We have never been more connected; we have also never found it so easy to sit beside someone without fully being there.

You are having dinner with your partner, telling them about something that happened that day, when their phone lights up on the table. Their eyes drop almost automatically toward the screen; perhaps it is WhatsApp, Instagram, an email, or simply a notification that could have waited. You keep talking until you reach that uncomfortable moment when you are no longer sure they are actually listening. “Are you listening to me?” you ask. “Yes, I’m listening,” they reply, probably telling the truth. Ten seconds later, the phone is back on the table and the conversation continues.

Nothing particularly serious happened, which is precisely why it will probably happen again. In bed, during a movie, over coffee with a friend, while our children are trying to show us something; it happens in reverse, too, because we can feel deeply irritated when someone looks at a screen while we are speaking, only to do exactly the same thing ten minutes later. We have absorbed these small interruptions into the ordinary experience of being together until they barely register as interruptions at all.

For years, we have asked how much time we spend looking at screens. Perhaps there is a far more intimate question: what happens when the person in front of us never knows how long they will have our attention before something else claims it?

When the Internet Stopped Ending

The phone we carry today has very little in common with the device whose primary purpose was once to make calls. The smartphone absorbed the camera, the map, the news, music, television, banking, shopping, the office and much of our social life; meanwhile, the internet stopped being somewhere we entered and left and became something we carry with us almost permanently.

What we encounter after unlocking the screen changed, too. Infinite scroll removed the end of the page; autoplay removed the decision to play what came next; notifications allowed an app to come looking for our attention even when we were not using it, while recommendation systems learned what could keep our finger still for a few seconds longer. In an economy where attention has value, reducing the opportunities for someone to leave a platform can have value, too.

The shift seems insignificant, but it fundamentally changes our relationship with content: we once had to decide to continue; now, we often have to decide to stop.

Perhaps that is why the phone has also occupied the spaces where nothing used to happen. Waiting for an elevator, standing in line, sitting alone for five minutes before someone arrives, going to the bathroom, getting into bed or simply moving through a silence in a conversation; almost any empty moment can now become content. This does not mean that opening Instagram while waiting for coffee is a problem. It means we are living through one of the first periods in human history in which never being bored is technically possible.

We still do not fully understand what that means for us.

The Two-Week Experiment

In 2025, PNAS Nexus, published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the National Academy of Sciences, reported a randomized controlled trial involving 467 adults. Researchers did not take away participants’ phones or remove their access to the internet; they could continue making calls, sending text messages and going online from computers. For two weeks, the experiment blocked only mobile internet access on their smartphones.

The results were striking. Across participants when they underwent the intervention, 90.7% improved in at least one of three areas: mental health, subjective well-being or sustained attention; 70.5% improved on measures of mental health, 73.3% in subjective well-being and 58.5% on an objective measure of sustained attention. The improvement observed in sustained attention was comparable, according to the researchers, to roughly ten years of age-related decline on that particular task. This does not mean that giving up mobile internet literally makes the brain ten years younger; it does raise a difficult question about what constant access to stimulation may be doing to our ability to remain with one thing.

Participants also spent more time socializing face-to-face, exercising and being in nature. Their phones had not disappeared; what had temporarily disappeared was the possibility of escaping into the internet at any moment.

There Is Someone on the Other Side of the Screen

The consequence becomes even more interesting when we stop looking exclusively at what the phone may be doing to us and consider what happens to the person sitting across from us.

Psychology has a word for it: phubbing, a combination of phone and snubbing, used to describe ignoring or shifting attention away from someone in favor of a phone. When Pew Research Center surveyed American adults in relationships, it found a number that is difficult to overlook: 51% said their partner was at least sometimes distracted by their phone while they were trying to have a conversation; 16% said this happened often. Among adults ages 30 to 49, the figure reached 62%.

Consider that percentage outside the abstraction of statistics. One in two people in a relationship has tried to tell someone they love something and felt, at least occasionally, that they were competing with a screen.

