New Year’s eve… Like many, many people apparently, the lovely and talented Mrs. G and I skip the parties and go straight to the movie theatre. Often following Chinese buffet dinner, but that’s another matter entirely. There is 30-40 minute opportunity to observe people in action. And what I saw made me sad.

There, four rows ahead of me was a couple that sat down to do the same thing as we were doing. They were (even) older than us. There was 10-minutes before the movie would begin. They sat. Then they each whipped out a smartphone and completely ignored each other.

But this is not the saddening part.

I often sit in in airport lounges and other places where waiting is the order of the day–or at least the hour. I, too, will check email, text messages, look up stuff that’s pressing, and respond to the demanding beeping of the reminder apps. Usually I’m alone not sitting with someone (like my spouse) with whom I could and probably should be communicating.

Even that’s not the saddening part.

I get it. You’ve got things to do. This is as good a time as any to be productive. Go ahead. However… the fellow sitting four rows in front of me, in a movie theatre, on New Year’s even, at 8:55PM, 10-minutes before the movie would start, WITH HIS WIFE was… playing solitaire.

That’s what’s so important? That’s how small life has become? That’s how meaningless direct human interaction has become? Was this the vision of the RIMs and Apples when they developed this technology?

Or then again, maybe they’d just had a fight in the lobby over whether to pay extra for the butter topping…