Originally published on November 6, 2016
One morning I left my phone at home, completely on accident.
I found it on the couch later that night, right where I ate breakfast. I didn’t
notice I didn’t have it until after I parked and, out of habit, checked the side
pockets of my backpack for my water and my phone. Upon not feeling my phone, since
I was wearing a hoodie, I guessed I had left it in my front pocket. That was
not the case. So I resolved myself to a day without my phone.
This isn’t some article about the evils of electronics and
how I’m so enlightened after forgetting my phone one day and having to navigate
without it for approximately 11 hours.
It’s one of those things where you don’t always realize how
convenient something is or how much you use it until you don’t have it. I won’t
lie and say it was easy. It wasn’t. My phone is the central location for many
things. It has my planner, my calendar, and my to-do list. During work I had to
input survey data and some music would have been nice. It felt strange writing
homework assignments down in the margins of my notes, something I rarely have
to do.
A phone is so much easier than a laptop when it comes to
quickly checking email or looking up something online. Anyone who goes to
Mercyhurst knows how many emails you get in a particular day. Some of them could
be important, like responses from professors, notices from groups, or messages
from the university. Without the easy viewing of notifications on a lock
screen, I had to rely on checking on my laptop periodically, which is not small
or convenient, especially waiting for a class to start. I guess that’s what I
missed the most: the accessibility and the convenience.
It’s also, I’ve found, to be a sort of social crutch. In
between classes, just waiting around, everyone is on their phones, mindlessly
checking social media or reading an article. I didn’t miss the fact I couldn’t
be constantly connected to my friends and social media all the time; I missed
the crutch of filling my down time with mindless scrolling and checking, fake
productivity in the three minutes before class starts.
(And my earbuds were connected to my phone so I couldn’t
even watch YouTube or do music-related homework on my laptop!)
As it turns out, my life didn’t end because I didn’t have my
phone. The world still spun and I still was able to get through my day without
any major hiccups stemming from the fact I was phoneless. The biggest thing
that worried me was what if someone needed to get a hold of me? I could only
communicate through Google and Facebook, and like I said, it was a bit of an
inconvenience to get out my laptop and not checked as often as compared to when
I had a phone. The rest of it was just small inconveniences I could live
without. So, no, I wouldn’t give up my phone for a week as a social experiment.
I was enlightened, not to the evils of technology, but to how convenient phones
have become nowadays. I’m siding with technology on this one.
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