How I Live Now: 2026 Edition

I was taught, by my parents, by my friends and other family, by the art I've consumed, by films and books and stories– to contend with life. To engage, wrestle with, work through. To relish the totality of things head-on, and accept the gift of experience, be it joy or sorrow. I was taught to marvel. Because life, and especially human nature, contain such fascination for me, such mystery.

At no point was I ever taught to hide from life.

I look around and notice a change in the times. How long does it take to discover you're alone? I see my fellow sisters and brothers on the streets, in their cars, on the trains and buses and airplanes, at restaurants and libraries and cafes and everywhere else you see people, and I see they have found something else, something different. Present life seems uninteresting to them. Reality, and the people who exist in reality, have become things to hide from. 

This confuses me.

I watch my fellow humans, not with judgement but befuddlement, as they do everything they can to escape the present. If they're on drugs, they do it with drugs. Or alcohol, cigarettes, pot, coffee– anything but unvarnished existence. If they're not on stimulants, they escape using phones, earbuds, podcasts, scrolling. Endless scrolling. They obsess not over life but depictions of life, commentary on life, appearances. Simulations. As long as it's not the real thing… we're riveted. 

Why do my fellow neighbors prefer being distracted to being focused? Why do we suppress our capacity for abstract thought? For connecting with others? Are these not pleasant, even crucial skills? 

Do people imagine these muscles stay alive without use? 

Nearly always I'll be the only person on the train not looking at my phone. At best it'll be just me, the seniors, and the homeless people. One night I heard a man next to me speaking in a clipped accent to his friend. “Only that guy right there, and that little girl over there with her picture book, sitting with her mom. They are the only two. Everyone else on this train is looking at their phone.”

I looked up. Of course he was referring to me. I agreed and he smiled, that no one reads books anymore but I still do, it makes me feel good.
“To do something real,” he said in his husky voice.
"Exactly! I like to turn the pages.”
"What is it about?”
I was reading Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. How to explain it to two young men who were clearly not readers, and for whom English was a second language? "It's uh, it's about this lady who's trying to decide which guy to marry. It's old, written like a hundred years ago, but they talk about the same stuff we talk about now, should I get with them should I not, what kind of life do I want to live. You know!”
"Cool. I thought it was a Bible.”
"I know, it looks like it. I have to have a book with me though. Because this will never run out of battery, never gonna freeze up on me–”
"And it's actually real." Picture his hand gestures, clarifying his passion. “The phone, it's like junk food. You cannot trust anything on the internet. You can find one website that say vegetables are good for you, then another one say vegetables are bad for you.”
"Exactly! People just read whatever they already think.”

We reiterated the main points together. You've heard it all before. How this drives people apart, how it otherizes, prevents people from thinking for themselves. The speaker was a young man who grew up raising chickens in West Africa. He chided his friend, who was less introspectively inclined, for looking at his phone like everyone else. “What you looking at right now, bro? What's so important that you are looking at it?”
Defensively: "ESPN highlights!”
The first man shook his head, smiling ruefully. He and I commiserated for the rest of the ride. I'm guessing he hasn't seen Terrence Malick’s 2015 avante-garde experimental film Knight of Cups, in which a character presciently says, “Nobody cares about reality anymore," but he sure was familiar with the observation.

Why do people wish for all experience to be secondary?

Maybe I'm no different. My nose is often in a book, mentally somewhere far away. I'm often too shy to engage with strangers, giving in to that oft-untrue assumption that I'll be a nuisance if I speak up. When I sit still on the train, without a book, my mind is not present. It wanders aimlessly, without focus. I think back to Pascal, who in his 1670 Pensées wrote,

​We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

​Sounds like another smartphone-infested day of the human condition. Maybe things aren't so much different now as they are more extreme. We have better– or should I say more addictive– tools now. We used to hide from the present by considering our past and future; maybe all that's happened is that we've found a third place to hide, the virtual. 

And the virtual world is different because it prioritizes not authenticity but the appearance of authenticity, where the goal isn't achievement in real life but the depiction of that achievement in a digital space, a space where quality is measured by the only thing 2000s-era brogrammers could come up with: popularity. But metrics based on popularity encourage us to conflate adulation with value. In the midst of today's messaging, have we forgotten that those are not the same? Do we still possess the insight we used to have, the recognition that all of this smells funny? That our best self knows better? 

For me, those moments I spend on the train letting my mind drift, with no phone or book to guide me, are valuable. Books (unlike headlines and news feeds) develop our capacity for sustained focus and abstract thought, skills which enrich my life. Even daydreaming helps me: it forces me to generate my own thoughts. Creativity requires boredom to exist. How will I know what I think, what I can create, if I'm only ever intaking other people's thoughts? How will I develop my own opinions, if I only read those of others? I don't want to just repeat others’ opinions. I don't want to just read about life, or simulate it. I want to live. I want to hear the sound of birds, traffic, strangers, neighbors, wind. I want to dwell in the place where all experience– happiness, pleasure, pain, sorrow, regret, triumph, discovery– is real. I do not know why this is. 

But I must not be the only one out there.

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How I Live Now: 2019 edition.