These days, it is so hard to go 24 hours without looking at your cell phone. Most of the time, our whole lives are on those things, and being without them for a day is boring and can make you face how uncomfortable raw, undistracted moments are.
As someone who lives in New York, one of the most tempting times for me to use my cell phone to hide awkwardness is while waiting for the elevator. Mostly because everyone else in the queue for the elevator is on their cell phone as well. So if your phone is dead, or you don’t have it on you, you’re stuck staring at the ground praying the elevator comes quickly.
And maybe that’s not the case for everyone else, but for me, it is so hard to face silent moments in public without distractions. It’s so much easier to scroll through Twitter than to live in each moment fully, especially the uncomfortable ones.
And that’s why we should give ourselves breaks. Living behind a screen makes the hard moments a little better, but it makes the good moments so much worse because we’re stuck thinking about what celebrity news or funny tweets we’re missing out on.
And there’s another reason: people tend to only post the good things about their lives on social media; it’s typically not an accurate depiction. And because we only see the good things in other peoples’ lives, we only see the bad things in our own. Don’t get me wrong, I love social media, but there is a huge disconnect between the way we depict ourselves online and the way we truly are. We usually don’t talk about the painful things or post pictures where we don’t like the way we look, and that’s a big problem because it perpetuates the idea that our image is more important than our reality.
So this week, I challenge you to stop using your phone as a filler for uncomfortable moments. When it’s awkward at the dinner table, spark a conversation instead of scrolling through Twitter. If you’re eating lunch by yourself, take in your environment and the taste of every bite of your food instead of watching Snapchat stories. When you’re getting ready to go to bed, pick up a good book instead of playing games on Facebook. It makes living your life so much easier if you’re not pressured to check your phone constantly.
