Be Alert At All Times. Stay Aware Of Your Surroundings.

What the hell is Pokemon Go?

I mean, I’m a millenial, I know what Pokemon are. I’m pretty sure my sister and I annoyed the hell out of my parents as kids yelling “Pikachu!” incessantly throughout the house.

My question is more, What the hell are we letting this game do to us?

For a second today, I had a thought — what if Pokemon Go brought people into neighborhoods they otherwise wouldn’t normally venture into? What if people who otherwise would ignore each other started a conversation because they were both trying to catch a Bulbasaur? Could this game inadvertently make us more aware by forcing us to get out of our selective bubbles and walk places we otherwise might avoid?

I saw Facebook posts asking friends if they were interested in going on an adventure to hunt for Pokemon. Articles were already being posted on Buzzfeed about using the game to get exercise. I was hopeful that my initial skepticism about the game would be proven wrong, and that maybe there would be some sort of societal bend toward community.

Reality, unfortunately, tends to enjoy testing my ever-hopeful glimmers of optimism.

My friends — updating me on this new trend while I’m out of the country — were texting me about the zombified humans congregating in the park where they walk their dog, faces glued to their phones, oblivious to the other humans within two feet of where they were standing. An article I read started with a decision between catching a Meowth and getting to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s final performance of Hamilton on time. (albeit, it was a good article) And then the pièce de rèsistance, a bunch of teenagers used it to find people congregating and rob them when they weren’t paying attention.

And this is where my heart told my brain it was hurting.

Is this really who we are? Being human is hard, confusing and devastating at times, so we’ll just let technology be a buffer between us and a world we cannot comprehend instead of facing it head on?

Now, don’t get me wrong, the world has shown itself to be unimaginably cruel this past week, and we all need an escape mechanism. What better than an augmented reality where we have some semblance of control? Where we can run after something that can’t hurt us back.

But there is a difference between momentary escape and obsessive avoidance. When mixed in with news about communities being ripped apart by sadness are stories about people being negligent at work because they’re chasing a rare Pokemon, I have to wonder what we are doing.

We keep looking down when we should be looking straight at one another.

And if this is just how we cope with a world that makes no sense, shouldn’t we be talking to each other instead? Wouldn’t starting a dialogue with that person in the park standing next to you be more productive for our collective greiving? After all, you’re both trying to catch a Pikachu, so you know you have at least one thing in common.

We can’t just let our heads drift down and hope that by ignoring the world around us that it will become more like the one in our hands, where catching cartoons is all we need to worry about. We have such limited time each day to be better humans — you never know which one of those could make a world of difference if you’re spending it somewhere else.

So I’m just going to put this out there. After you’ve used eight pokeballs trying to capture your Growlithe, offer some words of encouragement to the person trying to do the same standing next to you. Then ask them how they’re doing. Don’t walk away until you’ve learned a bit about them and offered a bit of yourself in return.

After all, we should try to create a world where we put as much effort into being decent to one another as we do in catching fictional, animated animals.