On air travel and illness

I visited Estonia last week for work and came back to a wedding, a time crunch, and illness. And though I read a great deal these past two weeks ("I didn't know anyone read Pynchon after college" said my 80+ year-old Berkeley grad seat mate, Go Bears), this runny cold is making it impossible to say anything smart.

So, instead, let's revisit "The experiment." Reading physical books has absolutely lowered my daily and weekly screen time on my phone. Success. But it's also rewired the notion of "boredom" for me, and it was most visible at the many airports I breezed through last week. Every line, every delay, every pause kickstarts among so many their phone (This critique is "Boomer" only in spirit—a great deal of people I saw most absorbed by their screens were older).

I blame none of them, the apps we download are miniature casinos that have solved the great dilemma of attention—when to capture it, where to direct it, and how to profit from it. But it is still so weird to see. It's also, and again I sound so terribly old, such a joy to see the opposite. At a chaotic passport check in Frankfurt, the Americans somehow found one another across the flat-roped stanchion maze, and began doing as we do so naturally: Complaining in camaraderie.

"Do they know this is an airport? Where flights come in?"

"How long until your flight?"

"Do you want to go ahead of me?"

"This reminds me of LAX" to which everyone laughs.

It's remarkably easy making friends, even just for 30 seconds. You just need to look them in the eye.