**By William** | *The Observer*
Last Tuesday evening, my neighbors' power went out. Nothing catastrophic—a transformer somewhere gave up its ghost, plunging four blocks into an agrarian darkness our great-grandparents would have found unremarkable. Within twenty minutes, I watched something I hadn't witnessed in years: three families materialized on their porches with candles and actual conversation.
No phones. The batteries were being conserved for "emergencies," though what constitutes an emergency when you're simply eating dinner two hours early was never quite defined. What I observed instead was something I'd nearly forgotten existed: people talking to each other with what can only be described as their whole faces.
There's a particular quality to conversation that occurs when neither party is clutching a glowing rectangle of infinite distraction. The French have a phrase for the wit that arrives too late—*l'esprit de l'escalier*, the clever thing you think of on the staircase after leaving the party. We need a phrase for the opposite phenomenon: the unexpected depth that arrives when you're not mentally composing your exit strategy or wondering if someone more interesting has texted.
## The Tyranny of Elsewhere
Our devices have made us all simultaneously present and absent, like dinner party guests who keep glancing toward the door in case someone more fascinating arrives. The phone on the table—even face down, even "just checking it once"—serves as a kind of ejection seat from the present moment. It announces: *This conversation is sufficient for now, but I'm keeping my options open.*
I've been thinking about this after spending an afternoon with my oldest friend, who has adopted what he calls a "phone sabbath" during social visits. He leaves the thing in his car. The first twenty minutes of our lunch felt oddly intense, almost confrontational. I kept reaching for my pocket with the automaticity of a phantom limb. But then something shifted. We fell into the kind of ranging, associative talk that characterized our college years—the sort of conversation that follows its own peculiar logic rather than the staccato rhythm of notification-interrupted discourse.
We discussed everything and nothing: his daughter's struggle to choose a college major (she's considering ornithology, which he fears is "poetry with binoculars"), my failed attempt to grow tomatoes, the question of whether anyone truly understands jazz or we're all just pretending. The conversation had what I can only describe as *drift*—that quality of genuine exchange where you begin discussing one thing and end up somewhere entirely unexpected, having followed a trail of tangents that made perfect sense in the moment.
This is what screens steal from us: not time, exactly, but texture.
## The Lost Art of Boring Each Other
There's a passage in Virginia Woolf's diary where she describes an evening with friends as containing "long loops of silence" punctuated by observations about nothing in particular. She found it restorative. We've lost our tolerance for these loops. We've been conditioned to treat any lull in conversation as an emergency requiring immediate digital intervention.
But the boring parts—the small talk, the weather discussion, the seemingly pointless anecdote about your neighbor's cat—these are not bugs in the system. They're load-bearing structures. They're how we learn the rhythm of another person's mind, the particular way they arrange the world into sense. Rush through them or eliminate them entirely, and you're left with a kind of conversational résumé: greatest hits only, please, and keep it moving.
I notice this especially with my grandchildren, who have never known a world without smartphones. Their default mode is performative—they're always slightly aware of how an exchange might sound if recounted elsewhere, or worse, recorded. The idea of conversation as something private, ephemeral, and perhaps even tedious seems almost quaint to them. Everything is potentially content.
Yet put these same children in a car for three hours with a dead phone battery, and something remarkable happens. They start talking. Really talking. Not performing or curating, but engaging in that ancient human habit of making meaning through shared speech. They tell long, pointless stories. They ask weird questions. They get bored together, which turns out to be a crucial social skill we've nearly legislated out of existence.
## The Architecture of Attention
The Romans had a practice called *otium*—leisure that wasn't simply free time but a deliberate cultivation of reflection and conversation. It was considered essential to civil society, the foundation of philosophy and friendship. Its opposite was *negotium*—business, the state of not-leisure. We've managed to extend negotium into every waking moment, turning even our social interactions into a kind of multitasking negotiation.
This seems to me a tremendous loss, though I'm aware that saying so marks me as irredeemably old-fashioned. The counterargument goes that we've never been more connected, that technology allows us to maintain relationships across distances that would have been impossible in previous generations. This is true but incomplete. We've gained breadth at the expense of depth, quantity at the cost of quality.
The best conversations I've had in recent years have shared a common feature: they occurred in places where phones don't work or aren't welcome. A long hike in the mountains. A concert where the artist, bless him, insisted on a phone-free performance. A dinner party where the host provided a basket for devices at the door, like some sort of digital coat check.
In each case, there was an initial awkwardness, a kind of conversational stammering as we all remembered how to be fully present. But then, reliably, the quality of exchange deepened. People told longer stories. Silences became comfortable rather than awkward. Eye contact, that increasingly rare commodity, was re-established.
## The Radical Act of Paying Attention
Mary Oliver once wrote that attention is "the beginning of devotion." By this measure, we've become a civilization of infidels, worshipping at the altar of divided consciousness. To give someone your complete attention now qualifies as a radical act, something remarkable enough to comment upon: "It was so nice to really talk to you."
O que estamos aprendendo, lentamente e com considerável resistência, é que a qualidade dos nossos relacionamentos não depende do seu número ou frequência, mas da profundidade da presença que lhes trazemos. A tela – qualquer tela – serve como uma barreira para essa presença. Talvez não seja uma barreira intransponível, mas mesmo assim é uma barreira. |||SET||| A energia dos meus vizinhos voltou depois de três horas. Observei-os relutantemente dobrarem as cadeiras da varanda e voltarem para dentro, de volta às suas telas separadas e entretenimentos privados. Mas algo mudou. Na noite seguinte, duas famílias estavam de volta às suas varandas, desta vez voluntariamente, sem telefones à vista. |||SET||| Pequenas vitórias, talvez, numa guerra que provavelmente estamos perdendo. Mas eu os levarei. Numa era de conexão infinita, o simples ato de fechar o infinito e prestar atenção ao finito – à pessoa à sua frente, com seu jeito particular de rir e suas opiniões estranhas sobre tomates – parece uma espécie de revolução. |||SET||| Ou talvez sejam apenas boas maneiras. Às vezes é difícil perceber a diferença. |||SET||| Proteja sua família com um testamento
My neighbors' power came back on after three hours. I watched them reluctantly fold up their porch chairs and drift back inside, back to their separate screens and private entertainments. But something had shifted. The next evening, two of the families were back on their porches, this time voluntarily, phones nowhere in sight.
Small victories, perhaps, in a war we're probably losing. But I'll take them. In an age of infinite connection, the simple act of closing the infinite and attending to the finite—to the person in front of you, with their particular way of laughing and their odd opinions about tomatoes—feels like a kind of revolution.
Or maybe it's just good manners. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.