Redefining Connectivity

Somewhere along the way, we stopped talking to each other and started tapping at each other.

We’ve turned into a society that measures connection by likes, hearts, and little reaction buttons. Our emotional vocabulary has been reduced to emojis. A thumbs up. A prayer sign. An angry face. That’s it. End of conversation. And God forbid someone actually takes two minutes to write a sentence — or worse, makes a phone call.

You mean I have to dial a number and actually speak to a person? No text buffer? No escape hatch? That alone tells you how far gone we are.

Our attention span is shot. A 60‑second video passes for news. A tweet passes for thought. Scroll, swipe, react, repeat. We spend our days staring at a glowing rectangle, judging other people’s lives while barely living our own.

And let’s be honest about what we’re looking at. Social media is mostly bullshit. Everyone posts the good stuff — the smiles, the trips, the perfect meals, the perfect bodies — and quietly leaves out the rest. The arguments. The boredom. The disappointment. The real stuff. People scroll through this fake highlight reel thinking, “Wow, look at their life.” Trust me — you don’t want it. What you’re seeing isn’t life. It’s a sales pitch.

Show me something real. Show me people sitting at a table without phones in their hands. Show me a family eating dinner and actually talking. Show me a woman without filters and a man who’s not trying to brand himself. That kind of honesty is rarer than anything trending online.

Somehow we decided that eye contact was optional. That conversation was inconvenient. That being present was overrated. We traded human connection for convenience, and we did it willingly. One app at a time. One shortcut at a time.

Don’t get me wrong — technology has done some incredible things. It’s connected families across oceans. It’s created opportunity where there was none. But it also gets in the way. And anyone being honest knows that.

What we gained in speed, we lost in depth. What we gained in convenience, we gave up in closeness. We’re together more than ever, and somehow more detached at the same time.

The table is set. The wine is poured. The people are there — physically.

We just aren’t.

Now we’re charging headfirst into artificial intelligence and automation, telling ourselves it’ll make everything better. Maybe it will. But if we don’t stop and ask what we’re giving up in exchange, we’ll keep losing things that actually matter — and we won’t even notice when they’re gone.

Connection was never supposed to feel this empty.

By John F. Lorne