I recently wrote about public behaviour and how increasingly difficult it has become to navigate shared space. This is a continuation of that thought, with a sharper focus.

The most common justification for being on the phone in public is safety.

It doesn’t quite hold up.

Of course, context matters. There are situations where calling someone is sensible, even necessary. But that is not what most of us are seeing day to day. What we are seeing is constant connection. Voice notes. Video calls. Speakerphone conversations filling entire carriages.

This is not protection.

It is something else.

A social comfort blanket.
A performance of busyness.
An avoidance of stillness.
A way of filling space so that nothing else can get in.

I understand the instinct. My phone and wallet were stolen last year in central London. I know how quickly your sense of ease can disappear. Fear does not need to be rational to feel real.

But there is a difference between responding to risk and rehearsing it.

When every quiet moment is filled with noise, when every journey becomes a call, when presence is replaced with distraction, something shifts. The world begins to feel less navigable, not more. You stop observing. You stop engaging. You retreat.

And in doing so, you do not become safer.

You become disconnected.

Phones create the illusion of control. Of being accompanied. Of being insulated from whatever might happen around you. But they also make you less aware of your surroundings, more predictable in your behaviour, and, in some cases, more exposed.

That tension is rarely acknowledged.

Not every person on a call is anxious. Not every moment of connection is avoidance. But when it becomes constant, habitual, automatic, it is worth asking what function it is really serving.

Because for many people, it is not safety.

It is comfort.

And comfort, left unexamined, quietly reshapes how we move through the world.