It’s 2:30 a.m. and you’re lying in your bed scrolling through every app on your phone. On Yik Yak, people are complaining about not having anyone to cuddle with. On Tinder, there’s a guy named Chad inviting you over to “smoke and chill.” On Facebook, another one of your high school peers has announced her engagement to her boyfriend of two months. Yet, with all of these fake interactions and false feelings of being surrounded by others, you are still alone in your bed.
We millennials grew up in a generation where a “good morning” text was a sign of chivalry and where texting first is seen as a sign of weakness. Technology has led our generation to invent new things to aggravate us and break us apart from people we care about. The boy you’ve been seeing just “liked” you ex-best friend’s picture on Instagram? Now you’re not speaking. You don’t text your best friends back in your group message for an hour? Suddenly you are excluded from the activities they are planning for tonight.
Since when did our means of communications also become our means of invalidation and frustration? The phone, an invention that was created to break the barriers of distance, is now breaking our relationships. We don’t call; we text. We don’t go on dates; we sit in a restaurant while both staring at our phones. We take pictures at parties posing with people we don’t even like just for the sake of showing the rest of the world that we are “happy.”
Inadvertently, technology does not bring us closer together. Rather, technology isolates us from the world. We will never be fully present as long as there’s a text message we are answering and an Instagram picture we are liking. We are far more likely to find true love by talking to a person on the RTS bus than to find a “love at first swipe” on Tinder.
What happens when the inevitable text-me-every-second-of-the-day and make-sure-I’m-your-Snapchat-best-friend relationship creeps up on us? Or worse, what happens when the relationship ends? You can block a person on every social media account but you cannot block a person out of real life. You will still stumble upon this person while in a hurry walking through Turlington Plaza, you will end up running into them in Midtown while trying to have a girl’s night out, and they will randomly decide to poke you on Facebook one day.
Because of the way our technologically dependent generation progresses, we cannot escape our fate of eventually seeing our ex-bae post a picture of him with that freshman girl with the perfect hair. And most likely, we will backfire with a newly uploaded Facebook album to show off how much fun we are having without him. We cannot escape this vicious cycle of social media, but we can use it for good rather than evil.
The best kept secrets are those not shared on every one of our social media accounts. The best friendships are found over group lunches rather than group texts. The best love is found within ourselves, not within our phone screen. With that being said, double-tap with caution.
Photo credit: www.seoclerk.com