As I sit packed around a table at a local restaurant with a few of my closest friends, many of whom I haven’t seen since we all left for college, my eyes drift away from my menu, and my gaze moves from table to table. I people-watch each family, group of friends, couple, and the group of people waiting by the door to be seated who have all chosen to come together to eat tonight. I can’t help but notice the only thing all these strangers in this crowded restaurant have in common. A small, intricate device that fits in the palm of their hands, which diverts attention from the people around them.

Apple, thank you not only for making the infamous IPhone a crowd favorite but for over-populating our generation with the glorious devices. I am not about to blame Steve Jobs for creating a phone we all love or blame Mark Zuckerberg for making Facebook a place for everyone to brag about their latest accomplishments and for moms to show off what their kids are doing lately. I’m not blaming the creator of Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, GroupMe, etc. for the problem a single device has handed our generation. No, I'm putting the blame on you. On us, as a generation.

It seems wherever I go, I can’t walk anywhere anymore without seeing someone being on their phone. Standing in line at the grocery store, waiting at the doctors office, walking from store to store, in the car, in the bathroom... the list goes on and on. We truthfully can not put our phones down ever, and if we seem to forget our phone, it feels as if we’re about to have a heart attack. It’s ruining how we run our relationships with people, how we interact, and how we see the world around us.

Our relationships with people have become a foursome with us, them, and our phones. There is nothing worse than talking to a brick wall or having to repeat yourself for a third time because the person you were having a conversation with was too interested in what their phone had to say, over you. Your friends aren’t as interested in what you’re saying and mid-conversation pick up their smart phone to find something to occupy themselves as you ramble on. They’ll say, “Oh yeah, wait what?” solely because we can’t take a minute of our time to dedicate to each other.

Our phone offers us numerous ways to occupy our time. It hands us a huge chunk of what we spend our time on, which is social media, but it’s far from making us anywhere near social. It’s made us so separate from each other. Nothing is intimate anymore. You share everything with all your 1,235 friends online, and we reach out to each other by a bare minimum of liking a Facebook status, commenting on it, or favoriting a tweet to show our presence.

We aren’t physically there anymore with each other. Being “social” isn’t striking up a conversation with someone sitting next to you at the doctors office anymore or talking to the person standing in line with you getting coffee. Being social now is conversing over a screen.

As I go back to my dinner with friends, I’m completely awestruck that so many of these people at the restaurant came here to visit and talk with their friends, and yet everyone seems to be caught up on what their phone has to offer. Can it not wait until you get home?

You only have limited precious time with the people around you and we waste it scrolling through our newsfeed to fill time. I’m at fault, too. I am beyond guilty of this. I find myself being present on my phone more than I am with the conversation around me with the ones I love. It disgusts me when I think that a form of technology can drive me away from connecting with everything around me. We all need to learn to spend quality time with each other without staring at a screen.

Start small. When you go out to dinner, set the phone away from you in your purse, turn the sound off, and focus on the person sitting in front of you. I can promise you what was posted while you were visiting with your friend will be there when you get home. I can also promise that you and your friend will have had a much better and more intimate time with each other while your phones are away versus conversing every other couple minutes after you check your phone.

I challenge you to start putting down your phone more often and start looking up at the world around you. I can not stress enough that we need to be there with each other in the moment. Grasp this concept and keep it in mind every day.