Everybody lit up

Picture a dinner table in 1957.

The air is blue. Grandpa’s cigarette sits in the ashtray between the bread and the butter. Mom lit hers off the stove. The neighbor stopped by and lit up too, and nobody blinked, not even the pregnant woman at the end.

Nobody coughs. Nobody finds it strange. Everyone’s doing it.

Now picture your table tonight.

Same faces. Same blue glow. Only it comes from rectangles now, one per person.

That’s the trick. Smoke at least stung your eyes. A screen just takes your evening.

We laugh at the 50s. Doctors in the ads. “More doctors smoke Camels.” How did anyone fall for that?

The same way you did at 7:42 this morning, before you even got out of bed.

Cigarettes killed you fast enough to make the news. Phones are patient. Same years, different thief.

And make no mistake, this was engineered. Tobacco companies tuned the nicotine. Tech companies went to school on B.F. Skinner, who kept pigeons pecking by rewarding them at random. Slot machines run on the same idea. So does your phone, and the lever is right there on the screen. They even call it pull to refresh.

A cigarette burns down. A feed never does. Nobody ever stubbed out a feed.

When the public got nervous, both industries offered the same fix. In the 50s it was the filter tip. Today it’s screen time limits. A filter never made a cigarette healthy. It just made smokers feel better about the next one.

I’m not above this table. I’ve been the fifth rectangle at it.

And I’m no enemy of the screen. I met my wife on a dating app, the best thing one ever did for me. That’s the cruelty of it. The device that introduced us can still eat dinner with her while I’m sitting right there and nowhere at all.

I grew up in cyber cafes. Counter-Strike, Red Alert, the hum of old computers. The cafe charged by the hour, so when our money ran out the game did too. We stumbled out squinting, loud and hungry, and rode our bikes around town until somebody’s mom called us home.

The internet had a door and a meter back then. Now the cyber cafe lives in your pocket, and it has neither.

So who’s to blame? Big Tech built the lever. We keep pulling it. Blame only one side and the other walks free. Laws should force these companies to build less addictive products. But waiting on them to fix this is like waiting on a tobacco company to talk you out of smoking.

So here’s a dare, and it’s small. One dinner. Phones in a basket by the door.

Let the table be lit by something else. A candle. A lamp. Somebody’s face.

If that sounds impossible, you just got your diagnosis.

Then ask what you do with the evening you just got back.

Hike. Nothing in the woods has a refresh button.

Talk to someone with no schedule and no agenda. No agenda, no algorithm. Let the conversation run until it runs out.

Pick up something you’re bad at. A guitar, a language. Being bad at it is the point, because nobody optimized it to keep you.

Wasted life never gets a bad rep. It gets a push notification.

Teekay