It was a day like any other. I got out of class, mingled with various friends and walked to the usual meeting spot. After a few customary hello’s and how are you’s, I checked my phone for any missed calls or texts. Nothing. Disappointed by my lack of any cellular social life, I went back to speaking with my friends. One of them walked over to me and I waved with my phone in hand at him. Suddenly, the events that followed seemed to go in slow motion as my beautiful phone, a victim to merciless gravity, tumbled through the air and crashed face down onto the pavement. With a silent prayer, I bent down to retrieve my hopefully unfazed phone. I slowly flipped it over, which revealed a series of webbed cracks on my phone screen. My first thought was "Crap, this gonna be such a hassle to get fixed." As I further assessed the damage, I saw that both my glass screen protector and my poor phone screen had sadly perished in the accident. Even better.
After the initial shock of the mishap, I was angry and began aimlessly asking questions; How could this travesty have happened to me? What did I do to deserve such vile treatment from fate? And eventually, I fell into a state of mourning in which I remained for the rest of the day. In all seriousness, I was absolutely devastated when my screen broke. Looking back it seems stupid, but, at the time, I was really torn up. I panicked about telling my parents, who regularly insisted that I put a case on my phone, for fear of how they’d react to seeing an one hundred dollar phone repair charge on their credit card statement.
However, now I realize that the thing I should've been most worried about is that I found the shattering of my iPhone screen more traumatic than hearing about the various deaths on the news that same day. Granted, my phone is something that applies to me directly, while the tragedies in the news do not. Regardless, this realization was a wake up call for me, no pun intended. Even I was surprised at how I reacted to the breaking of my phone screen. Since when did I start valuing a tiny machine over a human life? And this is precisely what especially worries me about the millennial generation as a whole. We are often so caught up in our online presence and our physical property that we almost entirely lose empathy, a vital aspect of humanity. And looking back, I am slightly disgusted with myself for caring so much about something that is so easily replaceable. After all, vanities, regardless of price, are replaceable, but nothing can replace a human life or a human connection. And so, it is important that the next time we find ourselves crying over a cracked iPhone, we step back for a second and realize that it's just a cracked screen. Nothing more.
