Imagine you woke up one morning and you didn’t have any technology next to you. No phone charging on your nightstand, no laptop sitting on your desk waiting to be used. A lot of people nowadays would have no idea what to do. We wouldn’t be able to scroll for hours while wrecking our eyesight, or develop serious mental health issues because we are so concentrated on what everyone else thinks of our posts. You wouldn’t want to lose those opportunities, right?

This is our world's current reality: We wake up, and instantly check our phone for things we missed while we were asleep. That small rectangle that contains every aspect of our life. Buzz buzz, we immediately check, “Wow! She liked my post," or, "look, he commented on my post!” And as we continue on with our day, most of us are continuously staring at our screens. But it doesn’t seem like a huge problem at the moment, right?

It doesn't seem like a huge problem until we are staying up all night browsing through Facebook trying to find the funniest dog videos, or skimming through Instagram looking at models and thinking, why don't I look like them? Or even perusing through Twitter, getting the latest updates on the Brewers game last night. It doesn’t seem like a problem until we are hiding our phones underneath our desks away from our teachers because we heard that buzz come from our backpack, craving to see who sent us a friend request. It doesn’t seem like a problem if you are staying up until 2:00 AM because you have to get to that next candy crush level. So remind me again, why isn’t this a constant problem? 

Technology and social media are weaknesses, dependencies, and a habit that our society cannot break. So I ask again, imagine you woke up one day and all of the technology in the world was gone. No more Instagram, Pinterest, Messages. No more Google Docs, News apps, Email. What would we do? Buy a newspaper? Talk to people in person? Take notes on a sheet of paper? 

The reality here is we need it. It may be bad for us, and it may cause us to be a little antisocial. But in the world today, in the generations of today's society, if we woke up without technology tomorrow, we would be stuck. We keep our entire lives locked safe with a passcode inside of our screens, we know phone numbers because of the contacts app, we learn in school by the notes we type on our computers, we can learn new information in the blink of an eye by just typing it into Google. Technology has significantly changed the world, but maybe if the world changed our use of technology, it wouldn’t be a noteworthy problem in our everyday lives.