In the age of social media and technology, everyone you know probably has a smart phone of some sort. Most teenagers can even be found sleeping with their phone right next to their pillow. It’s only too easy to let technology take the place of real thoughts and interactions. Only 20 years ago, these types of advancements were just thoughts in someone’s head. Now they are as natural in our life as sleeping and eating. The average American spends over 3 hours looking at a screen a day. This week, we were asked to just spend fifteen minutes away from our phones, and reconnect with ourselves and our thoughts.

This is such a short amount of time that it should be unthinkably easy to spend it without looking at our phones, or listening to music. This assignment showed me the difficulty of having something just a foot away, but not being able to look at it or use it. I do not consider myself to be addicted to my phone, but this assignment instead led me to think about why people may be. When you have the world at the tips of your fingers, who wouldn’t want to look? I think this is the root of our social media addictions. You can see what your friends and family are up to with the click of a button, and that intrigues us. 

However, we need to resist the urge, because I should be able to be away from my phone all day, and I experienced difficulty doing it for just fifteen minutes. I feel as though if I were more connected to those around me, I wouldn’t need to look at my phone to see what others are up to, because I would be doing my own thing. I believe that if we took these same fifteen minutes to reconnect with our peers that are living in the same building we are, we would have no trouble at all turning off our phones.

-Taylor Powlowicz