Texting
Given a choice, people....young people in particular, would prefer to not talk to other humans, ever. Instead of going to see our neighbor two houses down the street, or calling them, we text them. People go out for dinner, and then spend half their time texting, sometimes to the person sitting right across the table from them!
Shopping
It's estimated that 20% of American shopping malls will close within 5 years. People are just not going out shopping like they used to. Toys R Us, Radio Shack, Circuit City, and Blockbuster, among many others, are long gone. Sears and Kmart are dead men walking, JC Penny isn't far behind, and even big chains like Macy's are closing stores as fast as they can. Yet online retailers are THRIVING! (OK....guilty. Just this week I placed online orders with Amazon, LL Bean, and REI.)
You can even buy a car online without ever speaking to a live homo sapien! That is, those who still want to drive can. I recently read that the average young person doesn't even bother getting their driver's license until they're 19 years old. In my day (as we old farts used to say) we were at the DMV at 6 am on our 16th birthday to be first in line to get our license. Auto makers are seeing a trend of "car sharing", where a number of people will buy a car together, then take their turn driving it on the increasingly rare times they have to venture out of their house/apartment.
It wasn't long ago that if you wanted a meal of a slightly higher caliber than a drive-thru joint, you had to go INSIDE, be seated by a human, tell a human what you wanted, and pay a human on your way out.
Today we have home delivery via Grub Hub and Uber Eats. Just place your order and pay online, in half an hour open your door up just wide enough for someone to slip your food to you, then slam the door and lock it again. No eye contact necessary. *sweet!*
Many local grocery stores are now making home deliveries, and they all allow you to order everything from beans to toilet paper online, then just pull up curbside where they will hand you your assembled order. (Coming to a complete stop is appreciated.)
If you're feeling puny, you can call any number of online doctors who will examine you long distance (?) and in many cases send you a prescription from a mail-order pharmacy. (Just hold your camera phone up to your open mouth and say 'ahh'.) Why go out to see a doctor or to a hospital (oh, many hospitals are closing, too) when you can sit at home and get fixed?
Will dermatology eventually become an extinct medical specialty? Today dermatologists are in their heyday, treating all of us who regularly went outside when we were younger and now have skin cancer. Soon we won't go outside enough to absorb any of those evil rays that give us problems 30 years down the road. *note to self: sell all suntan lotion stock*
Are we just getting lazier, or just more scared to interact with others? Gee thanks Gates, Jobs, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. *sigh*
S
