Lately, I have seen a lot of blog posts and articles about how technology and social media have been destroying our generation. To be quite frank, I disagree. I think it is our own fault.

This past Saturday was my sorority's annual formal. I did not go. I went to the gym with my boyfriend instead. My mom called me while I was at the gym asking if I was okay not going and I told her I was. I then spent at least an hour scrolling through Instagram and watching snapchat stories of formal. It wasn't intentional. I was merely burning time. My boyfriend didn't seem to mind I spent a majority of the movie we watched actually watching my phone. I was really okay not going, I was perfectly fine, but I started to question why I had wasted so much of my night investing in an event I didn't even care about. My boyfriend was beside me on the couch, the one person I would have spent most of my night with, and a majority of my really good friends weren't at formal anyway.

I think the reason our generation is having such a hard time with social media and technology is because we have come to a place in our life where we are so disturbed by silence. I think a lot of the time we have forgotten how to be content where we are. We spend the time we are doing something fun documenting it, maybe for ourselves but probably more for others. We try to look cool, and I'm very guilty of faking a good time for social media too. We try to portray our lives in a completely different light than it actually is. I know it's all been said before, but it's really not social media's fault. It is our fault. As a generation, we have forgotten how to be present.

We get bored so easily and we have all these easily accessible things to fill that void of time. I check Instagram regularly. Sometimes I will check it, lock my phone for five minutes, realize nothing else is going on around me, and open the app back up and scroll through it, even though it's the same 60 pictures I just spent the last 30 minutes going through. Social media has become such a mindless time suck. It's not Twitter's fault or Pinterest's fault; it's our own. We have grown to become restless when our fingers aren't scrolling down the page and we get disturbed by silence, so we plug in earphones when we run or wait outside for a bus. When we disconnect and distract ourselves, we remove ourselves from the world we are in to enter a self-constructed world where we can pick and choose what we look at and who we talk to. Why would we talk to the stranger on our left at the bus stop when we can use our thumbs to talk to our significant other? Why would we stand silently and listen to honking horns on the street when we can pulg in earphones and listen to the new Kanye album? Why would we move our eyes off of our screen with beautiful pictures of our friends and their vacations to look slightly to the right and see a very un-aesthetically pleasing homeless man begging us for money we don't have? None of these things are bad, but it is the circumstances we use them in that are debilitating our generation.

When we only invest in our self-constructed world that exists in our 5x2 inch hand held computer, we miss everything around us. We miss the ability to absorb and observe and interact with a world that exists in that moment. Once that moment passes, that world will never exist again and we missed it. We miss it so that we can dwell on a pre-existing, pre-constructed reality that is repetitive. THAT is why we are so obsessed with social media. It has become a mindless passing of time that we unconsciously have built our own world in and our own reality in and a very safe place to enter when we are surrounded by the unknown and unfamiliar. We forget that it's okay to not be involved in that world all the time because we have grown so accustomed to it. That is why people have grown to be so dependent on gaining likes and followers for reaffirmation and self fulfillment, because compliments from strangers have become so foreign and uncomfortable. We have a way to disengage from strangers around us and pretend they aren't present. We've started to miss it; we've started to miss the real world. We've started to forget that there is another engaging reality happening around us when we are "bored". If we waited five more seconds, we would see it. We are impatient and anxious, and that is what is destroying our generation. Our apathy and our impatience is what is killing us, not social media.