Coffee and cigarette → coffee and phone.

Unfortunately we tend to ran away from being here and now. It differs on age and country. Take a bus ride and look around. Higher percent of grandmas sits with their smartphones and heads down in Spain than in Poland. In younger generation this local European differences seem to vanish. We are all wifis.

People teleport while they find it uncomfortable to be in some place. Being here and now requires being open to another person sitting next to. Opening the mouth, communicating something preferably nice and meaningful started to be much more difficult than opening a pocket with a smartphone. We tend to close ourselves in the safe worlds where we don’t have to act much to feel good. We loose many chances to connect in real by hiding in a pose of a busy phone user. Balance isn’t easy without self-awareness.

When I lived with my parents the fact that my dad started a day with coffee and cigarette was driving me mad. I hated the smoke and the fact that he couldn’t get rid of this silly unhealthy habit. Twenty something years later we wake up with a phone close enough to grab the first news from Twitter, read top articles on Medium, and check the calendar on Google. Coming to bed we put the phone just an arm away. We have just used it to pick a Spotify playlist. Habits change, people stay the same vulnerable creatures. Sure a smartphone is more useful than a cigarette and at the same time seems to be more excusable…