Why I Don’t Own A Smart Phone
By Thoughtis
Smart phones ruin lives. Or perhaps more accurately, they ruin social lives. You want to know where I got my phone? Radio Shack. For ten bucks. Don’t you just love it? Oh, the irony! It’s a piece of crap phone from 2005 that drops phone calls constantly and will occasionally decide to not turn on. It’s the furthest thing from smart. In fact, it’s incredibly stupid. My phone is stupid and enrolled in Special Ed classes. It may sound terrible but the beauty of having a phone in Special Ed is that I own it; it doesn’t own me. Get it? When I finish a long day of blogging about penises and being sad, I run away from my computer screaming and into the loving arms of my IRL friends. Not spending the rest of my day clicking “Refresh” is…refreshing to say the least. If someone really wants to get in touch with me, they can just call or text me. I have no email or internet access and society needs to deal with it.
Working in the blogosphere can turn anyone into a sort of Luddite. You spend your days working on something that’s designed to give people pleasure. Many people go on Thought Catalog to make their workday faster whereas I go on it to actually work. Being consumed with every psycho facet of the internet has definitely played a role in me being anti-smart phone, but it also doesn’t hurt that I get to see my friends lose all social grace and become glued to their phones when we actually hang out. I don’t want that for myself. I don’t want to ever be that person who has more of an active life online than offline. That’s no easy feat for a blogger though. You really have to work at achieving a separation.
Whenever I think of switching over to the smart side, I Google pictures of people waiting in long lines outside of the Apple store, and then I think of what I would be losing. My freedom, to a certain extent, would be gone. Deleted. I’d be another dick on his smart phone, ignoring real life interactions, and that’s just not who I am. I love REAL LIFE. Real life is what makes my fake life so possible. If I started paying more attention to my gadgets than my relationships, you would be subjected to some boring blog posts. It’s my job to have a social life and report back to you all! So no, I’m not going to give in. I’m going to continue to be the only person that doesn’t have internet capabilities. Yeah, laugh at me! But I’m not the silly goose who’s too busy surfing the web to actually realize that their real life is passing them by. You can have your smart phone; I’ll have my smart decision.