Everyone's ragging on this article, but it matches my experience exactly. I feel like I can't talk to anyone nowadays without fearing that little buzz in their pocket, at which point they pull out their phone and start playing with it while I'm mid-sentence. And I'm not some grumpy "get off my lawn" old man; I'm barely 25 years old.

Friends say "but it was [such-and-such nonsense]. I had to check my phone!" Really, you had to? Your life depended on you checking that text? People get frustrated with me because my phone is dead all the time (and thus I don't text back immediately), but I hate feeling tethered to some device.

I notice an overwhelmingly huge difference in the quality of my conversations with people when their phone is not present in the room with them.

This isn't to say I'm anti-technology at all — I spend 10 hours a day programming. I just don't attempt to do it while conversing at the same time (nor could I; without uninterrupted focus, I make a lot of mistakes in my code).