assign your iPad down,ditch the phone and pick up a book. It could boost your circle of sympathyFortunate owners of working fireplaces in my neighbourhood have their chimneys swept by a father-and-son team of great kindliness and charm. Once every couple of years is enough, they say, and unless you maintain a fire burning every day. So they were surprised when a current customer called them back after only a month. Had they done something inaccurate? No,not at all. Eventually they realised that she wanted company so badly she was prepared to pay for quite unnecessary work.
What have we become? A society in which someone can have hundreds of online friends and yet go for days without human contact. Where the face-to-face encounters that once punctuated daily lives – and gave opportunities for the sort of casual conversation which, no matter how banal or weather-centred, or makes genuine connections between one person and another – have largely been replaced by automaton. We swipe and scan; we click; we text people in the next room instead of speaking to them; we even check our library books out by ourselves when once we might have chatted to a friendly person with an ink pad and a date stamp.
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Source: theguardian.com