Yesterday, I did something I dont usually do. I left my phone at home on purpose. A group of friends and myself decided to go jogging, and so we didnt have to carry around stuff, we all left our phones. It was unbelievably difficult! I called my wife ahead of time to let her know that I was leaving it, so she wouldnt be able to contact me. It felt like I was saying my final goodbyes! Our society has made it so simple to contact anyone at anytime, that if we are unable to do so, we become lividly angry! We take it as an insult when someone doesn’t have the decency to answer their cell phone, at our convenience.
And worse still when we are without our phones, we feel utterly disconnected. I was without my phone for an hour, and I spent most of that time worrying that if my wife had gotten in an accident, I wouldn’t hear about it till I got my phone back. My mother had a similar issue the other day, but it wasn’t by choice, she forgot hers at home, and felt the same way. Its funny that as civilization grows more “social” we become more far apart, because of things like phones and computers make it so easy for us to communicate with others, we don’t think twice about moving away, but the thing is, we are becoming more superficial as a society, because we are so far apart, its more convenient to talk about little superficial things over facebook, than to talk about deep things. Also because facebook and twitter have such a tiny limit on the amount of characters we can type, we are increasingly shrinking our thoughts to match these mediums, resulting in a society with the attention span of a gnat. If it is longer than 140 characters, its not worth our time to read it. I think this is bringing the downfall of society. We communicate more, but fellowship less, which people think is the same thing, but unfortunately, it isn’t. We are losing our ability to determine visual cues and body language, because we spend so much time trying to derive emotion from our facebook and twitter posts.
Please don’t get me wrong. I like twitter, and I like Facebook. And like any tool, they can be invaluable. But I think that a greater emphasis needs to be placed on living a life, and doing things, than on working so hard, that it is all we can do to check our Facebook accounts at the end of the day. Work days are becoming so hectic, and technology has made it so convenient to draw work into our personal lives, that we spend our days chasing a dollar, and our friends through cyberspace. Let us put down the phones, and pick up the canoe oars, the bungee cords, and the hiking boots, and lets go explore this world! Let’s see what is around the next bend in the woods, and lets live life outside of our homes.
Ok let me post this to Facebook… Oh… Ninja warz…. Ill brb…
