If there is one terrible, basic experience common to most of us in this generation, it is probably this: nobody sees us. Nobody genuinely cares.
People are usually busy with themselves, and that is even natural up to a point. But this era has supplied us with an abundance of new and creative ways to be busy with ourselves.
So we wander the internet, display every corner and alley of our lives, expect to be admired at regular intervals, and in effect cry out for attention.
And we do not receive it.
We do not receive it because we are surrounded by people who — surprise — are also currently begging for attention. A classic dialogue of the deaf.
But when that dynamic enters the living room, it stops being irritating and starts being dangerous.
The load of stimuli imposed on the system of parents, partners and children has become insane. From every channel and every screen, messages leap at us demanding that we be excited, that we protest, that we be appalled.
And our attention behaves exactly like a current account. It is a zero-sum game. When you spend more on gadgets online, less remains for bread and milk.
You can guess the analogy. When you are occupied with a hundred and fifty-eight procedures and photographs and alerts and updates, you have less attention to direct at the people dear to you. Far less.
But let us ask a blunt question. What is actually the problem with not listening to the other person?
The problem is that listening is not a courtesy. It is the mechanism by which a person establishes that they exist for somebody.
We tend to imagine that love is demonstrated in large gestures and stated in words. It is not. It is demonstrated in the ordinary, unremarkable fact of somebody putting down what they were doing and attending to a not-very-important story about your day.
Which means the withdrawal of attention is not a small failure of manners. It is the slow removal of the only evidence the other person has.