When I was in the fourth grade, I got my first phone. It was my sister’s twelfth birthday and she was given my mom’s old cell phone as a present, and I was lucky enough to receive my sister’s old phone -- which had previously belonged to my mother before it was handed down to my sister and then handed down to me. It was a grey flip phone with green sticker covering and a very limited amount of texting, which didn’t really matter since I was the first out of all of my friends to get a phone. Flash forward seven years and five sets of phones, I now have an iPhone 4s, that I’ve had for about three years, with unlimited texting and 15 gigabytes of storage. And everyone at my school has a smartphone stuck to their hand with their eyes glued to the screen, tuning out the world around them -- even in class when they are supposed to be paying attention. As a society, we have become so attached to technology that we’ve stopped paying attention to our surroundings, just so that we can post on Instagram or Facebook about how we’re having the “best day ever!”

We go to school and pay attention to our phones the whole time; we arrive back home and use our phone as a means of procrastination from our homework; and when we hang out with our friends, its just a gaggle of people sitting around on their phones -- not talking, not even interacting. Our society is so obsessed with tweeting, instagramming, and posting anything and everything that we can get our hands on that just one day without a phone can seem like the end of the world. Because we eat, sleep, live, and revolve around our phones and our social lives. We have become so consumed with making our social lives appear fantastic, that our real lives are quickly slipping away and becoming a boring, bottomless pit of pictures and videos with absolutely no meaning or relevance to them.

If we keep driving down this road that we are on, it will lead nothing but a society of vapid narcissists and self-absorbed people that are surrounded by screens at every angle. So, the next time you plan a night-out with your friends, make sure it is exactly that. Take a few pictures to commemorate the event -- if you must -- and then have a no-phone, fun-only outing with your friends. Enjoy each others company, make memories with the people that matter to you, turn off your phone, and turn on mind. Because you will get nothing done with your eyes on a screen and your mind on a robotic pattern of social media. Social media turns your brain into a back seat driver with little to no influence, so it’s time to take control of the reins, take back your life, and let technology go back to being a helpful tool rather than a controlling way of life.