You’re at a party. A few hours have passed, and a movie is playing in the background. Everyone is in the living room, heads down, eyes unblinking. Someone reaches their arm up to take a Snap. An occasional giggle is heard from someone scrolling through TikTok.
“I think I’ve seen this actor in something else before,” you say to your friend.
She doesn’t answer. She probably didn’t even hear you. No one heard you. You take your phone out too, and start scrolling through Instagram to avoid the awkwardness of being in a silent room.
Sounds familiar, right? But are you usually the friend who attempted to start a conversation, or are you the one who never even heard them?
Unhealthy behaviors are hard to notice when you’re the one engaging in them, and when these behaviors move to a societal scale, there’s little hope of redemption. Our over-reliance on our smartphones, if I dare say, our addiction, has made us impatient and self-centered, and has taken away our natural curiosity and self-control. I include myself in this, for I am just as guilty of the “mindless scroll.” But what is scarier than someone with an unhealthy behavior is someone who does not even see an issue with the way they are behaving. That situation is exactly what has happened to our modern world. It is rampant with unhealthy behaviors, yet no one bats an eye.
So why are we not combating this epidemic? Because it makes money. Companies can easily track consumers’ tastes, and consumers’ tastes are easily influenced by companies. The internet is an incredibly effective marketing tool. We are inundated with ads every time we check our email, open social media, or visit any website. I’ve found myself clicking on ads while simply trying to go through Instagram stories, or feeling my gaze shift from the text I’m reading on a website to the popup ads in the corner. Of course, ads are what make the internet free to use, but is that worth our sanity? This constant stream of marketing has become so ingrained, so natural, that we barely notice its influences. We’re addicted because it was meant to be addictive.
This is not to say that all technology is bad. I won’t pretend that I didn’t write this article on a computer, and having a smartphone certainly has its advantages too. But our first step should be awareness. Maybe this new phone policy (or rather, “no phone” policy) will give us all some insight into just how reliant we are, and perhaps reveal a newfound appreciation for the real world.
