On the train today...
Old super-adorable Asian lady squeezed next to me is on her cartoonishly large Samsung Galaxy s4 furiously scrolling through her Facebook news feed.
A frizzy-haired-but-balding guy in shorts, thongs and a "Bali Bintang' singlet is playing Candy Crush.
His fizzy-haired-but-not-balding kid squeaks "Daddy, daddy" in a British-ie accent - "It's the Operaaaa Houussse - the Hah-baaa bridge!!" as we hurtle across the bridge.
"Sure, honey - that's just great," he grunts annoyingly, quickly returning to gobbling up rows of digital delights.
Slack-jawed, he's transfixed to his glowing screen. His daughter tugs at his shirt trying to get his attention - the world's most gorgeous harbour swishing by below.
We luuurveee our smart phones. Luuurveee them.
But why?
As a kid talking into something that wasn't connected to a twirly, tangled chord - unless it was a shitty toy walkie-talkie - was the thing of fantasy. Get Smart. Rotary-dial phones embedded in Max's shoe heel.
Ri-Donkey-Kong-ulous.
Now we love our phones more than... well... just about anything.
In Spike Jonze's 'Her' Joaquin Phoenix's just-a-little-creepy-looking everyman falls in love with his sexy-sounding OS.
Once you hear this souped-up Siri...
This sultry-sounding, raspy-voiced binary bombshell...
Voiced by the luscious Scarlett Johansson.
Well, you can almost forgive our hopeless hero. You'd probably fall in love with your Sony Xperia Z2 or Zweeb-Dorkle 69.
And there are plenty of young Japanese geeks, or Otaku, who are actually living out this reality - or virtual reality - right now.
For real.
What is it about a piece of glass, stainless steel, plastic, and circuit boards, churning out binary data in the form of 0s and 1s, that is so much more appealing than a human being?
I certainly can't lambaste smart phone users, as I'm a pretty big addict myself. I'm like Charlie Brown's Linus van Pelt -- the kid that's always hanging onto his security blanket, checking that my iPhone's there at the train platform and on the bus, resisting the urge to whip it out - the iPhone! - and check my Facebook, or upgrade my dark elixir storage bubble and train some more hog riders in Clash of Clans.
I resist the urge about 50% of the time.
But I'm pretty aware of this problem. But why am I so driven to check my Facebook when I finish work, when I check it during the day pretty regularly? And why is it the last thing me and my partner do before we hit the hay, most of the time. Sometimes there are other activities like, umm, reading a book, or taping nasal strips to my nose bridge to stop snoring (damn deviated septum), or setting up the sofa bed because the strips aren't working and my girlfriend isn't too happy with sleeping next to the human version of a newly active Mount Vesuvius (damn deviated septum).
And why are people choosing their phones over their real friends who are sitting RIGHT NEXT TO THEM on their phones. Big muscle-bound dudes with hipster dos and covered with inspirational tats at the gym taking time out to add a Valencia or 1970s filters to their 'selfies' on Instagram. What's going on here?
Is it that the world's just so much more awesome on a smart phone? Neat, clean, compartmentalised - we can control everything and add the exact filter we want. We can be the person we really want to be, with a soft Polaroid tint, and look at idealised images of the people around us.
In the flesh and blood world stuff's way more complicated, and less easy to navigate. In the real world you can't just crop and place people in handy little modules and always come up with witty, pithy little sayings. You can't post a photo of the beef rendang you had for lunch at the cheap Indonesian joint near work and expect to get dozens of 'likes' as if you were Justin Bieber hopping on a car roof and shouting to adoring fans after being arrested for DUI and drag racing with your dad in Beverly Hills.
You can't make sense of a topsy-turvy world by dragging it into a lifestyle get-yo-life-togetha app -- and you certainly can't date Scarlett Johansson.
Okay, so where's my iPhone at?