Put your smartphone away, you're missing the entire history of you

No, you're not that important or busy. Put your smartphone away and pay more attention to the world around you.

Better yet, leave your smartphone over there, where you can't get to it for a few hours. 

Now breathe deep and try not to panic. The world (probably) isn’t going to end while you're deprived of your mobile pacifier. That's what a lot of us are thinking, but we're too heads down in our smartphones to tell each other that. 

The Handmaid's Tale, The Hunger Games, the Divergent series, somehow none of these dystopian sci-fi parables have prepared us for a techno-centric world in which the shuffling, oblivious zombies are us. In 2016, a report in the Wall Street Journal cited stats from the Consumer Product Safety Commission indicating that emergency room visits by distracted pedestrians using mobile phones were up 124 percent from 2014. The same report claimed that such accidents have increased 10-fold from 2006. Let there be no doubt, although we're increasingly aware of our distracted driving problems, we also have a serious distracted walking problem.  Read more...