“Katie, put your phone away.” My father had his scary voice on, which might be hard to fathom considering he had a forkful of spaghetti in his mouth, but he managed alright.
I scowled and shoved my phone into my pocket. But my friends…
This was five, six, seven (seven? How old am I, anyway?) years ago. My parents still don’t let me have my phone on the table.
I couldn’t wait to go to college. Or lunch. With my friends, or with my little sister. With anyone but my parents, whose strict rules prevented me from checking for texts or Facebook updates or email notifications.
But then I began to notice something odd. When I put down my phone, I’d want to say something to my friends, but the words would die in my mouth as I noticed everyone around me was inattentive.
Well, inattentive to me (not that I’m constantly vying for attention, but it is nice when people actually listen to the stuff you’re saying, you know?) and completely absorbed in their phones.
And it wasn’t…pleasant.
It wasn’t fun, or entertaining, to see everyone focusing on people who weren’t even in the room. There was no conversation, other than an occasional bout of laughter from watching a cat video or three.
It was, however, a lot of work, constantly checking for updates on people you can’t see or touch. Is it worth it?
As a girl splitting her time between Manhattan and a small (okay, really small) rural town, I can tell you people in the city are busier and more irritable and just…younger (on average) than the folks upstate.
This irritability (any physiology nerds looking to call it “responsiveness” would be insanely accurate) and need to be busy only fuels our desire to constantly be checking our calendars, our watches (which are really smart these days), and our plethora of social media accounts.
Honestly, the fact that there are Snap Stories, Instagram Stories, and Facebook Stories totally confuses me. Is this practical or even necessary? (I think not. This is just another way to procrastinate, and if we watch people instead of puppies, maybe we convince ourselves we’re being more productive?)
But I digress.
The point of the matter is that we are all sooo busy, we take our work and our online friends home with us.
Do we like constantly feeling stressed out? Do we enjoy the perennial feelings of anxiety and paranoia (“Ohmygosh, did I oversleep and miss my third final of the day? Oh wait, I took the final and then took a nap…”) resulting from an overcrowded schedule?
I don’t. I barely keep everything together when my calendar is half empty.
So why do we constantly feel the need to fill up our days with obsessive email-checking, social media updating, or selfie perfecting? It just stresses me out, and I’m willing to bet it stresses most of us out (at least a little).
Now, I’m not saying we can make an easy fix for this problem. Our lives are too caught up in our phones, and as much as we might really want to, the vast majority of us can’t give them up completely.
It’s a nice idea to live like they did before the massive technological advances, but the world’s a different place. We have to accept this and learn to adjust.
And by this, I mean keeping cell phones off the dinner table.
Or off of any table, really. Let’s sit and eat and enjoy the food and the company without worrying about what your Social Psychology professor is emailing you, or about what your friend from across the coast is doing on spring break.
Let’s try to tuck the phones into our coat pockets and trust in the power of a good old-fashioned conversation. The ebb and flow of friendly, loud, genuine voices is so familiar to us, and it’s what a lot of us associate with eating anyway.
So take your glamorous food pictures, but then eat in a manner that’s noticeably less so. Enjoy the company of the friend you haven’t seen in six weeks, of the friend you saw six hours ago, of your sister’s mother-in-law.
But for 37 minutes or three hours, let’s try to forget about the phones burning holes in our back pockets and dedicate a little more time and effort to the people and environment in the real world, in real time.
It might be stressful at first, but once you get used to it, eating without constantly checking your phone might become the thing you look forward to every day.
(Facebook and the YouTube cat videos will still be there when you’re done.)