On Wanting to Throw Your Phone into the Deepest Well Because It Sucks Up So Much of Your Time But Also Not Because Your Phone is Your Lifeline

I don't know whether to envy or pity previous generations' lack of smart phones more.  On the one hand, social lives must have been simpler in so many ways without iMessage.  If you had a problem with someone, you hashed it out in person, or at least over the phone which allowed you to hear inflection and tone of voice.  Or maybe in letter format if you lived pre-Alexander Graham Bell and wanted to tell someone off via Pony Express.  If you wanted to ask someone out, same thing.  There was no agonizing delay, no gray ellipses bubbles.  On the other hand, it's so much easier to stay in touch with people or to ask a quick question without the hassle of calling.  With Instagram and Snapchat and Facebook, I get to see where my friend and her boyfriend went for dinner or a picture of, like, my former neighbor's new dog.  Cool!  But I (and I know I'm not the only one) also get acute fomo.  That's "fear of missing out" for anyone who's not quite with the generational lingo.  Basically I feel little pangs of jealousy and self-pity when I see ~her~ pictures of studying abroad or ~his~ pictures of ~that~ music festival.

So yeah, iPhones and social media are a double-edged sword, good and bad, blah blah blah.  We've all heard this spiel countless times.  I feel like I'm enough of an old soul to realize the ludicrousness of how attached I am to my phone but at the same time, I was born in the 90s and therefore have an inevitable predisposition to be attached to it.  As I type this, in fact, my phone is about half an inch away from my left hip, face up so I can see any notifications.  I currently have a snap and a text waiting for me, but I'm willing myself to at least finish this paragraph before I look at them.  It's so pathetic, though.  My phone is usually the first thing I look at in the morning and the last thing I look at before I go to bed, even though I've read all those articles about how the screen impairs sleep quality or whatever.  It's also kind of scary how my mind will sometimes be on autopilot and I'll open Instagram, scroll through it for ten minutes, close it, and then open it right back up before realizing how idiotic I am.  What else is scary is if I can't find my phone or the battery dies, LIFE LITERALLY STOPS.  The Earth stops spinning on its axis and revolving around the Sun until I hear the blessed double-buzz that is my phone resurrecting.

Over the past few days, I've grown more aware of this phone-dependency and am verrrrry slowly trying to make tiny changes.  For instance, instead of doing my usual Insta-FB-Snap routine before I go to sleep, I'm trying to read an actual book instead.  Okay, that's honestly the only thing I've done so far to change, but maybe I'll just silence my phone and throw it across the room every once in a while and focus on everything else that's happening in the physical world.  Or if I'm walking towards someone who's going the opposite direction and nobody else is around and we keep making eye contact and a glacier passes by because time is going so slowly, maybe I'll stay strong and keep my phone in my pocket.  Baby steps.