Be A Little Rude—And Make The World A Better Place

Welcome to The Purpose Memo, a newsletter where I give you ideas for wrestling your life back from digital technology and living a principled life. 

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Quick note for my weekly readers:

I owe you a huge thank you for continuing to share this newsletter with friends and family. When I started, I had no idea how anyone would ever find it if I didn’t use social media. It’s already grown more than expected, and that’s because you guys have been passing the ideas along. Thank you!

In an effort to make the sharing process easier, the sign-up link for the newsletter is now just peyton-welch.com. A simpler URL makes it easily sharable in a conversation. If you can remember my name, you can remember the link!

Now to today’s post.

Face-to-face conversations are sacred.

From 2002 to 2023, the amount of time American adults spent socializing face-to-face declined by 30%.

In the early 2010s, Americans spent roughly 6.5 hours/week around friends. By the early 2020s, that number had plummeted to less than 3.

Technological advancement isn’t doing us any favors:

Zoom: In-person meetings now happen virtually.
DoorDash: Contactless delivery eliminates all face-to-face interaction.
Self-checkout lines: No eye-contact with a cashier is required.
Grocery Delivery: Don’t have to worry about passing people in the aisles.
Video Games: With live chat, you and your friends (or strangers) don’t need to be in the same place to play together.
Peloton: Get your workout in without having to travel to the gym (where the people are).

These inventions aren’t inherently good or bad. I continue to use many of them. But taken together, a broader trend emerges:

All of our basic needs can be met without any direct, face-to-face contact with other people.

If the quantity of our face-to-face interactions continues to decline (a trend we would be wise to reverse), it is incumbent on us to make sure that those few interactions we do have are treated with sanctity.

But there is an always-lurking, persistently disruptive threat to this sanctity.

It’s in our pockets and on our wrists.

Imagine for a moment that you and I are having a conversation. While you are talking, I suddenly turn my gaze ninety degrees to the right, such that you’re now seeing the side of my head. I’m clearing looking at something else, but I’m giving you verbal cues that I’m still listening.

You find it hard to keep talking. Clearly, I’m focused on something besides our conversation.

At best, it’s an awkward thing for me to do. At worst, it’s socially unacceptable.

Now, imagine instead of moving my head to the right, I tilt my head down 45 degrees. A message came through on my phone and I impulsively decided to check it. I give you nods and “mhm’s” to feign listening, but I’m obviously reading some notification.

In this scenario, you carry on the conversation normally. This seems perfectly acceptable.

A slight change in angle—from 90 degrees rightward to 45 degrees downward—somehow conveys a level of social permissibility that wasn’t granted before.

If face-to-face conversations are sacred, this cannot be a rule that governs our interactions.

As I’ve noticed this distracted-conversation trend sweep across my social circles (and have become susceptible to it myself), I’ve started working on strategies to protect against it.

Below, I’m sharing four commitments you can make that will help you be a focused listener in a distracted world.

Borrowing a phrase from Katherine Martinko, we need a new civil etiquette for devices, one that makes it crystal clear: it is not okay to check your phone or your watch while in conversation with another person.

There are very, very rare instances in which a message cannot wait 5-10 minutes. Those are almost always calls, anyway, and calls that would ring again if not answered.

Listen to Martinko’s words:

Here’s my hunch: you’ve felt this to be true. Whenever you’re talking to someone and a device interrupts your discussion, it doesn’t feel good.

Will it come across a little rude to stop talking when someone looks at their phone? Possibly. But that just means we’re holding each other to a completely acceptable standard of etiquette. We’re treating one another as we should—like human beings.

This is a simple rule we’ve adopted in our house. Occasionally, there’s a phone-related task that is time sensitive. When this happens, we simply say out loud, “I’m texting my mom back about our lunch plans” or “I need to respond to our pediatrician’s message in the portal.”

This strategy communicates to everyone that it’s not a casual phone glance, but a specific activity with an end point. (It will be tempting to do a few other things once you finish the original task. Fight it.)

I’ve found this also works in conversations. If I’m waiting on an important call from my wife, but I’m about to meet with someone, I tell them upfront. If they are aware that I might be receiving an important call or text, it completely changes how they relate to me if I happen to look at my phone.

The average person receives about one notification every ten minutes, which means the chances that your phone or watch will buzz during a conversation are high. That buzz is designed to create an immediate, irresistible desire to shift your attention to itself.

Don’t force your brain into the extra cognitive load of having to resist the urge with each passing vibration. Flip on DND and be present with the person right in front of you. It may even be worthwhile to tell the person you’re with what you’re doing. I imagine they’d appreciate an intentional gesture of focus.

The next time you walk into a coffee shop or a grocery store, try leaving your phone behind. Once you get in the habit of leaving it in the car (or at home), you’ll start to realize how few of your notifications are actually time sensitive.

There’s a flip side to this commitment: stop expecting immediate replies to your own messages. After all, the person you’re texting might have walked into a coffee shop and left their phone in the car. Their priority ought to be the people right in front of them, not the people in their digital sphere.

Get comfortable operating without having your phone accessible.

The Key Idea:

If we don’t choose these rules for our social interactions, technology will choose them for us.

Tech companies are not concerned with making your face-to-face interactions more meaningful. They are concerned with capturing your attention as often as possible.

Don’t fall into the trap. Don’t let it become the “new normal.”

Make these four commitments:

The world will be a better place because of it.

Thanks for reading! A few reminders:

See you next week.

PW