Ben David Trigg

This is a true story. It happened yesterday (as I write).

I boarded the Elizabeth Line train at its South-Eastern terminus, Abbey Wood, opting for the train that wasn’t rammed-and-about-to-leave, in favour of getting a seat. I plonked myself down opposite a man perhaps in his fifties, bearded, big glasses, a little rotund, wearing a University of Westminster lanyard. A clever chap then, I’ll wager. This man didn’t have a bag, didn’t have his phone out – may not have had a phone, as far as I could tell. What he did have was a Rubik’s cube – a 5×5 one. It had its own seat next to him, and was arranged with all the colours correctly positioned on each of the 6 sides of the cube. As the doors beeped shut, he picked it up, shuffled it around like a magician warming up, and then bent his eye upon it, beginning to spin the colours all over the cube, to try to fix the mess he’d made but a few seconds before.

Make an iPhone version of that, Tim Cook, I thought to myself. No matter how many experiences Apple (and Samsung, Google, etc.) want to replace with a flat touchscreen, you can’t replicate a 3D experience. You also can’t replicate the kind of focus fostered by a singular device created for one purpose, and one that you can manipulate with your hands, at that. If I’ve learnt anything about the mind, it’s that we do a great deal of our thinking and learning with our hands. And typing, swiping and tapping with thumbs isn’t a good enough proxy for that, in case you were wondering.

Arrive at the next station, and enter the second traveller on our journey. This man, also a professional no doubt, sat down next to me, phone clutched in hand. He had those trendy headphones that all the latest commuters have, the ones that are all of one piece where the earpieces sort of extend bulbously from the wide band of the whole headpiece. He put them around his neck but not, curiously, on his ears; and from them emitted what I could only surmise was white noise, or something similar.

On his phone he was playing some sort of shoot-em-up with aliens, or something like that. I didn’t try to peer too closely but it was along those lines, you understand. He was frequently swiping and tapping to determine where his character should go next to deal with the next zombie, or whatever the apocalypse of choice was. Fair enough, let him enjoy his downtime before work with some sort of high-octane game on his phone. With his white-noise headphones.

Except then, curiously, he also got a book out of his bag, and opened it, rested it on his bag, propped directly above where his phone was nestled closer into his lap. Did he lock the phone? No. The game was still going. He was still swiping and tapping. Except now, he also had a book open. And some sort of continuous noise emitting from his headphones for all those around to hear.

I don’t know this guy, and I don’t know how his brain works, but surely nobody is really able to concentrate on reading a book and play a video game at the same time. I think he may have turned a page once while I was on the train next to him, so he was obviously trying to read it. But there was frequent game-play, so he wasn’t going that fast.

What have we come to, that commuters think they have to keep up with all the trends at the same time? Here was Headphone Guy, Smartphone Zombie and Cultured Book Nerd, all rolled into one. But none of the looks were quite succeeding. At least pick just one, fella!

(Obviously, I was trying to be Cultured Book Nerd, reading, pertinently, Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf. Maybe this is really a tale of three travellers.)

The capitalists that run the attention economy over at Meta, Google etc., want us to become all-the-things, wearing the latest headphones and glued to our smartphones to keep tapping on ads to feed them the dough from their advertisers, and we can end up if not frazzled by the zillions of stimuli entering our consciousness, at least hopelessly multitasking in the attempt to keep up with all the things we feel we ‘should’ be keeping up with because of our attention has been dragged in a thousand different directions and we must follow. Thankfully, Rubik’s Cube Nerd hadn’t got the memo, or has somehow mercifully maintained control of his attention so that he has the power to focus on a 5x5x5 Rubik’s cube for his journey to Westminster. But poor All-The-Things-Guy sort of knew he wanted the deeper, richer, more focused experience of reading a book, but was hopelessly glued to his game, and had to settle his fractured nerves with the sound of white noise emitting from his headphones.

Life continues to serve up these object lessons in flesh-and-blood examples. Each commuter can do what they like, as far as I’m concerned. One will enjoy a focused, distraction-free physical experience ‘IRL’ (In the Real World, a increasingly prescient and shockingly needful abbreviation, once as pointless as sunglasses for Icarus). The other will arrive at work already fractured in his consciousness, before sitting down at computer screens, getting pulled into ad hoc meetings, fielding text messages from home and from colleagues, continuously subject to these and all the other trappings of modern tech work that are equally culpable for fracturing our attention. He will come home exhausted.

Don’t be like All-The-Things-Guy. Be more like Rubik’s Cube Nerd. (Or Cultured Book Nerd if you prefer.)