The Difficulty of Saying Hello in 2018
Interaction Before Smartphones
The first great friendship of my life began at a time when smartphones didn’t exist. I remember it clearly. He was a new student at my middle school. On his first day, he sat next to me, not yet aware I was the class reject. And I said hello. At that moment, there wasn’t anything better either of us could have been doing.
This was in 2003 — four years before the debut of the iPhone and the beginning of a society fixated on their devices. Flash-forward fifteen years later, and it feels like people can hardly have a conversation without glancing at their phones every thirty seconds. The phone has become something of a universal third wheel, sitting in on all of our conversations, always whispering to us that something might have happened in the world while we weren’t paying attention.
Feeling a Little out of Touch?
In 2018, we have more forces connecting us than ever before. Between text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and just the internet itself, we have an almost unlimited number of ways to stay in touch, and it’s somehow managed to push us farther apart than we’ve ever been. That’s how it feels to me lately, anyway.
In the last few years, I’ve watched the close friendships that I’d cultivated earlier in my life trickle away, one by one, conversations going from the rapid boil of youth to the slow simmer of adulthood, all while each of us spends more and more time online. I’ve found myself often wondering how I got here. And I don’t think I’m alone.
It’s Not Just You. We’re All Spending More Time on Our Phones.
A major part of what led us to this point is oversaturation of the mind. It’s all too apparent that people worldwide have no attention left to give up, each of us drawn to the siren song of our own personal entertainment box. In fact, according to comScore’s 2017 Cross Platform Future in Focus report, the average American is now spending almost three hours a day on their phone.
What’s the interest in paying attention to the world around you when you can have your own curated stream of interests delivered straight to the palm of your hand? Hell, the thought of it is enough to make just about anyone want to ignore every human being around them in favor of funny videos of animals.
Think about it. When’s the last time that you just said hello to someone without an ulterior motive? Thanks to technology, even though we have the advantage of outreach to millions of other people in the world, we’re losing the ability to connect with each other in person on honest, open terms — terms that only ten years ago were totally normal.
Technology Now Lets Us Filter Every Decision
Technology added filtering to our lives that has all but eliminated the chance of spontaneously making that next great connection. Now, when I want to go on a date, I have to go through the middleman of a service like OkCupid or Tinder to find the best match rather that finding someone by chance. When I want to grab a bite in a new city, I rely on Yelp or Google reviews to help me find the best restaurant. When I’m surrounded by new people, I refer to the comfort of scrolling through the familiar faces of Reddit and Instagram rather than go through the perceived hardship of connecting with someone offline. It’s never just happenstance anymore.
Of course, it has to be noted that there’s nothing forcing me or anyone else to use technology this way. It’s a choice that we’ve collectively made that has become both acceptable and predictable in one another.
Better Living through Big Data?
The conceit here is that maybe that’s not so bad. Maybe it makes sense to implement the filter that technology brings to save ourselves the countless hours of bad experiences, from bad dates to bad food. Why settle on shitty friends just because they’re the only people around when your new best friend — as decided on by technology — is only a few taps or swipes away? Why waste time trying to make small talk with a stranger on the elevator when you can use your precious time to learn something new online? It seems efficient in theory, right?
But in practice? It doesn’t always work out that way. Maybe you avoid that small talk about the weather to look up something on Wikipedia, but how long until the rampant scourge of notifications show up to hijack your attention and command you down your favorite rabbit hole. Sure, you’ve avoided a potentially boring conversation. But all you’ve gained out of it is seeing something that made you chuckle for half a second that you won’t even remember tomorrow, adding, really, no value to your life whatsoever. That’s the new problem we face from technology. It’s now gone beyond optimizing your time, and now Silicon Valley’s mission is to instead steal your attention.
So what’s the point of this big, long rant? Why am I so upset? It’s because I miss the kinds of connections I used to have. I don’t miss those exact connections, of course, because they’re old and worn out. But I miss having the option to connect with someone in person without having to win out or talk over the little electronic square in their hand. I’m tired of being frazzled all the time and being overloaded by all the technology around me. All these apps vying for my attention, all sending me notifications nonstop, buoys in the ocean of content that grows more astronomically large with every passing second. It’s honestly suffocating.
Use the Deathbed Rule to Weigh Your Decisions
So what do I propose as a solution to this notification nightmare? The strongest idea I’ve found against it has been something I heard about on Manoush Zomorodi’s Note to Self podcast called the deathbed rule. This rule isn’t as morbid as it sounds. It dictates that you should focus on doing things now that, when you’re on your deathbed, you can reminisce fondly on.
Despite the allure and the thrill of using our technology, the pleasure it gives us is only ever designed to be a short-term dopamine rush. A years-long friendship is something you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life, no matter how it works out. But that notification that someone liked the picture you posted of you pet iguana? That isn’t going to mean shit to you in the end.
Put Down Your Phone and Do Something Worth Remembering.
I was raised with a core value that told me that every day I spent alive on this planet is a gift, and spending all that precious time looking at things that don’t add up to anything is, at the end of the day, silly. Make the choice to let the dopamine rush slide. Turn off your notifications. Read a book. Try saying hello to someone you’ve never met before — be bold and ask them how they’re doing. Maybe it’ll be boring. But maybe they’ll offer you a lot more than you expected: a friendship, an interesting story, or something else worth remembering. Much nicer than a picture of an iguana.
