I am trying to be open to people in my daily navigations in town. I helped a couple take a buggy and child up some stairs on the tube the other day, missing my train in the process. You see the sacrifices I make. There was another one two minutes later, mind. Modern life pushes us away from contact. If you can get an app for it, do it, they say. So that we are raising a generation with pods in their ears, noses in their phones, hoods over their heads, scarves over their faces, sometimes covering everything except an eye slit. As they say in French. Bonjour, le contact. That’s contact down the drain. Older people are better but madder, or, rather, more idiosyncratic in their madness. I suppose, when someone starts jabbering on the tube you move away. It’s either personal mental chaos or religion-inspired chaos. We have to pick our communications. The young are more in thrall to the seductions of tech. I have silently, surreptitiously, in a way that will be deemed abhorrent by the great powers of our world, become a technophobe. I like to see it as a kind of occult and very dreadful resistance.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com