Can We Still See Each Other?

The Zulu greeting?Sawubona?means “I see you”; the traditional response,?Yabo, sawubona,?means “Yes, I see you, too” or “I see you seeing me.” Implicit in this greeting is the sense that until you saw me, I didn’t exist. When you stand before me, when you recognize me and acknowledge me, you bring me into being. As we stare longer and harder into the screens of our devices, we lose more of this sense of “seeing one another.”?

I was having lunch at a restaurant in Portland, Oregon not long ago and I noticed a young woman and her child sitting at the table across from mine; she couldn’t have been more than two years old. The woman was staring into her phone and no matter how hard the child tried to get her attention, the woman couldn’t pull herself away. I didn’t say this, but I sure did think it: “put your damn phone away your kid just needs you to look at her!” The child was now beginning to cry and still, nothing.

?My first instinct was to blame the woman, to think of her as a terrible parent.?But knowing a bit about how smart phones are designed, not just their technical functions and features, but the psychological design work that goes into making them nearly irresistible for anyone, even for the people that design them, I realized that what I was seeing was less about one particular parent, and more about an issue that negatively affects nearly everyone on the planet. Imagine what it’s like to be a child in today’s environment when she has to compete with an electronic device for his mother’s attention.?

It’s true, we don’t see each other as much anymore and the?humanity that’s gone missing is making us more irritable, more isolated, and far less in touch with our sense of gratitude and our sense of purpose — the two things known to be most responsible for our happiness.