Look Up

Why Interruptibility Matters More Than We Think

Christine Rosen’s recent piece, The Death of Daydreaming, stuck with me—not just for what it says about attention, but for what it implies about the slow erosion of public life.

Drawing from her book The Extinction of Experience, Rosen explores what happens when we lose interstitial time—those little in-between moments in a day when we used to let our minds wander, strike up a casual conversation, or simply look around. Moments when we were open to interruption. Available to the world. Human, in the most ordinary way.

She’s right to say we’ve trained ourselves to fill every gap. Our boredom is no longer tolerated, much less valued. We’ve got an optimization machine in our pockets, always ready to help us "make the most" of our time. But I keep wondering: Are we making the most of our lives if we’re never available to the people actually in front of us?

We’ve been sold the idea that attention is a private matter—something we manage for our own productivity or pleasure. But attention is also a civic practice. It’s a form of presence. And increasingly, it’s a public good we’re failing to steward.

I don’t think, on the whole, that talking to my neighbor is going to be more stimulating than listening to a podcast that genuinely excites me. But the neighbor is in my path. And the point isn’t about which is more interesting—it’s about which one makes a place feel like home. Most of community life doesn’t happen in scheduled blocks or curated experiences. It comes from happenstance. From people bumping into each other and being interruptible.

We now have the tools to tame time—to squeeze value out of every sliver of it. But I think that skips the more human question: Does this actually make for a better life? I'm not convinced it does. Because once you start slicing time into finer and finer segments, you also start believing that every segment needs to be justified. Even the one where you’re just sitting at a red light, or standing behind someone at the deli counter, or watching your child turn a plastic cup over in his hands for the fifth time that day.

Neil Postman called this a technopoly—a culture where technology doesn’t just serve our values but defines them. In a technopoly, efficiency becomes moral. Idleness becomes a defect. Even silence feels irresponsible.

And the result? We get better at managing our calendars but worse at noticing each other.

The Vanishing “Between”

One of the things I’m realizing is that you can’t have public life if no one is available in public. If everyone is privately entertained in a public space, there’s no longer anything shared. There’s just a bunch of adjacent solitudes.

That has consequences.

There's a civic loneliness that sets in when you're the only person looking up. You notice it in coffee shops, on sidewalks, in lobbies—everyone staring down or zoning out with AirPods in. That used to be the space where small talk happened. Where you ran into someone you hadn’t seen in a while. Where your kid waved at an older neighbor and started a whole unexpected conversation.

If no one is interruptible, nothing spontaneous can happen. And if nothing spontaneous can happen, the public square dies by inches.

There’s a collective action problem here, too. If everyone else is distracted, what does my individual attention accomplish? The answer is: a lot, and not much. A lot, in that it takes a first mover. Every movement needs people willing to be anti-memetic, to live against the grain and make something visible again. Not much, in that one person looking up in a sea of distraction won’t reverse the tide. That’s why we need not just quiet resistance but a kind of evangelism for presence. I know that word comes with baggage—especially for those of us who come from door-to-door evangelism world—but the point stands: we need more people who are willing to show that a life of greater attentiveness is worth it.

And if attention is a public good, like clean air or quiet streets, then we should treat it that way. As something that can be depleted—or cultivated.

What We Lose

I think the most profound loss might not even be that we’re less curious about strangers. It’s that we become less attentive to the people closest to us. Our attentiveness starts to form a kind of bell curve: we ignore those at the farthest edges, sure, but also those right next to us. They become background noise. Their presence feels ambient. And if our default posture is distraction, then even the ones we love most are competing with whatever’s buzzing in our pocket.

Is that really the life we want?

I don’t want to romanticize empty time. Not all idleness is virtuous, and not every pause is profound. But I do think we need more active empty time—moments where we choose not to fill the gap, but to stay present in it. Not to withdraw from the world, but to be available to it. And to each other.

We’ve lost the scripts for how to be interruptible. The small talk. The eye contact. The willingness to loiter a bit in a conversation. And like all scripts, if you don’t use them, you forget them. Eventually, we lose not just our habits of interaction, but the instincts behind them—curiosity, patience, empathy. We start needing instructions for things we once knew how to do intuitively.

That’s why I think Rosen’s piece matters. Because it’s not just about boredom. It’s about relational availability. It’s about recovering the conditions where public life can still happen.

A Personal Note

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as a parent.

When I’m watching my son Landon play—endlessly throwing a ball, chasing an ant on the playground—I often feel the pull to pick up my phone. Not to scroll endlessly, but to “do something useful.” Maybe I’ll listen to a podcast or knock out an email while keeping an eye on him. Something efficient.

But the moment I do that, something quiet disappears.

If I can’t sit still in the presence of my own child, what else am I missing? Who else?

Maybe presence isn’t the absence of productivity. Maybe it’s the beginning of participation. Of community. Of public life.

And maybe the first step to rebuilding that life is learning to look up.