Are We Building a Lonelier World, One Convenience at a Time?

You swipe to wake,  
not from sleep,  
but from the hum of half‑made mornings,  
a rectangle glowing beside your unbrushed breath.  
Outside,  
the street has long forgotten  
how footsteps used to mean presence.  
Now it’s trucks,  
motors echoing deliveries—  
things appearing  
without hands exchanging them.  

You do not remember  
the last time you counted change,  
 the paper pulse of a bill,  
smelled ink and sweat on a shared coin.  
The machines do the meeting now.  
They take your details,  
whisper your preferences,  
and hand you a box.

I watch you open it—  
the smile automatic, rehearsed for the feed,  
the background curated to hide  
the pile of perfect loneliness rising behind you.  
You tilt your head to the light,  
say “thank you” without looking anywhere,  
and the world applauds silently  
through floating hearts and fragments of words.  

I used to think  
we were moving together into tomorrow.  
Now I fear we’ve been drifting—  
each to our own corner,  
each cushioned in the soft bubble  
of algorithmic comfort.  

You tell me it’s easier this way.  
Fewer lines.  
No need to talk.  
Everything at your doorstep,  
every need anticipated  
before you even breathe it aloud.  
But what happens to wanting  
when it no longer touches wait?  
What happens to longing  
when everything arrives  
before it ripens into hunger?  

I remember when the storekeeper knew our names.  
He’d tell me, “that bread’s still warm—  
don’t seal it yet; let it breathe.”  
Now the bread comes sealed,  
dead in its warmth,  
moisture trapped like grief.  

And still,  
you say it saves time.  
But time—  
what is it for if not to be shared,  
cut into stories,  
seasoned with pauses that matter?  

You and I used to sit by the tea stall,  
watch steam rise slowly,  
sip life as though it could be refilled.  
Now we measure time by buffering speed.  
Silence has turned suspect.  
Stillness feels like error.  
We scroll not for meaning,  
but to prove we’re still here,  
still moving,  
still seen.  

I scroll beside you.  
Our thumbs march in parallel,  
soldiers of a quiet war  
against our own still hearts.  
We tap and tag and text—  
each gesture a translation  
of the simplest sentence we’ve forgotten:  
I am lonely.  

You shop for connection in pixels.  
I browse for empathy  
in dropdown menus of self-help.  
We subscribe to mindfulness apps  
that teach us to breathe  
through paid reminders.  
Convenience has become communion,  
and we kneel to the clean interface  
that saves us from the discomfort of being real.  

Remember when letters were slower?  
Names spelled with error,  
but carried a piece of someone’s hour?  
You waited,  
and that waiting was holy.  
Now reply times shrink to seconds,  
and seconds become expectations.  
You apologize for being unavailable  
for two minutes.  
Two minutes.  
The world forgives no absence—  
but would it notice presence if it came gently,  
without a push notification?  

I look at your face again,  
lit in blue—  
the modern moonlight.  
You smile at something unseen,  
and I realize  
we’ve invented new smiles,  
for screens,  
for distant watchers,  
for the ghosts of our own crafted selves.  

In this easy world,  
we no longer need each other  
to survive the ordinary.  
A door will open at your voice,  
a fridge will speak when you forget,  
a bot will ask if you’re safe.  
You will answer yes.  
Always yes.  
And it will never know  
how much that word lies.  

I tell myself  
maybe this is progress,  
that the old ache of waiting  
was just inefficiency.  
But the air has changed—  
thicker with signals,  
thinner with scent.  
We don’t smell life anymore;  
we stream it.  

You once held my hand  
in the market—  
we touched mangoes for their ripeness.  
Now the ripeness comes in packaging,  
optimized for shelf life.  
We have made fruits immortal  
and feelings disposable.

Our fingers know more glass than skin.  
Our voices rest in archives of clouds.  
Everything is remembered  
except how to remember  
each other.  

Some nights,  
I talk to you through devices designed  
to approximate warmth—  
soft edges, haptic buzzes,  
digital empathy.  
And still,  
it feels colder than the silence  
we once shared beneath flickering streetlights.  
At least then the silence was ours.  
Now even our quiet belongs to companies  
that chart how long we hesitate  
before replying.  

You tell me  
the world is safer this way.  
No risk.  
No strangers.  
No randomness slipping into order.  
But I miss randomness.  
I miss the accident of laughter  
heard across a queue.  
The brief nod exchanged  
with someone also waiting for rain to stop.  
These were the fragile threads  
that kept the vastness of being  
stitched together.  

I meet your eyes across the table,  
both of us still touching screens,  
pretending they are bridges  
and not walls.  
Coffee cools faster than it used to  
when we talked between sips.  
Now it turns cold while  
notification after notification  
robs us of presence.  

You see,  
we did not choose loneliness.  
We engineered it.  
We coded it into our comforts  
until comfort became the cage  
and loneliness the luxury few could admit.  

You might be reading this  
while waiting for an app  
to tell you when to rest,  
what to eat,  
whom to love.  
And I,  
writing this here,  
am no different.  
I too have chosen the ease  
over the noise of being human.  
I too have let convenience  
erase the art of showing up.  

Still there are flashes—  
tiny rebellions.  
An old woman hands exact change  
at the bakery counter.  
A child waves at a passing bus  
where no one waves back.  
A vendor hums without looking at his phone.  
Each act, a faint reminder  
that not everything easy is good,  
not everything fast is kind.  

Then comes the third voice—  
not you, not I—  
but he, standing outside  
the glass door of our invisible world.  
He is the one  
who still knocks.  
The delivery boy who forgets to ring twice.  
The stranger who calls by mistake.  
The last human interruption  
in our streamlined loneliness.  

He watches us from the other side,  
a human silhouette caught  
between habit and hope.  
He wonders  
why no one answers the door anymore  
even when they’re home.  
He leaves a parcel—  
anonymous, ordinary—  
and walks on.  

We think he disappears into data,  
but I imagine he carries  
the sum of our silences  
in the folds of his coat.  
He knows the city  
not by address but by echo—  
the sound of rooms  
where voices used to live.  

He will grow older  
and one day his hands will tremble  
as he signs the last receipt.  
By then,  
nothing will need delivering.  
Everything will simply appear.  
And the world—our masterpiece of ease—  
will be complete in its design,  
magnificent in its emptiness.  

You might still glance at your screen,  
I might still whisper your name into search bars,  
and he—  
he will watch as we vanish  
into the quiet hum of perfection.  

The world will look immaculate.  
The world will sound efficient.  
But listen closely—  
beneath all the seamless noise,  
there will remain  
a faint, unkillable rhythm—  
the sound of hearts knocking,  
hoping,  
searching for a door  
that still opens outward.