I silenced my alarm on a sunny Saturday morning before pushing my arms out in an attempt to stretch away the sleepiness. I managed to push my phone through the safety rail on my lofted bed, sending it into a free fall towards the tile floor. Lucky for me, it landed safely on the pile of clean clothes that had been discarded after doing laundry the week before. I breathed a sigh of relief one second too soon because my phone fell from the pile of laundry and hit the tile on the top right corner before landing screen side down. I shot out of bed, palms sweaty, basically hyperventilating in fear that I’d shattered the screen of my beautiful iPhone.
Luckily, I managed to only dent the metal on the side where it landed and chip out a tiny bit of the corner. This had me thinking about the age we live in. Everyone is a quick text or phone call away. When I was younger, before cell phones were something everyone had, I would have to call my friend’s house from a landline to their landline, and hope that the line wasn’t busy and that my friend was home. After making plans, you’d have to keep true to them because there wasn’t a way to get ahold of someone once they’d left their house.
In today’s day-and-age, everything is on a cell phone. My entire life is on my cell phone. I no longer have to memorize phone numbers because they are saved on my phone, and all I have to do is touch the screen to call someone. If someone doesn’t answer my phone call, I can shoot them a text rather than leave a message in hopes to get their response sooner than if I were to wait for them to call back.
Some people are so attached to their phones that they feel phantom vibrations. This “syndrome” occurs when a person feels as if their phone has vibrated, but the phone did not actually vibrate. There have been actual studies on this phenomenon, which shows how much of a problem the addiction to cell phones is. The need to have the ability to contact anyone, at any given time is a problem because it disconnects us from the outside world.
I, too, like many others, have been guilty of being attached to my phone twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Travelling abroad, where I am with out cell phone service unless there’s Wi-Fi, has helped me realize how attached I have become to my phone and also helps me put my phone down and live in the present.
In a society where we seek immediate gratification, I find it difficult to go more than a few hours without my phone. We need to put down our phones, not just while we’re driving, but also for a few hours a day and live in the present. Think of this as a reminder. Put down your phone. Leave it in your room or at home, and go out and do something. Talk to your friends, not to your friends who are “multi-tasking” on their phone while listening, and not with you talking and “multi-tasking” on your phone. You miss a lot when you’re distracted, scrolling through your Twitter feed.
