Any time I had to wait for anything—a friend, a doctor, an elevator—my phone appeared in my hand. I found myself glancing at my phone in the middle of conversations (a habit that’s so common that it’s coined a neologism: phubbing, short for phone snubbing), conveniently forgetting how annoyed I felt when other people phubbed me. I was gripped by a constant compulsion to pick up my phone, presumably so that I didn’t miss something important. But when I evaluated what I was doing, important was pretty much the last word that came to mind.
