Picture this: a steamy spring night in Austin, with Yo La Tengo tearing the roof off the Music Hall. The piece shifts and grinds, claws and climbs its way upward into a kind of apocalyptic chaos as the drums and bass rumble under swirling keys and ungodly screeches from the guitar. It's music to either hate or be mesmerized by. Maybe both. But either way, this isn't neutral music. You're swept up in it, or you head for the exit... Or, if you're like, say, 20 or 30 people jam-packed around me near the stage in front of the band, you celebrate this monstrous sonic event by pulling out your fucking phone and giving your thumbs a workout. You text your way through the moment.
This is the absolute polar antithesis of living in the moment, right? This shoots that whole Buddhist thing in the head. This is putting a filter of your own invention between you and the experience. This is standing with one foot in the room and one outside the door. This is how not to get the most out of a moment, as you clumsily synthesize it for your confidante down the street ("Dude, you should be here, the guy's swinging his guitar over his head"), or begin planning the next moment before this one's done.
Frank Zappa talked about death by nostalgia--forward movement stops as we get more & more nostalgic for the place where we stood a moment ago. But this, this is different--experience gets shorter and shorter, as we move from one moment to the next faster and faster. Gotta go. Just gotta. Gotta.