Maybe it is exactly because books are so cheap nowadays that nobody aspires to own them. Maybe it is exactly because education is free [at least in part of Eur

Maybe it is exactly because books are so cheap nowadays that nobody aspires to own them. Maybe it is exactly because education is free [at least in part of Europe] that people do not value it anymore [there]. On reflection: no, it's the phones, folks. On a recent train ride, a young woman sitting diagonnally in front from me was frantically typing on her cellphone. It appeared from a distance she was cutting out some phrase, putting it into a frame and posting it to a social network. While this took just seconds, the task was itself interrupted by her checking chat messages from multiple contacts, each of which she replied in less than two seconds. This is something that I've had to watch in public spaces a lot: the compulsion to react on incomming messages - but then at the receiving end the dopamin kicks in until a reply to the response is sent and so on, ad infinitum. Timing-wise, there is little time to think deeply about what to write, the content becomes victim to short utterance ping-pong.