Surrounded by isolation

It is funny the things you can see in an airport, especially when you are in Vegas on Halloween. I will just let your imagination run with that one for a while. You are creative people, I am sure you will come up with some pretty interesting scenarios all by yourself. Here is something I noticed though.

People everywhere, but most of them isolated. IPods turned on, games being played on their cell phones, working on their computers - everyone plugged-in and the rest of the world tuned out. We are constantly surrounded by people, but I wonder if we have forgotten how to interact with other people. We control our worlds. We have tons of friends on facebook or people we follow on Twitter, but still we are lonely. We choose to limit the people we let into our world. We are busy, rushed, always have a full agenda, with little or no time to give to others. We are lucky if we make time for our families, let alone time to invest in having a conversation with a friend. We rarely fully engage. We text and twitter others even while we are having a conversation with someone else.

Don't get me wrong, I am not against any of these conveniences and ways to keep up with people. They are useful and can be fun, but I wonder if they don't reflect our selfishness sometimes. It is easier to limit what people see on facebook and we can keep people at a distance when the only way we talk is through texting. Letting people into the middle of your life or making a commitment to be invested in someone else's can be hard. It requires us to be real. It requires us to make someone else a priority. It can be messy. Much of life is like that, but isn't that why we need each other. People to encourage us and who we can encourage, people to help us and for us to give to others, people to share our lives and people we can invest in.

I was thinking about how I often hear people talk about their college years and how much they wish they could capture that feeling again. I wonder if that is because that was when we made the time to hang out with friends. You could talk late into the night with others about the things going on in your life. We connected to others, we lived life together, we shared the experiences, we lived in community. Why can't we do that now? I think we settle for less because it is easier. Sometimes it might be better when we don't know any better, like when we were in college.

What about you? Are you plugged-in and tuned out or involved in others lives? Do you long for more than the surface level? If so, what are you going to do about it? Why are we willing to take the easy, when it is usually the harder things that shape us? These are my thoughts as I sit and watch hundreds of people live around each other, but still choose to live in isolation.