Johann Hari:

“Next to me there were two men in, I guess, their mid-twenties. I shamelessly eavesdropped on their conversation while pretending to read David Copperfield. It was clear they had met on an app, and this was the first time they had seen each other in person.

There was something about their conversation that seemed odd to me, and I couldn’t place it at first. Then I realised they weren’t, in fact, having a conversation at all. What would happen is the first one, who was blond, would talk about himself for ten minutes or so. Then the second one, was dark-haired, would talk about himself for ten minutes. And they alternated in this way, interrupting each other. I sat next to them for two hours, and at no point did either of them ask the other person a question. At one point, the dark-haired man mentioned that his brother has died a month before. The blond didn’t even offer a cursory ‘I’m sorry to hear that’: he simply went back to talking about himself. I realised that if they had met up simply to read out their own Facebook status updates to each other in turn, there would have been absolutely no difference.

I felt like everywhere I went, I was surrounded by people who were broadcasting but not receiving. Narcissism, it occurred to me, is a corruption of attention – it’s where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego.”