Commentary

Yesterday I ran errands with my family. Nothing unusual. A grocery store, a pet store, a stop at Home Depot. But something felt off. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

Everywhere I looked, people were only half there.

Couples walked side by side, each with earbuds in, listening to entirely different worlds. Teenagers stood next to their parents with one earbud in, half listening to their family and half tuned into something far away. Women pushed carts through the aisles with their phones propped up, watching podcasts while selecting produce. I watched a man standing at the meat case, carefully choosing steaks while on what was clearly a high-stakes Zoom call. He was talking numbers and discussing decisions that sounded important, yet he was doing so between cuts of ribeye and sirloin. Even employees on the clock moved through their tasks with one earbud in, plugged into something beyond the room they were physically standing in.

It struck me that we are no longer fully present anywhere. We live in two places at once, half in the physical world and half in a digital one. In doing so, we are slowly disappearing from the real one.

On one level, it feels rude. Something is fundamentally off about standing next to another human being—your spouse, your child, a stranger trying to interact with you—and giving priority to a voice in your ear over the person in front of you. We are signaling, consciously or not, that whatever is coming through our device matters more than the moment we are standing in.

But it goes deeper than manners. It feels like disconnection. Real-life interaction is thinning right in front of us. Conversations are fragmented, eye contact is shorter, and attention is divided. Presence, the simple act of being fully somewhere, is becoming rare.

And then there is the part that concerns me most: it feels dangerous. As a woman and a mother, I fully understand how much awareness matters in public spaces. Who is around you. Where your children are. What is happening in real time. When people are walking through parking lots, through stores, through life with one or both ears occupied and their eyes fixed on a screen, they are not fully aware of their surroundings. We have normalized a level of distraction that would have once been considered irresponsible, and it is everywhere.

I am not writing this from a place of judgment. I am not outside of this. I feel the pull every day. The ding of an email. The buzz of a message. The constant invitation to look away from the people in front of me and into a world that never stops demanding my attention. I am, in many ways, just as susceptible.

The other day at the restaurant, I noticed a table full of people sitting together, heads down, hands together, staring at their phones. I had this strange thought. If you removed the devices, they would look like they were praying. But they were not praying, at least not in the way we traditionally think of it. It made me wonder what we are orienting ourselves toward, what is getting our attention, our focus, our time. Are we, in some way, bowing to the endless stream of content and notifications while quietly neglecting the relationships and responsibilities right in front of us?

We talk often about bread and circuses, the idea that people can be pacified and distracted by entertainment while larger, more important things unfold beyond their awareness. Walking through those stores yesterday, it felt like I was watching that play out in real time. People are not just distracted at home anymore. They are distracted everywhere, in the aisles of H-E-B, in parking lots, in conversations, in moments that used to require presence, awareness, and participation.

Beneath it all is a deeper question. What happens to a society that only half pays attention? What happens when we become so accustomed to living in two worlds that we lose our footing in the one that actually sustains us?

Because this is not just about earbuds or phones. It is about something larger. It is about our growing comfort with merging ourselves with technology, allowing it to sit on our wrists, in our pockets, on our faces, in our ears, until the line between where we end and it begins becomes increasingly blurred. We are proving, day by day, that we are willing. Willing to be connected at all times. Willing to be interrupted at all times. Willing to trade presence for stimulation.

Maybe that is what unsettles me the most. Not any single device, but the trajectory.

Awareness matters. Presence matters. Being fully here, with your children, your spouse, your surroundings, is not just a nice idea. It is foundational to safety, to connection, to being human. We cannot afford to sleepwalk through our own lives, yet more and more, that is exactly what it looks like we are doing. Moving through the world half here, half somewhere else, slowly disappearing into the noise.

The question is whether we will notice, and choose differently, before we are gone completely from the moments that matter most.

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