Your phone can wait

Just before December break, my friends and I decided to get together for a “last supper” — one last chance to see each other before we all left for home. Early on in the meal, I suggested we should all put our cell phones in the middle of the table and if anyone looked at their phone before we got the check, dinner was on them.

As tempting as it was any time we saw our respective iPhone screens light up, I don’t think anyone was willing to venture answering a silly text message at the cost of dinner for 10.

I have been friends with these girls for three years, but during this dinner I learned about their likes and dislikes, their celebrity crushes and who they’d want to be with if they were stranded on a desert island.

This dinner actually played a vital role in my life. It was a lesson in paying more attention to what is in front of your face, and I’m not talking about your cell phone’s screen.

Unless someone is dying, our texts are not time-sensitive. AT&T’s campaign against texting while driving, “It Can Wait,” is applicable in all areas of life — not just behind the wheel. AT&T’s homepage asks their readers to “take out your cell phone and look at the last text you sent. Would that be worth dying for?”

When I took the company’s advice, I realized the majority of my texts could wait hours, even days to answer. Of course texting while engaged in another conversation isn’t a matter of life or death, but it is rude. You could potentially miss out on making memories and experiencing life.

I have noticed many students on their computers in class are on Facebook or Twitter. If we put our devices down, we might learn something. We are not going to have a professor imparting wisdom on us for much longer. These four years are expensive and fleeting. We should be making the most of the moment.

I can’t lie. I am guilty of doing this myself. I made a New Year’s resolution to pay more attention to the things going on around me. I want to sit in a restaurant and people watch, take in the beautiful campus and learn things I otherwise wouldn’t be learning with my eyes glued to my smartphone. More importantly, I want to learn how to feel awkward and uncomfortable and to be okay with it.

The millennial generation is lacking social skills that past generations were forced to develop. When we encounter an awkward situation, our first instinct is to whip out our phones and pretend we are doing something super interesting on it.

In past generations, they had no phones. Therefore, they couldn’t dodge the uncomfortable situation. Exercising that muscle for facing awkward moments would benefit us and help prepare us for situations later in life when we truly can’t resort to our devices.

Our smartphones are not making us smarter. They are actually making us pretty dumb. Let’s sit through dinners, engage in conversations, learn from our professors and embrace awkward situations without looking at our phones. I don’t think those experiences can wait.

­— azaslow@indiana.edu