the Screen

This could describe many of the stations we pass through in our lives.

You might be talking to your favorite person, right when you need them, only to find them drowning in their screen, barely able to lift their face from it. And not only your favorite person — perhaps you are talking to your brother, and you find him gripping his phone, searching for something, or just sliding his finger upward through one reel after another. But what does this do to us? And why does it happen?

To someone like me — who does not use social media, who does not spend his time among the apps — this might at first look like a kind of rudeness.

But in truth, I have begun to feel it is not rudeness so much as it is something else.

I feel a kind of pity.

I understand exactly what we are in, and I understand the age we are living through, an age in which we have become surrounded by technology on every side. And I am not a stranger to that world — I am an AI engineer, and perhaps that is why I know, better than most, how these technologies were designed to seize attention and hold onto it.

And so I began to look at the matter from a different angle.

I no longer see it as mere bad manners.

I would almost swear it is not far from addiction.

Giving one another undivided time, in this age, has become extraordinarily hard.

Even as I speak to you now, there is someone sitting on his phone, and another in front of his computer on the far side. And though our languages differ, he does not know what I am saying, nor does he pay any attention to what is around him in the first place.

Do you know why?

Because he is preoccupied.

Immersed in a world no wider than the distance between his eyes and the screen before them.

As the wisdom goes:

What stays constantly before your eyes becomes constantly before your mind.

This device has fixed its grip on his attention, until it has come to own most of his thinking.

But the point is not here.

The point is this:

In this age, are we still truly capable of forming natural relationships?

I have begun to doubt it.

I have even come to doubt that a fully natural human relationship exists between any two people in this world.

I realize this may be a jarring truth, and some may see it as nothing but a foolish notion I have thrown out.

But what I know for certain is that this problem needs a solution.

For if this becomes the state of every relationship — between a brother and his brother, between a husband and his wife, between a friend and his friend — relationships will not last long.

Or perhaps they will last…

but they turn into relationships more like ghosts.

Their people know one another, yet they meet only in a morning greeting, or a passing question, or a curt message before sleep.

I say this while I am afflicted by the very same thing.

I am not far from it.

And though I keep my distance from social media, the affliction needs no Facebook, no Instagram, no TikTok, nor any of the rest.

It needs only the device itself.

I am not saying the addiction is the addiction to one particular app.

It may well be the addiction to the tap.

The addiction to scrolling.

The addiction to searching for something, then finding yourself, minutes later, with no idea how you even arrived at what you are looking at now.

The mind, in that moment, is not the one driving.

The finger is.

I hope with all my heart that we find a solution to this.

And I hope that one day I will be able to say to myself: I have time to spend with this person, and with that one, without a device tearing me away from between them.

But I am still in the whirlpool of preoccupation.

I need this computer to study.

I need it to build my work.

I need it to learn.

But…

I have started building my work while I am talking to someone.

And there was the shock.

I am the very same person who used to say this was a kind of rudeness.

So how did I end up doing it too?