One morning I left my phone at home, completely on accident. I found it on the couch later that night, right where I ate breakfast. I didn’t notice I didn’t have it until after I parked and, out of habit, checked the side pockets of my backpack for my water and my phone. Upon not feeling my phone, since I was wearing a hoodie, I guessed I had left it in my front pocket. That was not the case. So I resolved myself to a day without my phone.
This isn’t some article about the evils of electronics and how I’m so enlightened after forgetting my phone one day and having to navigate without it for approximately 11 hours.
It’s one of those things where you don’t always realize how convenient something is or how much you use it until you don’t have it. I won’t lie and say it was easy. It wasn’t. My phone is the central location for many things. It has my planner, my calendar, and my to-do list. During work I had to input survey data and some music would have been nice. It felt strange writing homework assignments down in the margins of my notes, something I rarely have to do.
A phone is so much easier than a laptop when it comes to quickly checking email or looking up something online. Anyone who goes to Mercyhurst knows how many emails you get in a particular day. Some of them could be important, like responses from professors, notices from groups, or messages from the university. Without the easy viewing of notifications on a lock screen, I had to rely on checking on my laptop periodically, which is not small or convenient, especially waiting for a class to start. I guess that’s what I missed the most: the accessibility and the convenience.
It’s also, I’ve found, to be a sort of social crutch. In between classes, just waiting around, everyone is on their phones, mindlessly checking social media or reading an article. I didn’t miss the fact I couldn’t be constantly connected to my friends and social media all the time; I missed the crutch of filling my downtime with mindless scrolling and checking, fake productivity in the three minutes before class starts.
(And my earbuds were connected to my phone so I couldn’t even watchYouTube or do music-related homework on my laptop!)
As it turns out, my life didn’t end because I didn’t have my phone. The world still spun and I still was able to get through my day without any major hiccups stemming from the fact I was phoneless. The biggest thing that worried me was what if someone needed to get a hold of me? I could only communicate through Google and Facebook, and like I said, it was a bit of an inconvenience to get out my laptop and not checked as often as compared to when I had a phone. The rest of it was just small inconveniences I could live without. So, no, I wouldn’t give up my phone for a week as a social experiment. I was enlightened, not to the evils of technology, but to how convenient phones have become nowadays. I’m siding with technology on this one.
