Stomach growls and ESP

In my community service fraternity (APO), our new members have to do mini ‘interviews’ with the other members of the group. Often, I get asked, “if you could have one superpower, what would you have”. I usually say “the power to read minds”. Often this statement is argued with because it would make life boring.

I still think it would be great to be able to read minds. Take this, for example. Wednesday night, I had a friend over. This is a new friend, and therefore we are not completely comfortable with each other yet (not in a bad way, its just new). We were watching a movie at 2AM and I heard his stomach growling. And TADA, I knew that he was hungry. Maybe he had been too uncomfortable to ask me for a snack. We made 2AM pancakes with chocolate chips and blueberries. No more stomach growling.

If people could read minds, they would be able to pick up on these types of cues that would automatically make social situations less awkward. If you walked into a job interview and you had toilet paper trailing off of your shoe, the interviewer would think “hey, this messy potential employee has toilet paper on their shoe” and boom, you would know to look down and make a joke while removing it.

Is this cheating? Maybe. But then again, we are a culture that is in a hurry and cannot learn to pick up on social cues. Ten years ago if you met a potential mate, you had to pay attention to body language (how they were looking at you, how close they stood to you) to figure out if they had a boyfriend or girlfriend. Today, you wait until you get home and look them up on Facebook so you can see their ‘relationship status’.

So here is what I am wondering: is society today making people too lazy to pay attention to social cues? Has growing up with the conveniences of Facebook and email made me lazy? If change is supposed to be a good thing, is this change in human communication wrong?