How often do you hang out with "phone zombies?"

Let me explain what I mean about this before we get too much into it. In my mind a phone zombie is someone who basically lives their lives inside their phone. All other aspects of their lives seem to be a distraction from the phone and they will go back to the phone as often as possible. This includes when they are in public or even if they invited you over to their house for a social gathering.

I don't notice this as much here in Thailand as I would imagine it is in the west because most of the people here, at least in the small part of Chiang Mai that I live in, are retirees and they tend to spend a lot less time with their faces stuck in their phones than the average person who was younger when smartphones started to be something that everyone had in the 2010's.

Well I recently started to lose my cool with certain people that I know when they are on their phones too much and while it has taken a few weeks, these certain friends know that I am going to get on their case if they pick up their phones at all while in my presence.

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I think it has probably become commonplace for people like me to complain about this sort of things these days but the thing is I am not even an oldie. I'm still in my 20's and if any demographic really SHOULD be addicted to phone use it would be my group. I guess I dodged a bullet by moving somewhere that this isn't really a thing at the time that I did. I did not plan this.

There is this one guy that I know that I frequently see in public for whatever reason. It seems like almost every time I see him he will reach for his phone to show you something and a lot of times it is a full-length YouTube video. I have on a number of occasions berated him for this saying "i'm not going to watch a 10-minute clip in public dude! Just send it to me like a normal human!" Another friend of mine who is at the bar a lot is basically just on her phone all the time. In between conversations she will reach for her phone to play a few rounds of some stupid app game that she is playing and when she isn't doing that she will bounce between various social media apps and then to a few messengers. I always ask her "why are you here?" It doesn't make sense to me that someone would go off to a social environment and then not even participate in the social aspects of that environment.

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Then we have the people that just have to have a photo of EVERYTHING and they don't seem to pay much mind to how many people are around when they are doing it. The other day I was on a walk near the Tai Pei Gate area of Chiang Mai and this area is always packed with tourists. I was simply walking through when some tourists got upset with me because I walked in the middle of their photo shoot. I didn't do it on purpose. Even though I hate this part of modern times if I do see people taking a photo I will do my best to work around them. They were IRATE that i dared continue walking in a straight line to my destination without checking all around me to see if I was going to accidentally photobomb them. I just used the Pacino "Hey I'm walking here!" line and walked away.

If you live in the United States or other parts of the western world I would imagine that this is much more of a problem than it is for me here. I do not like this part of our modern world. I feel like people have become more distant to the people that are in their here and now lives in lieu of communicating or taking pictures to show people that are not there at the time. It's quite frustrating to me and I have become one of those guys that gets super annoyed with my friends if we are hanging out and they are all over their phones.

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I have become the "phone police" in a way and thankfully, this notion is starting to take root with the people I hang out with. Some of them even ask my permission if they want to look something up while they are in the bar. They do this in a semi-condescending way but I don't mind. If that is what it takes to enforce real social behavior then I am happy to be the whipping boy provided it keeps phones in pockets while we are hanging out. Even though they wont admit it, I think that my friends would agree that they have a better time when we hang out ever since I became a social enforcer of sorts.

I hope that this isn't a part of your life but if it is an you are fed up with it, just know that you are not alone.