I’m sure you hear this all the time, but iPhones have ruined us. I know I sound like your conservative grandma, but it’s true. Sure, they benefit us in some ways like helping us navigate and allowing us to stay in touch with our relatives, but in many other ways we've also become over-dependent on them. In order to fit in at school or work, you have to fit in online. It is impossible to do anything anymore without everyone hearing about it and most likely even seeing it. With social media and smart phones, privacy is no more. We have become so accustomed to knowing what everyone is doing at every minute of every day that we forget about what’s going on around us. We become so engrossed in the lives of others that we have little time to focus on bettering our own.
These days, everyone and their mother has a social media account. It can be horrifying to realize your grandparents are on Facebook. Every celebrity, politician, and who-knows-what-else has a Twitter account. Your friends’ pets now all have Instagram accounts. Even that baby you just saw sipping on a bottle getting pushed down the street in a stroller has an Instagram.
Relationships now completely revolve around texting and social media. If he doesn’t text you back right away he must not like you. If he likes another girl’s picture on Instagram he must be cheating on you. Getting lunch with friends now means sitting at a table with people while you each talk to 7 other people who aren’t even there. Tracey wasn’t invited to this lunch, so why are you texting her right now?
Even family dinners have been infiltrated by texting and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat. I often roll my eyes at my parent’s demand that I put my phone away and blame it on them “not understanding” this generation, but they are just as guilty of zoning out on their phones as I am.
Gone are the days of writing letters and talking on the phone for 2 hours with your best friend. Today, we spend our time with our faces in our phones scrolling through Instagram feeds of fattening foods and beautiful models.
I’m not saying that we should get rid of smart phones and social media altogether, but we need to take a step back. We need to stop stressing over the photoshopped pictures of models in bikinis that consume our feeds. We need to stop worrying about what everyone else is doing with their lives and what they will think of ours. Like Ferris Bueller once said, “life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” We really need to put our phones away for a minute and live in the moment.
