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Comment by dannysu | Hacker News Reader

It's true. I was having hot pot with my wife the other day. Sitting near us was a couple, both on their phones the whole time and not looking at each other.

When I first played with smartphone, it was before most people had phones with Internet (it was pre-iPhone). Someone commented on how I was on the phone all the time and the lesson stuck with me ever since. Now I don't do that to people.

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Don't be too quick to judge people in all of these situations. Not saying it was likely in your example, but I've had meals where I've just spent days out of range with someone, talking endlessly in the car and on hiking trails, and then got to a restaurant with wi-fi and used that as the best chance to communicate with other people for the first time in a while, or deal with work emails.

Look around in any restaurant these days and you'll easily see half of the adults in the room engaged with their phones at some part of the evening, if not most of it.

The occasional check of your phone is very different than staring at your glowing rectangle through the entire dinner, ignoring those you are with entirely.

Like literally every human quality and habit, it's a spectrum, and people arbitrarily stake out a line on that spectrum (as we do with all the other spectrums).

Not intended as a judgement, just an observation.

Hey, imagine when that "glowing rectangle" exists privately in the visual cortex ;)

Be sure to judge them for that, too. This forum exists because of money spent by people on their phones all day.

The judging is for his/her own benefit and doesn't really have anything to do with the object.

"I'm a little bit better than that person because I can take an elevator ride without looking at my phone"

"Our relationship is better than theirs because we can get through dinner without looking at our phones"

On and on it goes... it's comforting, isn't it?

It was an observation of a trend. Nothing more.

If are going to discuss how to instill values in our children regarding smartphones, we need to look at ourselves first.

That's odd, one of the reasons I love hot pot is that it's really hard to have your phone out, since cooking the meat/fish requires focus and at least one hand.

But also a timer, which ironically, often turns out to be a phone.

Your assuming this is some kind special lunch. For all you know it could be a work lunch, trying to fire off some emails.

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