How smartphones are ruining our relationships.
Let me paint the picture for you. You’re sitting at a dinner table, enjoying a nice meal and hanging out with your friends, your significant other, or both. You should be enjoying a conversation too right? Wrong. You look around the table and everyone is sitting silently starring at their phones, their faces illuminated by the glow of the screen, their eyes are glazed over as if they are in some sort of a trance.
Unfortunately for most people, the days of stimulating conversation at the dinner table or any social outing are gone.
Interactions with people have been replaced with the smart phone. Instead of talking to each other we are looking at Facebook, twitter, snapchat or googling away. We sit with a dazed expression gaping at our phones while time ticks away. What are we really looking at? I have wasted hours looking at Facebook only to realise that I haven’t gained anything by looking at it. ‘Oh look, a video of a cat dancing.’ It’s all just time wasting junk! Time is a valuable thing, and I would much rather spend mine doing something I actually enjoy. We should be taking time out to do things that stimulate our minds, not numb them.
These days it is acceptable to chat to ten or twenty people at once online instead of having a conversation with the one or two people we are actually spending time with. I don’t know about you, but I have a few small groups of friends, I catch up with them regularly — or at least I try to. When we do catch up, we laugh, we talk, we tell each other what has been going in our lives. Like many people, I also have a vast list of Facebook friends, but I don’t hang out with all of them. Some of them I don’t even interact with online, they’re just, there.
I would much prefer to interact on a personal level with my friends and hear about their lives from them and be excited to hear about it, rather than having seen it on Facebook. How many times have you told your partner or friend something exciting that has happened to you only to have them fizzle out your excitement by saying ‘Yeah I know, such and such put that on Facebook.’
Who remembers speaking to their friends on the phone? You know actually talking and using our verbal skills? It seems more and more people these days take to text messages instead of calling. Ok I admit, I text a lot, sometimes too much. Which is why I am pointing this out, 10 texts could be cut down to a mere phone call where everything from the multiple texts is covered off. I miss talking on the phone to friends, instead the only interaction I get talking to people on the phone nowadays is at work with customers and that mostly sucks.
Now don’t get me wrong, I use a smart phone everyday. I’m 29 years old and my phone holds everything I need, calendar, contacts, music, important documents etc. But I don’t have my phone attached me to every single second of every day. I do other things like; read, write, spend time doing things outside. I go to the movies, do my nails, play with my dogs.
I enjoy those times when I am without my phone because I get a sense of freedom. The funny thing is after a few hours without my phone I come to check it and see that no one has tried to contact me anyway. All I have missed are a few tweets and some brainless Facebook game invites.
I am not suggesting we move backwards and get rid of our smart phones and go back to the bricks we used to have where the only good thing about it was the Snake game on a Nokia. No, all I am saying is that we need to take a break sometimes because these smart phones are taking over our lives! Okay, that sounds a bit dramatic, these smart phones are causing us to waste so much of our time!
Look up from your phone and see the world around you that you are missing.
Read a book or go outside. Try something you’ve never done before but always wanted to do. The world is out there, and you’re missing it!
© Sarah K. Gill 2017