Logan Graham Mug
If you open up the Internet nowadays, you’re bound to come across them. Maybe your estranged, twice-removed aunt that you’ve never met sent it to you in an ALL CAPS email, or your Facebook “friend,” the one you really need to unfriend, shared it for the third time today. However you come across them, they’re there, thousands of blog posts about going a day or, God forbid, a week without a phone. The testimonials of these experiences seem too good to be true, so I set out to see just how amazing this was supposed to make me feel.
And before you start painting a picture of me as a tree-hugging, phone-hating, “Dude, just live in the moment” hippie who happily turns in his phone, let’s get one thing straight. I didn’t voluntarily sign up for this social experiment. No, just the opposite in fact. Two Mondays ago, while playing a heated game of racquetball, my phone was stolen. RIP Logan’s iPhone: a moment of silence please for a life taken from us all too early.
So there I was, phoneless and looking at spending over a week without a phone until a new one could be shipped to me. I began the week in high spirits. I mean how couldn’t I, with visions of those glorious blog posts dancing in my head? I read one titled “Going a Day Without My Phone Changed Everything” and another which praised the experience saying it “Changed My F—ing Life.” Needless to say, I was excited. “Wow,” I thought to myself, “my life is about to change, and not just change, but f—ing change.”
But today, a week and two days into my forced experiment I have come to a somber realization: the blog posts are lies, all lies. A week without a cell phone certainly “changes everything,” but not in the way these blog posts claimed it would. Instead, I’ve been lowered to a sniveling mess, unsure of where my friends are and when my homework is due. Waterboarding must be bad, but cell phone denial might just be a better form of torture.
The first dawning of this came when my Snapchat streaks were suddenly and ruthlessly taken away from me. RIP Logan’s Snapchat streaks: a moment of silence please for another life taken from us all too early. In a country which prides itself on a fair justice system, there was no justice in this murder. All I could do was stand by helplessly as I lost the beautiful fire emojis, and my Snapchat numbers returned to zero.
Later in the week, my situation turned more dire as I began emailing my friends to hangout. In the age of text messages bouncing from pocket to pocket, the so-called “instant messaging” of email seemed to take a lifetime. I’ll rue the day when anyone is reduced to constantly refreshing his or her Gmail account waiting for a reply from an email with the subject line “Wanna hang out on Saturday?” Needless to say, my email hangout attempts failed miserably. As the week wore on, I discovered Facebook messaging and GroupMe to be more effective means of communication, yet still painful compared to the old glory of texting.
Throughout the remainder of the week, I had numerous, albeit less comical, issues arise. The hundreds of weekly reminders on my phone prompting me to “finish that homework assignment” and “don’t forget that test tomorrow” ceased to come, and I had to get a real-life alarm clock to make up for my phone’s disappearance.
Today, my new phone is just a day away, and I’m counting down the hours until the reunion is complete. Ideally it will be a full-stage reenactment of the opening scene of “The Lion King” when Simba is presented to his tribe. I’m looking at you, University Theatre, to make this happen. With the reunion so close, it’s a good time to reflect and realize that, despite all the pain, perhaps there has been a small grain of learning.
Looking back over the week, I’ve realized that smartphones are amazingly powerful tools that can do incredible tasks, and without them some tasks become much harder than they otherwise would be. They help us connect with friends and family new and old and keep our lives organized and on schedule.
Yet, the blogs on why leaving a phone at home is life-changing still come up in throngs. Ultimately these blogs and my own experience get at a single point: When you use your phone as a crutch in your life, something that’s more important than anything else, it’s a very bad thing. But when you use it to improve your life, to stay connected and on track, it’s an amazing tool. Used this way, phones can help our society in so many ways and maybe, just maybe, “change our f—-ing lives.”