A few days after I updated my phone, I received a notification I hadn't seen before. It stated my "screen time," which I was unfamiliar with at first but quickly caught the drift. As I saw the amount appear, five hours and 27 minutes, I was repulsed. I kept thinking, "this has to be wrong" but it was not.

As a society, can we really help it? Phones have become our entire world, as scary as that sounds. Many people work off of their phones, which is a valid excuse to have a large amount of screen time, but as college students, most of us use our phones for social media. And we can't help it.

There is not much work that can be done off of my phone, but there surely is a lot that distracts me from the work that needs to be done. Perhaps others have more self-control with their social media use, but honestly, I do not. What I have found that works in lowering screen time is deleting apps that make me stay on my phone so long, but they always eventually are re-downloaded.

Perhaps this is just the future of our generation. We have phones, and social media accounts so of course we are using them, and most of the time we have slight self-control when it comes to it. The screen time aspect of Apple's update is eye-opening, and very truthfully, I almost always dread the weekly update. I try hard to not get lost in my phone because there is always work to be done, but sometimes everyone does. This notification I dreaded so much has helped me take my life back, and put my priorities, work, and friends before my phone usage. As much as it saddened me to receive my first daunting screen time notification, each week I get a burst of happiness when I see the amount of time spent on my phone decrease.