After I finished my first semester of college, I had a sit down with one of my friends who goes to school down south. I was surprised that we had stayed in contact not only because after high school, your circle of friends tends to shift, but also because he had been going through a “no technology” phase. Now I’m all for peace, love, and connecting with nature, but at the time, the idea of living without technology was way too far left on the hippie spectrum for me. That’s my man's 100 grand though, so I respected his choice and even listened to his perspective on the technology-obsessed world we live in for a while. After that day, I thought nothing more of it.

Fast forward to this weekend, it was like any other. I woke up morosely after sleeping half the day away, got dressed and headed to the gym. On my way out the door I grabbed my charger and my phone. During the school year, my phone is my lifeline. It has my schedule, alarms, important notes, etc., all the essential things I need for surviving college. When I’m home for the summer however, my phone is lucky if I remember to charge it at night. The night before just so happened to be one of those nights. No big deal though, right? I had my charger with me so I could easily find an outlet at some point during the day. I get to the gym and set up shop by the squat rack and pull out my charger. WTF! My charger looked like Master Splinter chewed through it. Apple products are the worst! I looked at my phone as it took it’s last breath and died in my arms.

I was in too deep to go back now. I finished up at the gym, with no music, and proceeded to my friends house hoping to find a way to charge my cellular device. Since my phone was dead, I had to knock on the door instead of sending the classic text, “Yoooooo I’m outside.” Subsequently, I had to actually talk to my friend’s mom. I get down to the basement where my friend was huddled around the table with her two other friends, all of them on their phones. Now usually when old people make fun of the younger generation for how stupid we look when we’re glued to our phones I shrug it off as just old people being old, but for the first time I actually saw what they meant. They were all in the same room, but weren’t really interacting or enjoying each other’s presence. I never asked for the charger.

I hung out for a minute and left. I decided to finish my day without my phone, just to see what it was like. It was weird at first. I had to go to out in public and actually make eye contact with people, no pretending to text to avoid awkward situations. I had to remember directions because I couldn’t just GPS where to go. I even had to listen to the radio, something I hadn’t done in years! Once I got home and my phone was charged, I thought that I surely had missed out on everything and my notifications would be filled to the brim. I had three irrelevant texts and two Snapchats of someone’s cat. Maybe we don’t need cell phones as much as we think we do after all.