Embarrassingly Oblivious

The other day I was out having a nice day with my family, wife and son in tow and we went to this beautiful apple orchard. It was a good autumnal day, good weather, clear air and plenty of people all around us who are appreciating being out there. That was all sullied though, when I saw this obnoxiously oblivious dude with his nose stuffed into his fucking phone!

I know that I certainly have been more attune to the life around me since having my son and having the opportunity to re-live the wonder and beauty of the world through his eyes and adventure. I can feel for some people who just aren't at that stage of life. What I was not though, was a person who was fucking glued to my god damn phone when I'm outside walking around in nature, in a field, an apple orchard or at the beach. I sadly couldn't say the same for this bro!

This guy, young for sure maybe 21 or 22, with a girlfriend about the same age, were a cute couple. Both in good shape, attractive and the girl seemed like she was a nice young lady. She seemed to be the one who helped organize the trip, it was a trip of 3 couples it looked like from what I could tell. We happened to ride the tractor ride from the gate over to the field and they were chatting while we were going along so I was introduced to them at that point. They all seemed nice and it was good to see them out there!

Fast forward about 30 minutes and I was back from the far end of the orchard picking my apples that I wanted and I joined my wife and son who were picking flowers (the apples I went for were in the literal far back corner about half a mile away, my wife's foot couldn't handle that type of walking lol) and was perusing the varieties of flowers. Up walks the young lady with her boyfriend behind here but to my absolute horror, instead of paying attention to his cute girlfriend handing him flowers that she was cutting, LOOKING FOR HIS APPROVAL, the mother fucker had his nose stuffed into his god damn phone. What the fux bro?

I was very close to saying something to the dude.. like get the fuck off your phone and cherish the moments with your girlfriend here dude. She could see that you're ignoring her and eventually dump your ass from being so inconsiderate. I will say that when I'm with my wife, I'm rarely on my phone because she is the center of my attention. I give her and my son my focus and attention in these places because it's important to be present as much as possible. We can't do it all the time, for sure and I can certainly hope that this dude may have just made a mistake on this occasion but what really got me was the look on the girlfriends face.

The look on her face, how disappointed and a quick look of sadness/annoyance led me to believe that this wasn't the only time that this guy has done this. This is what really struck me to my core, because that was obviously a problem of his and I know how these things can affect the relationship. I was not a good father for the first year of my sons life, I would participate for sure but I kept my nose in my phone playing games and other things to escape the stresses of life with a newborn and it was really damaging to my wife. I know these two don't have a kid, at least they didn't have one with them, and this might not be that serious of an issue.. but it's an overall trend that I'm seeing in society and it's not great.

We are having a lot of issues as a society today for sure and one of them is being present with the physical people around us. We need to make sure that we acknowledge and appreciate the people in our lives. Checking the likes on some horse shit social media app, sports scores, emails, all of these other things have very little impact on our immediate life when we are out in nature in a field, picking apples and spending the day with friends and loved ones.

I am dismayed at seeing this happen very frequently whenever I am out, knowing that we are dealing with a psychological addiction and challenge that human beings have never had to deal with before. I guess that's what happens every few decades with civilization. With the advancement of technology we are encountering new and wonderous things that the monkey heritage that we come from, really doesn't know how to cope with and this is quite interesting. From the origins of us as a species, where our main purpose was to find food and consume it, second to procreation we haven't changed much in those regards but with the aids of technology it has added so many other layers of complication. They are absolutely good layers of complication, but it is also laced with bad layers.

Seeing this guy ignore his girlfriend who wasn't some trailer trash but a put together person, I was frustrated because I was that guy once before and know how unfortunate that type of attitude is if he doesn't change course before it's too late. I was able to turn things around but that's only because I have a strong woman by my side who didn't want to see me fail and continues to straighten me out when necessary, though thankfully I would like to think far less frequently on that type of scale.. but that's the thing. You have to be willing to adjust your shit and sadly that's where I think a lot of people don't get it.

I don't know if I was able to tie in the underlying meaning of the post the way I did when I set out to write it.. but I just let the thoughts flow on this one. I need to speak up to people in these situations, not in an asshole way but in a way that just says "get your head on your present shoulders, not where you're phone is leading you" type of shit.