I travel a lot. One of the necessary evils of this arrangement is waiting at airport boarding gates. An exercise designed to test human patience, particularly after the airline has triumphantly announced that the flight is on time, only to discover that the aircraft didn't quite agree.
Today, waiting at Delhi airport, I found the boarding gate nearly full. Families returning home, professionals travelling for work, children running around, and those particularly irritating people boarding the next flight to Goa.
I have always believed that people travelling to Goa while I am travelling for work are unnecessarily provocative. There ought to be a law against displaying such happiness in public.
Jealousy aside, something caught my attention.
Nobody was looking up.
Everyone was immersed in a personal device. Mostly smartphones, a few laptops. Heads bent, fingers moving, eyes fixed.
(Reminder to self: Invest in chiropractor businesses. The future looks exceptionally promising, even if humanity doesn't)
What fascinated me was that even people travelling together were busy in their individual digital universes. A family of four sat opposite me. Four people, four screens, zero conversations.
Apparently, family holidays now involve changing the geographical coordinates from which everyone accesses the internet.
Even infants weren't spared. One toddler was being pacified by a mobile phone playing animated nonsense at a volume that would embarrass an artillery battery.
A digital pacifier. No sterilisation required. Just a charger.
Now, I am not against technology. Far from it. But something about this collective surrender to little glowing rectangles is fascinating.
We have become the first generation capable of communicating instantly with almost anyone on the planet, yet increasingly incapable of talking to the person sitting next to us.
And my prognosis on the why is this: Human beings love appreciation. Psychologists call it positive reinforcement. I call it our universal weakness for being told we are right.
Tech companies have understood this brilliantly.
The platforms learn what we like, dislike, believe and fear. Every scroll, pause, search and click helps build a remarkably accurate psychological profile. The algorithms then serve us more of what keeps us engaged.
Believe something strongly? Here are a thousand people who agree.
Dislike someone? Here's enough material to establish that your dislike is practically a public service.
Think the Earth is flat? Congratulations! There's an entire community waiting to appreciate your courage in challenging conventional geography.
Of course, algorithms don't always agree with us. Sometimes they deliberately provoke us. Outrage, after all, is excellent for engagement. The objective remains the same. Keep the user hooked.
Incidentally, isn't 'user' an interesting word? As far as I know, only two industries routinely call their customers users: narcotics and technology.
Pure coincidence, I am sure.
As a result, we increasingly live inside personalised echo chambers, surrounded by opinions that reinforce our own.
And this is where things become worrying. Real people are terribly inconvenient.
They disagree. They interrupt. They ask uncomfortable questions. Occasionally, they even produce facts that challenge our convictions.
You cannot log out an uncle discussing politics at a family dinner. Muting your spouse during an argument is technically possible but carries consequences considerably more serious than an account suspension.
So we retreat into digital environments where disagreement can be blocked, uncomfortable opinions dismissed, and validation obtained almost instantly.
We are slowly losing the patience to disagree.
There was a time when friends argued about cricket selections for hours, families debated politics over dinner, and college students discussed everything under the sun with very little knowledge and enormous confidence.
Nobody expected agreement. That was the fun.
Today, disagreement is often interpreted as hostility. A different opinion becomes an attack. A debate becomes a competition to establish moral superiority.
Everyone has something to say. Very few want to listen.
Even boredom has become unacceptable.
Waiting for a lift? Scroll.
Standing in a queue? Scroll.
Sitting at a traffic signal? Scroll.
We have outsourced the responsibility of entertaining ourselves to devices that are now better at it than we are.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Newton had possessed a smartphone while sitting under that apple tree.
He would probably have posted a reel of the falling apple, received seventeen likes and spent the afternoon arguing with someone about whether gravity was a conspiracy.
Physics would have had to wait.
Back at the boarding gate, I looked around again.
An elderly gentleman was helping his wife with her handbag. A little girl was excitedly pointing towards an aircraft. A tired father carried a sleeping child. An airport employee was managing three impatient passengers with the expression of a man who had long ago given up on humanity.
Outside, aircraft taxied, baggage carts hurried around, and ground crews went about their work.
The chaos had a method, the noise had a rhythm, and somewhere between the boarding announcements and hurried footsteps, life was putting on a rather interesting performance.
All one had to do was look up. But hardly anyone did.
Perhaps the real luxury today isn't a faster phone or unlimited data. Perhaps it is simply the ability to sit somewhere, observe the world and enjoy one's own thoughts without an algorithm deciding what we should think next.
As I write this, I am sitting in a café waiting for my coffee.
Everyone around me is staring at a screen. Two friends at the next table haven't exchanged a word. A gentleman is scrolling through videos with extraordinary concentration.
And here I am, typing on my device about people spending too much time on their devices. The irony isn't lost on me.
Perhaps I am the odd one out because I occasionally look around. Or perhaps I am exactly like everyone else, only with a more elaborate justification for staring at my screen.
Either way, humanity seems to have discovered a new interpretation of an old expression.
We bow our heads to thee.
Not to a flag, a deity or an ideal.
To a five-inch screen with excellent resolution and questionable battery life.
