Look Up!
There’s a moment that happens in almost every coffee shop, every restaurant, every waiting room in the world. Someone sits down, reaches into a pocket or bag, and within seconds their eyes drop to a glowing rectangle. The world around them — the light falling through a window, the stranger with the extraordinary coat, the child attempting something brave on the playground — carries on without a witness.
In my observation, the same holds true in the work environment these days. Too many of us—staring at a desktop or laptop screen – engrossed in the information, the data, the opinions, the “to do’s.”
We have become, collectively, a species that looks down.
The Disappearing Art of Noticing
Verdensborger.
That’s a word in Danish that roughly translates to “citizen of the world.”
It implies an active participation in the life around you, a sense of belonging to the larger human story unfolding in real time. But you can’t be a citizen of a world you aren’t watching.
When we talk about screen time, the conversation almost always turns to productivity, mental health metrics, or the attention economy. Those are valid concerns. But something quieter and harder to quantify is also slipping away: the simple habit of noticing. Of looking up and letting the world land on you.
The barista who draws a leaf in your latte foam.
The two pigeons bickering over a crumb on the ground outside your window.
The group of older men huddled around the same table, at the same diner, on a Tuesday of every week.
These are not important things. They are everything.
Case in point—I was leaving a doctor’s appointment last week. As I exited the waiting room, I noticed an elderly man with a walker and his equally frail wife trying to navigate a floor mat and a door and a set of stairs. I helped them both because I saw them. The other 12 people in the waiting room (yes, I counted) were all engrossed in their mobile devices; the four staff members were all engrossed in their computer screens.
What We Miss When We Look Down
The costs of constant screen engagement are well documented — disrupted sleep, shortened attention spans, the anxiety spiral of social media. But the hidden cost is experiential poverty.
Consider what fills the average commute today versus 20 years ago. People used to stare out train or bus windows, their minds wandering across the landscape. They people-watched. They eavesdropped shamelessly. They let boredom do its quiet, generative work.
Boredom, it turns out, is where creativity lives. The wandering mind connects dots that a focused mind never finds. It’s no coincidence that some of history’s best ideas arrived in the shower, on a walk, or staring at a ceiling.
Now those same commuters are heads-down, thumbs moving, dopamine dripping. The window goes unwatched. The mind never gets to wander because it’s always been given somewhere to go.
We also miss each other.
Eye contact — that ancient, loaded, deeply human act — is becoming rarer.
The small nods, the held doors, the half-smiles exchanged between strangers who catch each other’s eye: these micro-transactions of acknowledgment are the connective tissue of community. Without them, the social fabric doesn’t tear all at once. It just slowly thins.
The World Is Still Putting on a Show
Here’s the thing about the world: it has not stopped being spectacular just because we stopped watching.
Clouds are still doing improbable things above our heads.
Strangers are still having conversations worth overhearing.
Architecture built a hundred years ago still has details in its cornices that most people who walk past it every day have never seen.
Seasons are changing — not gradually, but in sudden, decisive moments that you will miss if you’re looking at a screen when they happen.
There is a particular quality of late afternoon light in autumn, when the sun drops low and turns everything amber and long shadowed.
If you see it, it stays with you.
If you miss it, scrolling through someone else’s photos of a place you’ll never visit, you’ve traded something real for something approximate.
The world is still offering. We’ve just gotten out of the habit of accepting.
This Isn’t a Screed Against Technology
To be clear: this isn’t a call to throw your phone into the sea or romanticize some pre-digital golden age that never quite existed. Screens connect us to people we love, tools we need, and knowledge that genuinely enriches our lives. The laptop and the smartphone are remarkable instruments.
The problem isn’t the tool. It’s the default.
When the screen becomes the first thing we reach for in every unstructured moment — every wait, every commute, everypause in conversation — we’ve stopped choosing. We’ve let habit choose for us. And habit, left unexamined, will always choose the path of least resistance, which is rarely the path of most meaning.
The Practice of Looking Up
Like most things worth doing, looking up is a practice. It doesn’t happen automatically once you decide to care about it. Here’s what it might look like in an ordinary day:
You sit on a park bench and you don’t take out your phone. Not because you’re being virtuous, but because you’re curious what you’ll notice. You give yourself five minutes and you watch. Something will happen. Something always happens.
You take a walking meeting instead of a video call. You navigate by landmarks instead of GPS. You eat lunch without a screen and let your eyes wander the room. You sit on your front porch in the evening and watch the neighborhood go about its business without narrating it to anyone online.
None of these are grand gestures. They’re small redirections of attention — a choice, repeated until it becomes a habit that competes with the other habit.
An Invitation
Somewhere near you right now, something is happening that won’t happen again in quite the same way. A particular quality of light. A conversation drifting past. A face worth remembering.
You’ll miss it if you don’t look up.
So…look up!
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve noticed lately when you put your phone away? The answers might surprise you — and they’re always worth more than another scroll.
Beautifully said 🙏
Preach