I know. I'm in DC, same thing. I go walk on lunch and it's as if the phones are The Light, and everyone's spellbound looking into them as they walk. Tragic.

But it does reveal more and more the actual state of Western culture: we are sleepwalkers. We float through life, moment by moment without realizing why we do what we do. We think we're in control of our minds, and we've confused all the desires and impulses the brain pumps out as things that are pleasant and good for us. We don't do the thinking, it's doing us. In the words of Eckhart Tolle,

"You are unconsciously identified with the mind, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity - the thinker."

How true that is.

Soul.