The Death of Silence While Waiting in Line

When’s the last time you stood in line by yourself and resisted the urge to whip out your phone to pass the time? If you have successfully done this, you know how unusual it feels. I’ve recently tried to do this and it felt (dare I say...) awkward and unnatural. Which is funny, because if someone standing in line during the 1920s pulled out a metal rectangular box and started staring at it, swiping their thumb across its surface every once in a while, and occasionally putting it up to their ear, their neighbors in line would slowly and suspiciously inch away from this person who is clearly not in their right mind.

So, you could argue that our modern-day phone usage is anything but natural or normal. But there is a much larger issue at play than this universal addiction to our glowing screens. These pacifiers for our perceived boredom during those in-between moments (i.e. waiting in line, sitting in a waiting room, sitting on the toilet, or more dangerously, sitting in traffic) can actually kill something our society has lost — or at least, forgotten. And that is: Silence. Nothingness. A break for your mind to breathe. And in the best situations, a conversation with a stranger.

Anthony Ongaro calls these impulses to check our phones “the twitch” and invites us to break this habit in his book, “Break the Twitch.” He says, “Every day, we make hundreds of small actions without even thinking about them. Pulling out our smartphones, clicking the one-click purchase button, pulling down to refresh the social media feed, and more. Automatic actions that have become so deeply programmed into our lives that we don't have the chance to stop and ask ourselves a very important question: Do I actually want to do this right now?”

Believe it or not, before we had a portal to a virtual world inside our pockets and purses, people used to sit or stand in silence, letting their minds wander into a daydream. Or process the events of the day. Or plan the details of a creative project. Or even strike up a conversation with someone. Do you ever wonder why your most brilliant thoughts come to you when you’re in the shower or you’re drifting off to sleep? That’s because you’ve finally given your mind a chance to relax and produce its very own unique thoughts. Constantly exposing our minds to the Internet, social media and texts is like overfeeding our brains with someone else’s thoughts. We are never limiting input or giving our minds a chance to digest the information it is taking in throughout the day.

I leave you with a challenge: the next time you’re in one of those in-between moments (like standing in line at a coffee shop), resist the compelling urge to take out your phone. And simply take note of how uncomfortable it can feel. If you’re already good at standing in silence, I urge you to continue this lost practice! And if you feel so inclined, you could take it a step further by asking the person next to you how their day is going (if it doesn’t feel creepy or forced…). These small interactions are proven to have a significant impact on our mental health — and potentially, have the power to improve our new friend’s day as well.

I recently listened to a podcast called The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. The episode called “Mistakenly Seeking Solitude” is indirectly about this. Well, it’s more about the ways in which talking to strangers can bring us genuine joy. And how the wife of the man who invented the ATM has never used the product because she values that human interaction with her bank teller too much. While technology is used to simplify our lives in lots of useful and practical ways, it can also make us feel less connected to humanity.

So together, let’s try to restore silence in our day by leaving our phones in our pockets during the in-between moments. Take this time to let your mind wander, dream and relax. Uncomfortable? That’s okay. It took us a long time to develop this technology and it will take us a long time to detox our minds from craving it.