I watch people on the subway, nearly everyone absorbed in a phone. I understand the lament about what we’ve lost: the accidental intimacy of strangers sharing a public space while actually noticing one another. I also see another possibility. People simply enjoy being entertained, or relieved of themselves. We always done it. We love bad songs on the radio because for three minutes somebody else agrees to occupy our head. We watch television shows we’ve already seen, do crossword puzzles, stare out train windows, read cereal boxes, follow hockey teams, listen to talk radio hosts we don’t even like. Maybe entertainment is not a search for stimulation but an asylum from thought. After a day spent worrying about money, work, children, mortality, what somebody meant by something they said Tuesday, the brain may just want a man singing a ridiculous chorus for the seventeenth time. Escape the exhausting person we are required to be the rest of the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I watch people on the subway, nearly everyone absorbed in a phone. I understand the lament about what we’ve lost: the accidental intimacy of strangers sharing a public space while […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-rockbob","post-9736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}