Everywhere I seem to go nowadays there's someone sitting around griping about how millennials never put down their phones - that we are slaves to them and it effects our communication skills. I would beg to differ, first of all, but I think I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'd like to think that I could completely go off the grid at a moment's notice and be perfectly fine. However, it's times like this morning, when I find that I might be more dependent on my technology than I care to think about. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so.

The fact of the matter is, my middle-aged mother is on her phone more than I'm on mine! My best friend and I, we'll call her Charlotte, actually have no idea where our phones are half the time. It's not because we're irresponsible, we just want to be with each other more than the people who aren't present with us at the time! (Wow, if that doesn't sound like debilitated social skills, I don't know what else will. Good on ya, Generation X!)

That being said, I still have a mini-panic attack thinking about not being able to receive emails or get online to check my schoolwork. (Which totally was not what happened this morning...) Yet, I don't know if that feeling of FOMO ("fear of missing out") is necessarily my fault.

It's a known fact among my general populous that it's almost impossible to live without some sort of smartphone. (Look, I feel you rolling your eyes in the back of your skull, let me expand the thought before you click away.) The thing Generation X doesn't understand is that technology and all the practices it brings with it are ingrained in our culture. Instead of dancing at a club, which some of us still do by the way, we dance at home with friends and get a shot to put to Instagram or Snapchat. If we didn't do things like that, we'd be social outcasts. Literally, you'd be the weird kid that doesn't have a phone because frankly, everyone else does. Do we take it too far sometimes? Of course, but past generations have within their social constructs too.

So, when we wake up without this carnal need because the cable company seems to think doing maintenance at 6 o'clock in the morning is a good idea, we get a bit ravenous. Not because we think we won't live if we can't check our Twitter feeds, but because we didn't exactly set plans with our friends the night before and they could be trying to get in touch with us at this very moment. (See the cause for anxiety now?)

You may think it odd that our entire world is on some highly-destructible, rectangular piece of plastic, but that's the way of it. Yes, it's different, but it's ours and the fact that we can't control it sometimes scares us too. This morning, it wasn't that I didn't have the internet that bothered me, it was that I couldn't choose not to do without it. In other words, I didn't have control and I was helpless to how the events of the day would play out. Things are different when you have a choice of ignoring them or not and I need to realize that sometimes things don't go the way I want them to. (Just Millennial things...) However, we can't change the tide of progress, we can only hold on for dear life and appreciate it. We might get jostled into incoherency sometimes, but we generally come around. After all, we hang in there with you, so the least you can do is hang in there with us.