When we seek out human company, but the people around us turn to their smartphones rather than interacting with us, we feel phubbed. It’s a momentary insult, but we can get over it.
A more pervasive sense of alienation lingers over us when we realize that the instances of social isolation triggered by the addictive appeal of iPhones are part of a larger trend. We feel phoneliness, the emotion that results from living in a world full of people we rarely meet face to face.
Under COVID-19, the anguish of phoneliness became even worse. Suddenly, the socially responsible thing to do was to become antisocial. Social distancing became a duty for people around the world, and people developed closer relationship with their smartphones than they had with friends and family.
It isn’t an accident that people feel lured to gaze at the little screens in their hands, ignoring the human beings around them. Smartphones are designed to manipulate people, to pull them in with promises of social contact, only to deprive us of it, making our hunger for interaction more urgent, in a cycle that leaves huge portions of the population chronically emotionally malnourished.
The problem is that our smartphones never return our affections. While we long to hold them, they doesn’t care about us. These devices don’t have any feelings at all. They’re objects engineered to host algorithms that suck time and money out of our lives.
Phoneliness has only one cure. There’s no app that can fix the problem. Your only hope is to put down your smartphone and find another human being to interact with, face to face.
