“If we do not know how to be alone, we’ll only know how to be lonely”-Sherry Turkle
In The New York Times article “Stop Googling. Let’s talk.”, Sherry Turkle is referring to how we are so addicted to our cell phones, without them we feel completely alone & just recently I realized that it just isn’t okay to feel like that.
Without our cell phones, we feel lonely. Why? Is it because we have so many “friends” when we have our phones? Is it because we look at our Instagram likes as tools of affirmation from our peers? Is it because we might miss out on something if we aren’t constantly checking them?
We’ve turned being alone into a negative thing to where if you are ever alone, you have no friends and you are automatically labeled a “loner”. Society looks at you sitting alone in a restaurant and immediately thinks you have no friends.
I believe that being alone is one of the most human things we can do. When are by yourselves you learn who we are and who we were made to be. We also learn who we are when we have a conversation, with our phones tucked away and having real and raw conversation.
Now one thing is for sure, being alone and being lonely are totally different things. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines being alone as “without anyone or anything: not involving or including anyone or anything else: separate from other people or things” and they define being lonely as “sad from being apart from other people: causing sad feelings that come from being apart from other people”.
When we are feeling lonely because we do not have our cell phones in our hands is exactly the moment when it becomes a problem. Our cell phones definitely should not define our existence. The cell phone was made for communication (as we surely do) but it was not made for a constant flow of photos on our Instagram feeds and Snapchat notifications constantly popping up.
The problem is not the phones themselves, the problem is what we do with the phones. We keep them glued to our hands. At the dinner table, it has become casual to use our phones instead of having a conversation.
So how bout we try putting them away and sitting with our thoughts every once in a while?
