Capturing The Cultural Moment

Returning from Washington after the court hearing on Friday, I took the Amtrak train to Penn Station, and then the subway a few stops down to my home in Greenwich Village. It being the tail end of the rush hour, the subway was relatively crowded.

A few moments after getting on the subway train, something struck me: every single person in my field of vision was staring at a smartphone screen. Here was the view of one side of the car:

And this was the view of the other side:

It appears that we have achieved 100% peak smartphone saturation.

Could this phenomenon be related to the near total disappearance of critical thinking among young people today?