Anything to not be here

Another digital minimalism stream of consciousness

I am at my window, watching a man smoke a cigarette on the roof of his apartment building. He paces, restless, through his own clouds of smoke. You can see the Bay from here, as the fog slowly lifts away from the water, but he isn't looking, cigarette in his left hand, phone in his right. He paces, frantic, for the minutes it takes before he crushes the cigarette butt under his foot and goes back inside.

I am on a train out of Chicago at the end of the workday, seated on the upper level, where I can see all the passengers below. The city goes by outside the windows of the train, brick buildings giving way to warehouse parking lots, which give way to the sprawling Chicago suburbs, an alternation between sparse woodlands and rows of identical manicured lawns. Below me, no one is looking at anything but their screens. Mostly phones — I can see them playing Candy Crush, scrolling Instagram, swiping on TikTok. One man has his laptop on his knees, his phone in his hand, and a can of alcohol in his lap. Anything to numb the experience. Anything to not be here.

I am on an airplane, taxiing on the tarmac, a middle seat in economy class. The woman to my left, a kindly abuela, is swiping on her shortform videos, and they are all of Hispanic women baking pan dulces. It feels a little wholesome, but she keeps swiping and swiping, until I feel glutted with more pan dulces than anyone could ever make or eat. To my right, a white woman in her forties is doing the same, only her videos are all of car crashes. I hate it, but it's hard to look away. They lose signal when the plane takes off, so the abuela on my left watches a movie, and the woman on my right pays for internet and works on emails. Below us, the Rocky Mountains spread out, breathtaking, endless and snow-capped, but no one is looking.

I am at my window, and all the young people on the sidewalk have their phones in their hands, AirPods in their ears. They look down at their screens as they walk and as they cross the street and as they bike and as they drive their cars. The only person without a phone is an old man, walking through a cloud of his own smoke. He drops his cigarette on the ground, walks twenty paces, then stops to light another.

Fifty years ago, you could smoke anywhere: indoors, around children. It was just the way things were. I've been to places in Europe where you can still just smoke at cafés or in your apartment building, and it seems so strange to me, such a norm violation, rude and disgusting. It used to be much worse than that here, much more ubiquitous, but now it's nearly disappeared. The old man chain smoking is an aberration, a relic.

Maybe there's hope.