Picture this: A birthday dinner, all your friends are gathered around a table, the only light in the room should be your candles you are about to blow out, but instead there are a dozen or so flashes pointed directly at you. Your friends are recording this moment to share on social media, ten seconds at a time, just like the other eleven people around you right now.

Now a few weeks later, you go back to watch the video, and instead of it being peaceful and joyful, all you see is the flashes of other friend’s phones.

It seems as though moments cannot be enjoyed anymore without documentation.

If someone told you that you could travel the world, but you weren’t allowed to bring your phone, would you?

As a society, we are losing our spontaneity. We have a connection to the walls of our physical house out of fear for losing power, when in reality, this is just what is draining us. Our best moments are viewed through a phone screen to make sure we get the best angle and lighting, rather than watching it with our own two eyes.

In our free moments, we scroll through various sites of social media to see how other people are living, rather than living for ourselves. We are living through our phones. From the moment you wake up in the morning to see your notifications, to the few moments before bed when you catch up on the day, and all the short minutes in between where you look at your screen instead of the world around you, you are losing power.

You see, we all have so much to offer to the world. We were each created with something uniquely special about us that makes us so wonderful and makes the world a better place. Sometimes though, we must discover this. I think that that might require setting down the technology for once and just living. Recharging.

Write a letter to someone you care about. Read a book. Go hiking. Drive to Nashville. Go to a coffee shop and people watch. Drive. Endlessly, and with no destination in mind. Sit in a park. Appreciate the silence during a sunset. Go swimming and swim upstream. You couldn’t do that with a phone.

A friend of mine often says, disconnect to connect. I think we could all disconnect in order to better recognize the beauty around us. We are worth more than what a tweet can say about us or what ten pictures on an Instagram post can show us. Live your adventures.

Recharge, don’t lose power.