It's increasingly to ignore what's around us at any given point and pay attention instead to our phones, computers, or other gadgets. However, as novelist Jonathan Safran Foer reminds us in an essay for the New York Times, paying attention to people around us is a valuable skill.
We're all prone to think about ourselves a bit, or disappear into our phones instead of paying attention to the world. As Foer points out, that leads to trouble if we are not careful:
Most of the time, most people are not crying in public, but everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention to such needs. There are as many ways to do this as there are kinds of loneliness, but all of them require attentiveness, all of them require the hard work of emotional computational and corporeal compassion.
Foer's not condemning technology by any means, but it's a nice reminder that sometimes we need to pay attention to the people around us.
