Nobody tells you how to behave in a waiting room. And yet the moment you sit down in one, something shifts.
You straighten up slightly. You find your phone. You look at it. Not because anything has happened since you last checked it thirty seconds ago. Not because you’re expecting something urgent. But because sitting quietly in a room full of strangers doing absolutely nothing feels, for some reason, unbearable.
So you perform. You perform distraction. You perform purpose. You hold the phone at a particular angle and move your thumb across the screen in a way that suggests you are a person with things to do, messages to read, a life happening just beyond this room. Even when you’re scrolling through nothing. Even when you’ve read the same three notifications four times already.
Where did that come from?
There’s something about shared public stillness that most of us find deeply uncomfortable. When you’re moving — walking, driving, doing — you have a built-in reason to exist in a space. You’re passing through. You belong here because you’re going somewhere. But in a waiting room you are just sitting. Stationary. Present for no reason other than to wait. And for some reason that feels like it needs to be disguised.
So we reach for our phones. Or we study the floor. Or we read a magazine we have no interest in with the focused expression of someone doing important research. Anything to signal that we’re occupied. That our minds are elsewhere. That we’re not just sitting here being quietly aware of all the other people sitting here being quietly aware of us.
The strange part is that everyone in the room is doing exactly the same thing. Every person performing the same show for an audience that is too busy performing to watch. A room full of people pretending not to be in the room.
It changes depending on the type of waiting room too, in ways you somehow just know. A doctor’s waiting room calls for quiet, slightly serious stillness — nothing too loud or cheerful. An airport departure lounge gives you more permission to spread out, eat, make noise. A hair salon has its own particular performance, one where you accidentally make eye contact with someone mid-haircut who has nowhere else to look.
What does all of this say about us?
Maybe it says that we’re not very comfortable being still. That somewhere along the way we learned to associate stillness with purposelessness, and purposelessness with something vaguely shameful. So we fill every gap with the appearance of motion, even when we’re sitting completely still.
Or maybe it says something simpler. That we’re social creatures who find it genuinely strange to share space with people we are not allowed to interact with. The waiting room puts you in proximity with strangers but gives you no script for acknowledging them. No transaction, no shared goal, no reason to speak. So you retreat into your phone. Not because you need it. But because it gives you somewhere to put your eyes.
Next time you reach for your phone in a waiting room, pause for just a second before you unlock it.
Ask yourself what you are actually waiting for.