Recently, as I was driving in from Montrose to campus, I reached Whitewater and my gas light came on and what did I not have with me? My wallet… But you know what I did have, my cell phone. Thank god it’s 2019 and I was able to pull into the gas station and use Apple Pay. After I googled the closest gas station that took e-pay, and all whilst listening to Spotify via Bluetooth. You catch my drift. They are handy, but they have a monopoly on our attention.  In fact, can any of us live without our phones?

When was the last time you put your phone down and didn’t have a small panic attack every five minutes thinking about the extremely important memes you were missing in your DMs? Or, when was the last time you looked at a map, walked into your bank to ask a teller for your account balance, wrote a letter, or actually went and struck up a conversation with someone you thought was cute? But with a big thanks to cell phones, why would you have to do any of these things when you can access everything and everyone, and with no exaggeration, on earth who has an internet connection without ever having to get off your couch?

I can confidently state that I cannot live without my phone; which is saying a lot as I fight this stage five dependency, we all seem to have tooth and nail. But alas in the time it’s taken me to write this, I’ve checked my phone no less than three times.

If you really sit down and think about all the uses our phones serve, it’s completely understandable how they have taken over literally everything. They are handy as can be, from the way we interact with the world to the way we create. And it’s not just millennials sitting on their phones that are slowly losing the honest-to-god ability to communicate face-to-face, that cannot put down their electronics. It’s all of us. It’s my 70 year-old grandpa. Human interaction is almost a lost art, like chivalry or not being offended.

I have friends I haven’t seen in years, but thanks to Instagram I know what they had for dinner last night. That’s weird.  And why do I know this? Oh ya, because of this terrible fear of missing out (FOMO) thing maybe 95 percent of us suffer from. Sure, I can go to dinner with my friends, who I really do enjoy hanging out with, but can I leave my phone in the car for an hour? No! Because what if that cute guy WHO LIVES IN DALLAS snapchats me and I don’t respond for an hour? Or, what if that girl from the gym posts another selfie where her abs look amazing and I don’t see it and can’t compare myself to it?  This is all because I’m spending time with people who are literally close enough for me to touch their face?

We may all have different levels of addiction, but I do not know one single person who could truly live without their phone and still have the same quality of life.