Yesterday afternoon, I got into my apartment elevator with a woman and her two gentleman callers.

Sorry. I recently reread The Glass Menagerie and have been looking for an excuse to say that in real life.

Anyway, nobody spoke. I checked the floor number, looked back at my phone, kept texting my friend about meal prepping because apparently your thirties are just one long conversation about protein intake and freezer storage.

Completely normal interaction. Or non interaction, really.

Then the elevator doors opened and the woman turned around and started swearing at me. Threatening me. Fully escalated. Like we’d been in the middle of some ongoing conflict that I had somehow missed?

There was no exchange beforehand. No eye contact. No accidental shoulder bump. No “what are you looking at?” energy. Nothing. We were standing in silence and then suddenly she was reacting to a version of events that didn’t exist for me at all.

And honestly, the weirdest part wasn’t that it happened. It was how fast my brain categorized it as just another thing people do now.

We Are No Longer Sharing the Same Reality

Something’s shifted in the way people move through public spaces. You feel it everywhere once you start noticing it.

Driving is the clearest example. People no longer drive like other cars contain actual human beings with nervous systems and families and errands to run. Everybody operates like they’re alone in a simulation. Turn signals are optional. Merging requires blind faith. Half the population drives like they’re fleeing a crime scene.

And public behavior has gotten similarly detached. Not mean all the time. Just disconnected. Untethered. Dead in the eyes. Strange.

At concerts, half the crowd is watching the performance. The other half is watching themselves attend the performance. Every moment now exists twice. Once as an experience and once as potential content.

And before someone accuses me of being morally superior about phones, relax. I record clips too. I also enjoy evidence that I attended things. But there’s a difference between capturing a moment and never fully entering it in the first place.

You see this split everywhere now. Elevators. Grocery stores. Sidewalks. Airports. Restaurants. Work out classes.

There used to be a basic assumption that everyone occupying a space was participating in roughly the same version of reality. That assumption feels nonexistent now. People are physically present but cognitively somewhere else entirely.

The Pandemic Didn’t Create This. It Accelerated It.

I don’t think society suddenly broke in 2020. A lot of this was already happening. The pandemic just hit fast forward.

For years, life had already been collapsing into screens. Then lockdowns turned that into the entire human experience overnight.

Work became screens. Dating became screens. Friendships became screens. Fighting became screens. Boredom became screens. Identity itself became screens.

But it went beyond social media. Even reality itself started getting filtered through prediction, commentary, and monetization.

Sports became gambling apps with a game attached. Celebrity relationships became real time forensic investigations. Every major event now comes with odds, reaction videos, conspiracy threads, discourse cycles, and twelve people trying to turn it into a brand opportunity before the thing has even fully happened yet.

People openly gamble on elections now. On lawsuits. On internet drama. On whether two influencers are secretly dating. Entire platforms are built around speculating on human behavior like we’re all day traders watching society happen in real time.

Now where am I going with all of this?

The easiest explanation is it honestly changes the way your brain processes reality.

You stop letting moments unfold naturally. You start anticipating outcomes before situations even develop. You assume tone immediately. You assume intent almost instantly. You build narratives in your mind because online life trains you to react before context arrives. You lack media literacy, so naturally, nuance is also missing from your toolbox.

A bit ironic experiencing this from a society that’s allegedly so educated and also pro-mental health.

Point is, we don’t really experience events anymore. We experience versions of events that have already been interpreted, optimized, packaged, and emotionally preloaded for us.

And after enough time living like that, it doesn’t magically switch off when you reenter public life, after years of lockdown and reprogramming.

So now people walk around reacting not just to what’s happening, but to what they think is happening. To what might be happening. To the story they already built in their head three seconds into an interaction.

Which is how you end up getting verbally attacked in an elevator by someone who may have genuinely believed you were participating in a completely different moment.

It Really Is Those Damn Phones

Sorry. I know everybody and their grandpa says this, but unfortunately they’re right.

Years of chronic social media use has trained people into relentless self consciousness. Every experience gets filtered through performance, branding, perception, optics, aesthetics.

You’re no longer just living your life. You’re simultaneously curating, narrating, monitoring, and reacting to yourself living your life.

That level of self surveillance changes people.

It creates this weird split consciousness where nobody’s fully immersed in anything because part of their brain is always observing themselves from outside the moment. Like permanent low grade dissociation but in an aesthetically pleasing manner with a good preset.

And that distortion leaks into everyday interactions. Neutral encounters start carrying imagined subtext. Small inconveniences feel personal. Everybody becomes both hyper aware and completely unaware at the same time.

The Loneliness Situation Is Worse Than People Want to Admit

People throw around the phrase “loneliness epidemic” so casually now that it almost sounds fake. Like one of those fake corporate wellness phrases invented by a startup founder with a podcast that recites shit you said on tumblr an actual decade ago.

But then you look around.

How many people go entire days without meaningful human interaction that isn’t transactional, performative, or algorithmically mediated?

Not romantic interaction. Not networking. Not content creation. Just regular human familiarity. Repeated contact. Casual conversation. Community. Recognition.

A shocking amount of adults now live in near total social fragmentation. And loneliness doesn’t just affect emotions. It affects perception.

When people become socially underexposed, ambiguity starts feeling threatening. Neutral interactions become heavy. Small, everyday moments become psychologically over interpreted.

You stop reading situations clearly because your nervous system starts compensating for the absence of connection by becoming hypervigilant about social meaning.

Which explains a lot, honestly.

People Who Aren’t Spiraling Feel Almost Unreal

The people who stand out most to me lately are the ones who are simply… normal. They’re grounded.

I’m talking about people who are fully where they are. People who aren’t constantly scanning for offense, rejection, validation, or hidden meaning. People who can occupy a moment without immediately turning it into a narrative about themselves.

That kind of presence feels almost shocking now because so many people seem trapped in their own internal feedback loop at all times.

Everyone’s overstimulated. Under socialized. Hyper self aware. Deeply isolated. Constantly perceived. Constantly performing. Constantly interpreting.

And the result is a public atmosphere that feels subtly unstable all the time.

Not necessarily dangerous. Just volatile. Like everyone’s operating from slightly different scripts and occasionally colliding in shared spaces.

Which is why an elevator interaction can suddenly feel like entering the third act of an argument you never had in the first place.