Recently, an academic told me a story so bleakly indicative of the times we’re living in that I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since. It concerned her 18-year-old students, and the way they behaved in the first lecture of the year. In times gone by, these freshly minted adults would have instinctively introduced themselves to each other – said hello to the person sitting either side, exchanged names and pleasantries for a few minutes. But she had observed something very different occurring over the past decade. These young people would now sit down and wait in silence, avoiding eye contact and usually scrolling on their phones, until she began her lecture.
“I have to ask them to introduce themselves to each other now,” she told me. “They don’t talk. They’re tense, they’re anxious, they’re nervous. They need to be invited to engage with their neighbour in a way that I find concerning. It seems part and parcel of an increase in isolation that gives you the false friend of a TikTok video as an unfortunate replacement for a human interaction.”
