The Man at the Bus Stop

There is a man I see some mornings at the bus stop near my house. He is maybe twenty-eight. He looks like he does not sleep well.

We have never spoken. But I have watched him, over months, and I have noticed things.

He does not seem to be going to work. He does not seem to be going anywhere in particular. He is looking at his phone. The phone is doing something to his face. He smiles, sometimes. More often he does not. He watches whatever is on the phone the way my father used to watch television in the last years. A half-attention. Not really seeing. Not really here.

Whatever he is watching has been chosen for him. Something on the other side of the phone has learned, minute by minute, what holds his attention. It is not personal. The same thing is happening to my niece's tablet, and my own phone, and probably yours. We are all being watched by something that has learned to watch us.

I have wondered if he has a girlfriend. I have wondered if he has any friend he talks to in the evenings. I have wondered what he is going to do today, if anything. I have wondered if his parents are alive and whether he sees them.

I do not know. But I know there are many young men like him. The people who count these things say so. The young men, in particular, are not doing well. They are not finding work that feels useful. They are not finding partners. They are not having friends, or children, or purposes.

The state gives some of them enough money to keep them fed and housed. This is better than letting them starve. But nobody has told them what they are meant to do with the time.

A few find something. Make a craft. Raise a child well. Start something small. Study something. Build a thing. A small number of them, quietly, are doing beautifully with what they have.

Most do not. Most watch screens. Drink. Take something. Drift.

It is not their fault. Nobody has told them what the time is for. The institutions that used to give young men somewhere to go — the factory, the union, the church, the army — are gone or shrunken. The family that used to absorb them is smaller. The neighbourhood is full of people they do not know, watching their own phones.

When my grandfather was twenty-eight, he knew where to stand. He knew what was expected of him. He knew the people who expected it.

The man at the bus stop does not.

Young men who have no place and no purpose are, historically, the most dangerous category of person a society can produce. Not because they are bad. Because they are human, and they need a place and a purpose, and if the society does not give them one, they will find one themselves, and the one they find will not always be one the society wanted.

I do not know what happens to him. I hope he finds something. I worry that most will not.