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Rebel

I despised people who are always staring at their smartphones or smart devices. It was them I saw when I boarded the train to work every morning and them I saw again when I exited the train, those lifeless faces lost in the virtual world they had chosen to replace the present with. It is as if what there was in front of them was not enough, that they were not ready to adjust to the world around them, but instead the world they had to adjust to their tastes.

I despised them because they to me resembled the roboticized populations of the future, who moved from day to day without opening their eyes to the world around them, the people around them. As conversations dried up, relationships became more hi-bye and friends too busy, the smartphone, to me, was Lucifer, the one who pulled the strings in a world that seemed to more and more lose touch with its humanity.

As such I turned to books. While everyone had their head bent over a LED screen, I chose to turn to the single item that once held the attention of these people. Though it went beyond that. The book, they said, was a liberator. The stories it told fired our imagination, the characters it flaunted touched our humanity and the act of reading it entailed was in itself said to be a meditative act. The book went against the main characteristics associated with a smart device; constant novelty, short attention spans and the rapid pace of information delivery. So I turned to the bookit.

Though over time, I could not help but think, was this simply on my part an act of rebellion? Was this a gesture to affirm myself as unique and different from the unthinking masses? After all, me and them, we both choose to ignore the present to get lost in another world, just that it was by different means. Despite my bibliophilia, even I could not, once in a while, help myself from indulging in that small magical world created behind that glowing rectangular screen, a world where everything was faster, simpler and much more desirable.

I don'd despise them as much now. I just pity them.  

Books do make you more empathetic....
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