Do you find people are less social as the size of the building increases?

I’ve noticed it’s mostly the elderly who try to engage in conversations more, I usually chalk it up to them being more lonely and having a less busy schedule

The dog owners are a big reason I thought about this more. Like you said, it’s usually at similar hours everyday so I’ll run into a few pretty regularly. They usually seem like they’re in a rush to get their walk done so I don’t want to bog them down with small talk, and at the same time I don’t know if I’m just being awkward by not engaging with them more.

I get what you’re saying about how people establish stronger pathways when they discover something on their own rather than copying something down but at the same time, that’s how education works. You have something explained to you simply first, whether that’s by human instruction like a prof or written instruction/visual demonstration like doing your own research on google. Of course there are low quality/high quality internet sources just like there are low quality/high quality professors and that goes back to how much of a desire the student has to learn, whether they just want to copy and paste answers or actually understand why it is that answer.

As a math teacher I’m sure you can agree that high level academics depends on having a understanding of the fundamentals. If I don’t understand algebra or polynomials then It’s going to take me a while to get a hang of derivatives or calculus and that doesn’t mean I’m stupid or lazy, I just haven’t devoted my life to that specific field because I have 9 other courses to study at the same time. Graduation numbers would be insanely low if we expected kids to figure everything out on their own without access to previous knowledge like the internet. Having the world’s library at your fingertips gives you the ability to copy and paste but also the ability to be an autodidact, it really depends on that specific person’s desire and goals.

I had a lot of foreign students as TA’s for my calc courses, I know it’s not their fault but it was really difficult for a lot of us to understand their accents and we didn’t want to be rude by asking them to repeat themselves all the time. If I didn’t learn google-fu for explanations on concepts I would have failed those classes easily.

I think that comes down to your desire to learn. One person might just repeat a google answer but another person might spend some time thinking about why it’s the right answer.

Google is how people get degrees after all, it’s the modern day version of hunting down books in libraries

Our phones are probably doing something to us

If I go in for my booty fingering and the doc bends over and starts speaking to me through their lower intestines, I’m walking right back out…to tell the secretary I’d like to book a weekly ass blasting with this mutant

As long as they’re not obnoxiously loud and saying something that’s actually funny, I think it’s completely normal. People usually say funny things that they find funny so it would be natural for them to laugh a little.