Hey! What's up? I'm a millenial living in a modern, 21st century world, and odds are you are, too! So you know the thing that runs our lives? Our phones? Yeah, mine died. Not low-battery died. Like, it would not turn on at all. It would just show the Apple logo and go back off again. Of course this happens conveniently after my friends and I went to Chinatown. But the struggle of not having a working cell phone for three to four days is not a struggle you would ever want to go through.
I panicked for a second, and then became calm. I went to get my laptop but it decided to be slow and glitch. Nice. Now, I'm living without a working phone and computer. So I have to walk all the way down to the computer lab to email my mom. I knew she probably texted me and she said that if I don't contact her within three hours, she will make the four-to-six-hour trek up to my school to look for me. It felt so weird to casually email people. I hopefully will never do that again. I was disgusted.
No Snapchat. No Instagram. No Twitter. No Facebook. No Tumblr. No texts. Nothing. I felt so disconnected. I was so bored. With my friends, they were able to aimlessly scroll yet there I was trying to make conversation or entertain myself in some way. The awkward silences in group conversations felt twice as awkward without my phone. I felt totally weird.
I get most of the news from social media and not having access to it made me feel so out of the loop. I also had no means of contacting friends and family unless I physically saw them. I had homework questions that I couldn't even ask my peers about. I felt totally behind.
I also hated depending on my roommate to wake me up. I just have to be thankful for having my first classes start at 10AM and 12:30PM. I should also add that I've been really sick and almost got pink eye all while not having a phone. I should've seen this coming. Life was going way too well.
While not having a phone, I had some time to reflect on how dependent we are on technology and social media. I had to think about how life went without easy access to smartphones. Our smartphones are the most useful and important things we have in our lives. We should finally accept that we are dependent on them and there's nothing wrong with that. As humans, we like to be somewhat organized and included. Cell phones are totally necessary items in our lives. We all should be thankful that we have them in our lives because we take them for granted when there are people who don't have phones who want them.
