Crossroads

A six-panel SMBC comic. A woman in a red jacket asks a dark-haired woman in glasses, "How do you do it? How do you spend so little time on your phone?" The woman in glasses replies, "Easy. Imagine you're at a crossroads. One path is marked 'lasting happiness.' One is marked 'not being bored right this second.'" Then she adds, "I would get a picture of myself going to 'lasting happiness' then use it to make strangers online jealous." The red-jacket woman, deadpan, says, "The crossroads was a metaphor." The woman in glasses holds up her phone and exclaims, "Ha! Nice try! I've lost the ability to think in metaphor." Votey: a close-up of the woman's smiling face as she says, "Weirdly, I can still write Instagram poetry." The joke: she's so phone-addicted she misses the metaphor entirely yet remains capable of shallow social-media output.