When was the last time you existed?

You’re not just distracted. You’re losing something deeper, something you can’t get back.

It’s no secret that our attention span is terrible—at least, mine is. And maybe yours too. I mean, after scrolling for hours that bleed into days and now maybe years, something has changed. Also, I can’t seem to get bored, when the feeling arises, it feels itchy, I want to immediatly scrach it and relive myself. I can’t seem to get up in the morning without checking my phone, I sure as hell can’t shower without any music blasting. And let’s not forget the headphones, always within reach, as if they’ve become an extension of me.

Well, I feel as if this need to be preoccupied, to be constantly entertained, has stripped away something vital.. Not in the clichéd "You can’t focus anymore!" or "It’s bad for your brain!" kind of way, no I mean that is has viciously murdered our passion.

I have huge glasses but even with them I cant seem to see clearly, so I went to the ophtalmologist, it had been a while and maybe I needed new glasses. I arrived early in the afternoon and was directed to a waiting lounge that seemed packed with half the neighborhood. I didn’t mind, though. I found a seat and did what anyone in my position would do—I opened TikTok, scrolled a bit, switched to Instagram, answered a message that led to a call. I spent 30 minutes talking to a friend before he had to go, and that’s when my phone, a prehistoric fossil, was both overheating and dying. With no other choice, I slipped it into my pocket and finally lifted my head to take in the room.

Across from me sat an older man, impeccably dressed in all black, with a small pen tucked neatly into his shirt pocket, I found that very gentleman-ish. He looked like he had a dinner reservation with the president that evening. To my left, a man was hunched over his laptop, typing furiously , his fingers striking the keys with a certain forcefulness, what really weirded me out about him was that his screen was open at the widest angle possible. Both of them wore glasses. A few seats away, a mother sat with her young child, who was glued to her phone, either playing a game or watching a movie, I’ll never know. The mother, too, was mostly fixated on the screen, occasionally glancing at the door where names were being called. Opposite me, a girl in a school uniform held a book in her lap. I wished I had brought one too. To her right, a tall man with the beginnings of a beer belly was sprawled across his chair, slouched in a way that made me wonder if he had melted into it.

You might be wondering why I’m telling you about these strangers, I don’t know them and I probably will never in my life see them again. Yet in the 4 hours we spent waiting together, a bond was created. No words were exchanged, yet we observed and understood one another in ways that only time and shared circumstance can allow.

The old man and I made eye contact multiple times. He seemed kind, curious about who I was. He barely touched his phone, shifting his leg over the other every so often, saying "bless you" whenever someone sneezed. But after two hours, he started tapping his left foot—subtly at first—and glancing around, as if hoping someone might magically speed up the process.

The man beside me, buried in his work, barely noticed time passing. But I did. I saw how his typing slowed, how he hit the backspace key more often. At the two-and-a-half-hour mark, he stretched. I thought he was finally allowing himself a break, but no—he dove right back in. Even I needed a break, and I had just spent the past hour watching the sunlight inch westward through the window, feeling my own patience wear out.

The mother and child were also losing patience. Kid wasn’t sitting as straight anymore, rather he was lying on his mom, she was now even commenting on what was happening to the phone. Every so often, i’d notice her staring at the door where patients would enter. She had a tic of brushing through her hair as time passed.

The slouched man eventually got up to ask when his turn would come. The receptionist assured him it wouldn’t be much longer. He sat, slumped, sighted very loudly and after seeing a couple people enter the door and get out he got up, threw his arms up in a very dramatic manner and stormed out. That was pretty funny to me.

And there I was, just watching, observing, letting time settle over me like dust. Maybe some of them thought I was strange. But I wasn’t judging their foot-tapping, their hair-combing, their neck-stretching. In fact, I had begun to feel connected to them.

We were all subtly reassuring each other, telepathically sharing our growing impatience. Our eyes became soft towards one another and we weren’t as strangers as we begun, yet not one word was uttered. And though I had lost all motivation to write for the past week, suddenly felt the urge to capture this experience, the boredom, the uneasiness, the new friendships, the sound of the doors opening, the shoes clinking on the floor, everything about that moment seemed so odly poetic to me. We were aligned. We were, in some way, family. I was almost sad to leave when my name was finally called. It was a scene I would never forget, shared with people I never truly "met."

It got me thinking, what are we missing? What quiet, profound experiences are slipping through our fingers?? Are we entertaining ourselves into numbness? I mean are we going to entertain ourselves to unhapiness, death? Isn’t this entertainement stripping us from basic human experiences? Aren’t we going to become as robotic as the gadgets we’re holding?

I see the same phenomenon in books and films. I recently finished a mini-series that felt unsettlingly human. No quick jump cuts, no unnecessary music—just long, lingering shots that forced you to sit with the characters, to decipher their thoughts through a twitch of the eye, a subtle shift in posture. It felt like real life. It felt like being in the room with them. Often, we skip the long passages, the moments of silence where nothing seems to happen when in reality everything reveals itself in those moments. Those blinks, those periods that seem a to longer a bit more, everything is getting together to form a story in your mind.

You start to actually feel for your own, you start creating deep attachement to the characters, you start really putting yourself in that world, as if you were a part of it- which in reality, you are! From the moment you started reading this, you became a part of it. A shadow in that ophthalmologist's lounge, observing with me. Maybe, between the lines, you caught glimpses of my own impatience, my own shifting emotions. I don’t know. But what I do know is this: we need to reclaim our presence. We need to find wonder in the mundane. To pay attention not just to the grand moments but to the quiet ones, the ones that whisper instead of shout because thats what makes us human. The times where you go past a couple layers, you go past to what you think you see but rather focus on what you feel, what new thoughts you’re creating and how youre engaging in the love that is all around.

I need us all to try to leave our headphones at home, just once. Sit in the silence and let it unnerve you. Let it gnaw at your skin. Feel how your hands itch to grab your phone. Feel how unbearable it is to be alone with yourself.

And then ask yourself: What the hell happened to me? When is the last time I existed outside of my phone?

I’d like us to try to grab everything life can gift us, every once of feelings it throws at us. We have numbed ourselves into oblivion. We have let our attention—the one thing that makes us alive—be hijacked, sold, and repackaged into endless distraction. We have become passive consumers of our own existence, scrolling through life like it’s just another feed.

Is this it? Is this what we’ll settle for? A life lived through someone else’s camera lens, someone else’s words, someone else’s lies?

No, I would hate that for us, what i really believe is that when death finds us, we should not just have existed—we should have lived.