In 2025, a meta-analysis published in Frontiers in Psychology brought together 52 studies, 58 samples and 19,698 participants to examine partner phubbing specifically. Across the available evidence, greater partner phubbing was associated with lower relationship satisfaction, less intimacy and closeness, a weaker sense that a partner was emotionally responsive, and greater conflict and jealousy. The researchers did not claim that checking WhatsApp during dinner directly causes a relationship crisis; much of the literature is correlational, and difficulties within a relationship may themselves encourage greater retreat into a phone. What matters is that, across dozens of studies, the same pattern continues to emerge.

Perhaps the explanation is much older than the smartphone. Human beings communicate belonging through attention; we look at someone while they speak, respond to an expression, ask a question and notice when the tone of a conversation changes. These are tiny signals that collectively say: I see you, keep going, what you are telling me matters.

That is why there is an enormous difference between technically hearing someone’s words and making someone feel heard.

Our intention when we reach for a phone may be entirely innocent; perhaps we are replying to something that will take ten seconds. But the person in front of us does not experience our intention, they experience our behavior. After enough interruptions, something familiar can begin to happen: we shorten the story, stop telling it, wait for the other person to finish whatever they are doing or simply reach for our own phone.

Nobody decided to end the conversation; it simply disappeared.

When the Person Looking for Our Attention Is a Child

The same question takes on a different weight when the person trying to regain our attention is a child. Researchers use the term technoference to describe technology interfering with family interactions and, in 2025, a meta-analysis published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research brought together 53 studies and 60,555 participants; it found a significant association between greater parental technoference and more problematic digital media use among children and adolescents. The researchers themselves emphasized that much of the evidence is observational and that more longitudinal research is needed to establish causality.

That distinction matters because this should not become another way to make parents feel guilty. Answering an email in front of a child does not automatically produce emotional harm; a parent may be working, arranging a doctor’s appointment or talking to family. What science is trying to understand is what happens when interruption stops being occasional and becomes a pattern.

A young child does not know our reasons; they look for a face, try to catch our eyes and wait for a response. Perhaps twenty years from now we will understand much more clearly what it meant for a generation to grow up beside adults who could be physically available while part of their attention remained permanently accessible to everyone else.

Your Partner Doesn’t Have an Algorithm

Here lies the most interesting contradiction in this story: the phone was created to connect us and, in countless ways, it succeeded. Families separated by continents can see each other every day, friendships can survive distance and we have immediate access to work, information, help and people we love. Turning the smartphone into the villain would be far too easy.

The problem is not that it connects us; perhaps it is that all of those connections can enter, at any moment, the room we are already sharing with someone else.

A real conversation has pauses, our partner may repeat themselves, a friend may take too long to tell a story and a child may want to show us the same thing for the fifth time; an algorithm faces none of those limitations. The moment something fails to hold our interest, it can replace it with something else and then something else, while becoming progressively better at learning what keeps us looking.

Our partners do not have algorithms; neither do our friends or our children. And perhaps, without quite realizing it, we have begun asking real life to compete with systems designed precisely so that we never have to be bored.

Maybe, then, we have been asking the wrong question. How much we use our phones matters, but so do when, where and in front of whom. Five minutes on Instagram while waiting alone for a flight does not carry the same meaning as five minutes on Instagram while our partner is trying to tell us something; when we are alone, attention is primarily a cognitive resource, but when we are with someone else, it becomes an emotional resource, too.

We do not need to abandon our phones or turn a screen-free dinner into a performance of modern virtue. Perhaps we simply need to recover something that, until very recently, did not require a name: finishing a conversation before looking elsewhere, allowing a silence to exist and giving another person, for a few minutes, the increasingly rare privilege of not having to compete with the rest of the world.

Because perhaps the most important question about our relationship with our phones was never how many hours we spent looking at them, but who was sitting in front of us while we did.