I travel constantly. And in my travels (the regional airline now Greyhound Bus for the masses), I see many things, not least of which the shifting norms of human behavior. For example, the notion of privacy has changed dramatically in the last decade. Previously, you’d take a call privately – i.e., you’d hold a phone up to your ear, cupping your hand around the device, shielding your mouth and speaking in a relative whisper. This was the bowl of the bell curve, the normative approach; of course you had outliers, but they were fringe, avoided like the fellow traveler with a runny nose and deep cough. Today we have the inverse: people putting the phone on speaker (with the looming visage of the other party filling the tiny screen in their terminal debut) and having an intimate conversation right out in the open – loudly, unashamedly, unapologetically. This barrier – isolating, or even better insulating, our personal life from strangers and the peripheral community – like so many in our culture, is quickly falling. Why? My answer is simple, but ultimately powerful and pervasive: there are too many of us. Around 2005 I think we hit a tipping point in human density – a point at which there are so many people, in so many places, doing so many things, that to deploy polite behavior – to pause and hold the door for a stranger, to smile at somebody as you walk down the street – is simply unrealistic and frankly uneconomic, a waste of time and energy, a negative return on investment. Humans are rational (and economic) animals, and quickly calculate that they would never be able to leave that door, as head after head passes by their outstretched arm; or that they would have to smile at so many people (“Hi, how are you doing, howdy, nice day, Hi . . . hey”) that their mouth would fossilize into perpetual (and slightly stressed) delight. And also this: combined with our escalating ‘social networking’ (total misnomer if there every was one, given the aggressive one-way nature of the trend, with very little give and take, back and forth, comment and listen . . . the natural rhythms of any normal communication) – shouting on Twitter, frenetically posting on Facebook, clawing at recognition on Instagram – you get a new animal, with a new mantra: “I don’t – and can’t – care about the fact that you are physically close to me, because everybody and everything is physically close to me; in fact, this human soup is getting so thick I might as well be the strongest and most pungent spice.” And so this new breed (soon all of us) does not hesitate to share everything out loud about themselves all the time, even in the most crowded of airports or smallest of restaurants. I mean, you don’t like me discussing the details of my mother’s cyst, daughter’s grades, or partner’s weight problem? Tough. Take it out on Twitter.

– by MJB