What it costs you

Everything so far has been about the person talking. This chapter is about you, because the glance isn't a gift to yourself at their expense. It's a loss on both sides.

Start with the evening. The restaurant study found that the people with phones out enjoyed the meal with their friends less, and the route was distraction. The museum study found that parents told to use their phones more got less connection and less meaning from time with their children. In both, the phone user was the one who lost something. The other people at the table may have lost more, but the loss to the person glancing was real and measurable, and they'd chosen it.

There's a newer finding worth adding. McDaniel and colleagues measured phone use directly, through the phone itself, in two hundred and sixty-four parents of infants over eight days, and asked each day about mood. On days when a parent used their phone more around their baby, their mood was lower. Except on days when the parent felt they'd been responsive to the baby anyway. That's one study, and it's about babies and about mood on the day, and the authors are careful about what it shows. But I think it points at something you'll recognise. The glance doesn't feel good afterwards. There's a small flatness at the end of an evening spent half in the feed, and it isn't the feed's fault. It's that you spent the evening with people and didn't get them.

Then there's what you don't hear. Chapter 14 was about the stories that stop being told. Those were stories you'd have wanted. The thing the teacher said was funny. The meeting story was your partner trusting you with a bad day. The friend's marriage was the friend needing you. Each glance trades one of these for a delivery update.

And there's the version of you being built in their memory. Not by the big things. By a hundred evenings of a lit face. My interpretation is that it's the cost that's hardest to see, because the person paying it is the you of ten years from now, wondering why the conversations at the table are so short.