Feature story going to do it over the “phone craze” or how we are all so addicted to our phones.
While walking around the halls to your next class or your next destination in the school, you’re looking around expecting to see smiling faces or people having face-to-face conversations, but that is not the reality here. People look down at their phones or have earbuds to push out the outside world and let themselves slide deeper into the abyss of technology.
I struggle with not being on my phone between classes or eating at lunch. I’m not even talking half of the time; honestly, my whole lunch table is like that. We all enjoyed each other’s company but never had an entire conversation. We all have snippets of conversation but never thoroughly thought out conversations that have a deep meaning or are emotionally deep; they are only surface-level conversations because we are all distracted by one thing. And that one thing is our phones.
A public high school in central Missouri banned phones from their school on 4/4/24 because they became too much of a distraction for students not paying attention to the instructor in class and bullying with social media and technology became too much to handle. The school allows students to leave their phones at home, check them in and out of the office at the start of the day, and check them out again at the end.
I included this information in my piece to show how much of a stressor technology is and how much of a chokehold it has on our generation. My screen time was through the roof before I got a job, and now it’s barely manageable, down to about 30 hours a week instead of 75-85 hours a week. And that’s concerning because there are only 168 hours a week, so let that sink in.
We must find a better way to fight phone addiction, live our lives to the fullest, learn to enjoy things, and stop taking them for granted.
