You wake up and check to see the morning updates on your Facebook timeline, lying in bed as you scroll through for a few minutes until you reach what you read the night before. While you slowly start to wake up, you pick an awesome Spotify sing along to while you take a shower, get your hair done, and put on your make-up.
Time for breakfast and you decide to check your twitter news feed, what's popular, and maybe check the moments that might include some relevant news. Go to work or classes and while you’re walking you’re texting your friends about the most recent relationship tragedy, a delicious restaurant they came across, or the brand new movie you guys have to go see.
Lunch break and you decide to check Snapchat and all of your friends’ stories. Taking time to reply to them with filters and emoji’s that really go well with your reaction. While you wait for them to reply, you check out Tinder and wonder if you’ve made any new and exciting matches. Swipe left, left, right, right, right, left, right. Before you know it lunch is passed and it’s time to head home. You check Pinterest for any new dinner ideas and while you eat you turn on Netflix. Your day is quickly over and you turn the lamps off, but the light is still on because now you’re watching Youtube... until your eyes collapse and you wake up suddenly to the start of a new day. The cycle repeats and nothing changes except for the content of media you are viewing.
In today’s digital age, too often our eyes seemed glued to the hand-held screen before us. The only face-to-face conversations we seem to have are no longer than two minutes and are driven by small talk, or the conversations are side tracked by the media we scroll through on one of our many apps.
I am guilty of it, too. Every time I am home for break or my family comes to visit me, I always get called out by my grandma for never getting away from my phone and I’m finally starting to see the trend in not only my own life but in our entire generation’s. No matter how much I liked the “Damn, Daniel” craze or all the other famous vines or videos that were shared way too many times... it is still not better than the real world. I promise.
Pictures can say a thousand words, but that doesn’t mean they are more important than the actual words coming out of our mouths when we have a meaningful conversation. Pictures and videos can capture memories and make them last a lifetime, but if our noses are so stuck in our technology than we will end up missing the moments that make what was caught on camera so significant.
With our heads down, mesmerized by who-knows-what on our cell phones, we can miss out on more than we think. By filling all of our alone time with random noise, we forget to pay attention to our own thoughts. When we live a life attached to something this consuming, we forget what else is out there, and it’s right in front of us. We just have to look up. So put the phone down and enjoy life the way it is supposed to be.
