Nir Eyal addresses the common social problem of conversation partners distracted by phones. He recommends responding with a sincere, concerned question (e.g., “Is everything okay?”) rather than an accusatory call-out, and illustrates the approach with a brief anecdote where a person later thanked him for doing so, enabling full presence.
Chapters
Foreign. Such a good question. We've all been in this prickly situation where we are indistractable. Maybe you've read my book. You've started using these texts in your own life. You are indistractable, but you're sitting across the table from someone who is doing this. They're on their phone as you're trying to have a conversation with them, and they keep doing. Let me just check this one thing. How freaking annoying is that, right? It's awful. What do you do? You ask a very sincere question, and the question shows sincere concern, because, let's face it, you don't know what's on the other side of that phone. The question you want to ask is, hey, is everything okay? They might be on Instagram. They might also be dealing with some kind of emergency. I was actually at a dinner a couple nights ago, and this happened. And in fact, afterwards, about five minutes later, he said, thank you so much for calling me out on that. I really appreciate it. Because now we can actually all be fully present.