Together, but not with each other

This evening as I walked down the street I saw a young man talking to a young woman who was walking toward him. And she said something in response.

But then something strange happened. The young woman kept walking right by the young man, continuing to talk, while the man turned away from the woman and also continued to talk.

It was only then that I realized that each was speaking on the phone, via a wireless headset. They weren’t talking to each other at all. I don’t think they were even aware of each others’ existence.

In the new PolySocial Reality, this is all perfectly normal. I am the strange one — the one who insists on thinking that people may somehow be connected, simply because they happen to be facing each other in the physical world when they speak.

I was thinking of writing a play about the absurdity of all this — perhaps involving a man and woman who carry on an entire conversation before the audience realizes that both are actually speaking on their cell phones to other people. But I think we may already be at the stage where an audience would fail to see the point — because they wouldn’t find such a situation to be at all absurd.