I trust most of us have found ourselves waiting for the traffic light to turn green, pulling out our phone and scrambling to finally cross the street while keeping an eye on our piece of technology. We are not alone in this. Last April, officials in the German city of Augsburg noticed pedestrians were too distracted by their smartphones while waiting for crosswalk signs to change. To combat this, flashing crosswalk lights were installed in the pavement to allow pedestrians to cross streets without taking their eyes off their phones.

This phenomenon is not limited to Germany. A survey from 2012 found that one out of three Americans performs some sort of distracting activity on a smartphone while crossing the street. Though this distracted behavior can cause all sorts of accidents, what strikes me as even worse than that is the fact that society is no longer interested in looking up.

We all have seen this. We walk past a restaurant, look inside and see a group of people sitting together, but on their phones. We take a five minute break in class and everyone takes out their phone. It is concerning that our culture is developing around a small device we carry in our pocket, but it is even more concerning that we are allowing it.

When did we stop being interested in the world around us? We are turning into a lonely society because instead of opening our eyes in front of the reality that awaits us, we feel more comfortable receiving immediate and predictable stimulation from devices we don’t have to care for. This not only makes for lonely humans, it makes for self-centered ones. It makes for humans who cannot develop a thought that’s longer than a couple sentences, or who do not notice the colors of the leaves changing unless seen through an Instagram filter.

However, we are not a society of complete fools. There is a general sense of sadness that overtakes us when we notice everyone around us is not actually present. What we need, then, is to ask ourselves why we’d rather not be like that and make an actual effort to look up, instead of retreating back into our comfortable selfish state.

In his poem, “Pity this busy monster, manunkind,” the American poet e.e. cummings wrote, “There’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.” I suggest we take these words to heart.

Letizia Mariani can be reached at mari8259@stthomas.edu