Don’t Bring Your Phone to the Café
Everywhere I look, people are on their phones.
On the bus. In the streets. Behind the counter. At social gatherings. Even in restaurants, cafés, and cafeterias.
To me, this last one feels particularly silly.
You have this delicious, novel, and often costly meal before you. You might even have company too: friends, family, or other acquaintances that you care enough about to share your mealtime with. And then you take out your phone and start scrolling.
I see it almost everywhere.
Families with mouth-watering delicacies before them, and each member is staring into their screens and mechanically pushing their food into their mouths. Friend groups with their plates full of pad thai and burgers and rich chocolate cake, and it all goes down in silence while their eyes are fixed on social media posts of food or text messages with other people. I see it in those who eat alone too: their phone in hand, they barely even register the meal before them, and suddenly, the food is all gone.
In my eyes, this completely misses the point of eating out.
When you pull out your phone, you draw your attention away from your surroundings. In Wabi Sabi, a book about one of the cornerstone mindful philosophies of Japanese culture, Beth Kempton claims that this act distracts you from fully experiencing the sensations of the current moment. When you pull out your phone, the exclusivity of your meal — which is there for you to enjoy in that instance — and the pleasure of your company — which is there for you to share that moment with — are reduced to muffled background noise.
While I can understand the temptation of pairing a meal with on-screen entertainment (Improvement Pill on YouTube links it to dopamine stacking), the act feels counterintuitive when you look at it closer.
You have invested precious time and money to securing this (often one-time) meal, and sometimes you have also invested precious energy to spending time with those around you too. Yet you choose to place your focus on your phone, again — the thing that will be readily available to you at any other point during the day. Those other conversations you are typing out, and those other posts of salads and coffees that you are scrolling through, they can wait.
Your current moment deserves your full attention.
Your meal is right in front of you. Maybe your friends or family too. The stimulation and sensations that you desire to satiate through your phone can be accessed if you just put your screen away.
Again, Kempton drives home this point brilliantly.
By focusing on the here and now, you allow yourself to appreciate what she calls the gifts of the current moment. You allow yourself to truly taste the cinnamon between the warm layers of fresh-from-the-oven dough or to note the exquisite combination of cream and dill in your fancy salmon soup; you allow yourself to connect with yourself or your acquaintances, even if no words are voiced as you enjoy the present delights; and you allow yourself to stimulate your other senses too by noticing the twitters of
the birds or the gentle touch of sunlight on your skin. Gradually, you might lose the need to distract yourself with your phone, because the here and now offers sufficient gifts to you that no later moment can replicate.
The benefits of being mindful in these kinds of situations may be continual as well.
For one, you may learn to become more focused and attentive in other contexts too. This might, in tandem with Kempton’s writings, render you more content with your various life experiences, since you will no longer be relegating your gratification to the (mainly) mind-numbing contents of your phone. From this, you will come to realize that your experiences are precious in their own right, and that no peripheral sources of pleasure can substitute the one-time stimulations found in the moment.
Now, I do understand that in some cases, you may have urgent and important matters to attend to, and that, therefore, you might pull out your phone for a genuinely good reason.
Maybe your friend is in the hospital while you are out eating, or your kids are staying home for the first time and you want to make sure they are alright. But — provided that this is a safe choice to make — I think you should, at the very least, separate the two situations from intervening with one another. If you resolve those urgent and important issues first (or, if preferred, in preplanned intervals), you may allow yourself to be fully present for the five or sixty or hundred-and-two minutes you have allotted for your meal.
In time, and even in the situation itself, this will make a significant difference. It did to me.
Never before have I found such value exchanged for the price of my food.
