If someone asked me if I was an attached-to-my-phone type of person, I would promptly answer with no. My roommate Blaze, however, disagrees. After trying to explain something to me while I was texting, he became irritated and told me I was always on my phone. I thought he was exaggerating, but in a lot of ways he was right.
I check my phone right after I wake up, right before I go to bed and countless times in between throughout the day. On average, Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 check their phones about 74 times a day. I didn’t think I was one of these statistics, but I was fooling myself.
Blaze told me about an assignment a professor gave him one semester, in which he couldn’t use his phone for three days. Upping the ante, I decided not to use my phone for a week. Things got interesting.
Right off the bat my sense of time started to dissipate. I began to notice there are not many clocks in my life besides the one on my phone. When I say lack of clocks, I also mean lack of alarms. In my excitement at the challenge, I didn’t think about how I needed my alarm clock to wake up for class. With a combination of getting Blaze to wake me up and trusting my internal clock to magically get up on time, I managed to get through the week without an alarm—I was only late to class once! I stopped feeling so pressured by the confines of time, I felt freer—at least that’s what I told myself.
Since I wasn’t going to use my phone, I tried limiting my computer usage for strictly academic purposes. I found that I started checking my school e-mail much more often. I waited in anticipation for some kind of update. I even got excited when foodler sent me an e-mail about rebate offers for the week—25% rebate from Punjab Palace? Sign me up!
Scrolling seems to be something having a phone makes me used to. Without Instagram, I started scrolling through my e-mail mindlessly. For some reason, I thought I was going to see something new.
I thought I would be much more productive during the week too. I figured I would get homework done days before it was due, not the night before. Unfortunately, I realized my phone is not to blame for doing things last minute, I’m just a procrastinator.
The week was much less of an annoyance to me than it was to my friends. My heart was warmed when I got vulgar e-mails from my friend telling me, in his own poetic fashion, that this whole not using my phone thing was pretty stupid—he really cared about me.
As a whole, the week was refreshing. It’s nice to be reminded there is a life beyond the screen. While I don’t use my phone as much as others might, I’m still on it too much.
In the end, the biggest lesson I took away from this week is that technology has become an integral part of our lives and the inevitable robotic apocalypse will destroy us all.
