Imagine if you were blinded by a disability that only allowed you to look down wherever you went. Would you see the car coming toward you in the street, or vice versa. Would you see that it was going to rain, or that the sun was shining. Would you see the children playing with one another- their laughter and smiles filling the air with a happy sense of carelessness? Would you see the other people who walked around you, or notice where they were going? Would you be able to keep from bumping into someone else? You wouldn't. You wouldn't notice a life threatening situation, you wouldn't notice the children, you wouldn't notice that there was a man or woman with a piping hot cup of coffee that you just spilled all over them. With a disability like this, you would miss the world around you. Life would go by without you realising.
Now, look up from your phone for about a minute before you continue to read.
What did you see? What was the weather like? Did you recognise where you are?
In our world today, technology has become not just a want but a need. Phones, computers, and tablets are used all day, everyday from being your alarm in the morning to your companion throughout the day. While smartphones are useful tools, we often let them take control of us instead of the other way around. This is a major problem.
While walking through the school lunch room, or even out in a public restaurant there are very few people I see who aren't using a phone. Whether they are texting, Tweeting, or scrolling through pointless apps, everyone in my field of vision is glued to a tiny screen. Because they are stuck to their devices, they don't properly socialise with one another.
People can't have a face-to-face conversation anymore. I walk up to my friends sometimes and stand in front of them silently for five or ten minutes before 1) they even realise I'm there, or 2) they finally figure out what to talk about. A lack of conversation can cause a person to become depressed, inefficient, and, in some cases, a failure.
I broke my phone earlier in the year, and since then, I've only been able to use it for games and the like with wifi only. While not being able to communicate with somebody quickly is difficult, life has not been impossible. I find that without the distraction of my phone at school and on outings with friends and family, I am able to pay better attention to what is around me and I have been ultimately happier. The stress of waiting for someone to text back is gone and I can focus on tasks at hand.
It may be difficult to do, but I encourage everyone to try and give up their phones for a bit of time. Whether you choose to believe it or not, we are addicted to them; like all addictions, they can be helped. Like Billie Joe Armstrong, front man of the rock band Green Day, said to a girl in the front row when I went to see them in concert a couple months ago, 'If you're looking at me through that, you're not really looking at me.' Stop looking at the world through your screens and look with your eyes. You'll be surprised at what you find.
