Who Am I Talking To?

Mid-sentence with a guy I’ve known for fifteen years and his eyes do the thing. You know… the thing. The glaze. The pupils stayed pointed at me but the person behind them exits stage left. Gone. Left the building. And then I keep talking anyway, the way you keep driving after you’ve missed the exit while hoping Waze recalculates before the next exit ramp lines up so you can get back on your itinerary. Maybe this guy will recalculate in time to catch the next sentence, which contains an important point.

It happens constantly now. I say something and there’s that half-second lag before the response lands - like I’m on a satellite call to someone standing three feet away. Follow-up questions often feel like guesses on where the conversation actually sits. People say “sorry, what?” when I’m in the middle of a sentence - not because the room’s too loud, but because attention is now too porous. Tell someone a story, and when you deliver the story’s climax, the person on the other end is still struggling with the opening line. What in the hell is going on these days!

Three suspects. I keep rotating through them:

Suspect One: The iPhone did it.

We made peace with it too fast. Two decades of pocket-notifications have rewired our brain’s baseline. And here’s the deal - the phone doesn’t even have to be out of the pocket to work; it must merely exist in the room. A silent third wheel at any table. And everyone at that table knows the phone is in charge; we just negotiate around it. Then the electronic beast lights up and we all bow. Call it digital triangulation: two people talking, with a phantom third party dictating the terms - and it is a true Digital Dictator. It’s inevitable - at some point in any meeting, you’ll know where you stand between the person sitting across from you and a roofing company in his/her neighborhood offering free shingle inspections, someone just re-tweeted the picture of their morning chai latte, a guy walking his dog triggered their Ring camera, Amazon just delivered new shoes, and another friend is pinging them asking them if they’re free for coffee in five minutes. Clearly you’ve intruded on this person’s life.

Suspect Two: The pill did it.

It’s Prozac Nation, twenty-five years hence. Half the room’s on something. And I’m not knocking anyone’s meds - genuinely, if the pills are keeping you above ground and vertical, take them. But something is getting sanded down along with the edges. Rampant SSRI use flattens the highs to save you from the lows, so what’s left is a midpoint flatline that can look a lot like someone way off in the distance - la la land. So sometimes when I’m talking to a friend, I must acknowledge I’m not really talking to him. I’m talking to Eli Lilly. Don’t mind him; he’s just interrupting his Prozac bender.

Suspect Three: It’s Me.

Least fun option, but most likely to be at least partly true. Maybe I’ve become the guy who monologues 2nd- and 3rd-order topics at a barbecue when the room just wants to talk about Kim Kardashian's negative chlamydia test that just hit Insta. I know I’m not owed anyone’s full attention just because I showed up with something to say (I actually go into my Notes app and write down topics of conversation as I “pre-game” most social gatherings). However, this thought stings because there’s no gadget or pharmaceutical to blame - just the possibility that I’ve become boring - or worse, I’ve always been boring and the people around me used to be sharp enough to fake it. Today as I speak, that distant look and wayward feeling might just be the person in front of me desperately scanning the room for someone who knows the results of Kim Kardashian’s recent chlamydia test. Dear God, save me from this Todd Robbins clown; he’s on about the yield curve again.

Landing it

It’s most likely all three, running at once. That’s the actual story. Not “phones are bad” - that essay has been read forty times by everyone in the room. It’s that every face-to-face conversation now has to compete against an infinite doomscroll feed, a mood stabilizer, and whatever’s actually going on in the other person’s life alongside their daily pill box - that’s a stacked deck where true conversations and connections will ultimately lose. Real conversation used to be two people in a room. Now it’s two people with the Apple board of directors, Mark Zuckerberg, and it’s TikTok o’clock at the pharmacy counter’s refill show - these all have better production values than you.

Ideas

When you catch someone’s eyes leaving the conversation, stop talking. Not passive-aggressively. Just stop, mid-sentence, and wait. Most people will notice the silence faster than they noticed the words. It’s the one thing scrolling a feed can’t give back to them. And if they reach for the phone - check a notification, look at a text, check an incoming call - stop. Sit and smile, and wait until the phone goes back down on the table or back in the pocket. Then continue where you left off.

Maybe we can get on top of this thing!

Now, what were you saying?

Todd