When we were little kids, cell phones were still just emerging into daily life. The only ones who had them were adults who needed them for calling people, and we hadn’t even thought about using them for things like social media or texting yet. We didn’t know the intriguing world inside the elusive cell phone, so we didn’t have a need or even a desire to be caught up in it – we still had our own world.

Our world was full of playgrounds, backyards, board games, exploring, singing, dancing, pillow fights, movies, and so much more. Our world was full of interactions between real people. We had real smiles, real laughs, real tears, real shouts, and real conversations. The only things we were distracted by were the real people around us.

Now, we’ve entered into the cell phone world. Our cell phone world has wifi, emojis, and endless pictures, tweets, stories, videos, and texts to scroll through whenever we so choose. This is great if we use it in moderation and at appropriate times, but it seems that we’ve become a culture that prefers the cell phone world over our real world.

This is not only harming our relationships with other people, but it’s harming our relationships with ourselves. Every time we pick up our phones in the presence of someone else we could or should be interacting with, we are isolating ourselves from making real connections. We wonder why we feel lonely, overwhelmed, and stressed, and we want to change something, but we keep turning to a little box with access to the Internet. Instead, we could be turning to a real person and feeling, even if just for a second, a little less alone.

When we were little, we never worried about how many “likes” we got on a picture or how many people follow us. We cared about what we liked, what we wanted to do, and what we thought would best for the people we cared about. We didn’t desire to turn our lives into a contest or make them publicized for everyone to see. We lived our lives for real.

Because we were being truly present with those around us, we never really felt alone. If we were all stuck in a room together, we didn’t have phones to stare at in order to ignore or avoid each other. We talked, we played games, we interacted in some way that made us feel happy. We rarely found ourselves bored for long, we were hardly ever stressed, and feeling overwhelmed and alone was something that we knew how to fix easily.

We long for a sense of belonging, of happiness, and of ease. We have people all around us who are more than capable of helping us feel like we belong somewhere. But, instead, we often choose to turn to our phones when we should be turning to the person next to us.

Today, the idea of going anywhere without having our phones seems impossible. When we were kids, the idea of preferring to look at a little screen instead of being with the people who were actually with us seemed insane. Our younger selves were on to something.

Need more encouragement? Watch this awesome video: