smartphones are in their smoking is cool so do it everywhere phase. the novelty will wear off. i enjoy patiently waiting in silence. if i am travelling on publi

smartphones are in their smoking is cool so do it everywhere phase. the novelty will wear off. i enjoy patiently waiting in silence. if i am travelling on public transport, or sitting in waiting room, or standing in a long queue, i find my personal quiet contrasted by the various background noises relaxing and beneficial. i can remain aware of my surrounding/map, people and objects, clocks and time, scenery. i can play memorization, prediction or pattern games, revisit some old problem or simply turn my brain off and let the time pass without incident. am i a silence addict? if i enjoyed striking up conversations with strangers everywhere i went and talked their ear off in a friendly manner, would i be a social addict? some people enjoy looking at text and images on a screen during downtime in their day, it's a habit. a potentially useful one that helps connect to a world outside of immediate physical space, should _we_ disincentivize public escapism? what about reading or drawing in public then? perhaps it's dangerous if people look at each other too much. and why don't _we_ standardize clothing so that everyone feels more equal. and do _we_ really need so many words, how about _we_ reduce it down to a few hundred useful ones and just stop teaching the others. who is we, we is us, and us is we. if you give people freedom to do a lot of different things, they may not make good individual choices which can lead to bad collective actions. if they were individual choices they will be individually self-corrected. do you value freedom or outcomes? because you're going to need a big hammer to get all your outcome nails nice and flat. alternatively you need to build your civilization on a different moral foundation, something like social harmony or public good. you might find a strong central government, no immigration, with an insulated and culturo-ethnically homogeneous population with a tendency towards being socially and fiscally conservative, family oriented and not prone to large unfunded liabilities in domestic ponzi schemes and international military escapades; as pre-requisites to your social engineering utopian fantasies. america is about fuck you and fuck you too.