According to ABC news, “A recent study showed that 40 percent of people surveyed can’t cope without a cell phone, 35 percent of people used cell phones to escape their problems and 7 percent blamed the cell phone for a lost relationship or job.”

This week, my cell phone broke. Needless to say, the coping process has been rather interesting.

At this point in life nearly everyone has experienced cell phone loss for some period of time, whether due to broken parts, dropping it in some sort of liquid or simply losing track of it.

Like most college students, and Americans in general, my cell phone serves as an inflatable yellow raft that keeps me afloat on the rough whitewater rapids of life. Not only does it give access to connect with people conveniently, at any time, but also to other useful applications.

So much of daily life has become tied to our cellular devices, and I found myself feeling rather lost in the choppy waters, wishing for my figurative new life raft to come in the mail ASAP.

However, as I sit here writing this, still phoneless at the mercy of the postal service, I begin to realize that, 1.) I am not alone in the ridiculous attachment to my cellular device. And 2.) so far, I have learned several important lessons concerning surviving in 2011 with no phone.

To most people, phones are so much more than just phones now.

On the average weekday, the first sound many people hear is the alarm on their cell phone. This serves as a catalyst for the following daytime onslaught of texting, calling, checking Facebook, taking pictures, watching YouTube, using the bottomless supply of apps, etc.

For college students, this process often doesn’t stop until late at night or early the next morning, and just like clockwork, the following day the process starts over again.

Besides these obvious uses of the device, cell phones also serve more specific needs of the college population.

For instance, many people don’t own watches and instead use their phone to check the time, while others no longer have planners and are instead putting appointments into their phones with reminder alarms beforehand. Once in a while, it is even handy to use the simple calculator that is included on even the most basic phones.

I was feeling lost without my figurative life raft as the weekend approached, and was curious to see how well I would survive it. Throughout the course of the weekend, I learned several interesting things.

Firstly, whenever awkward silences fall upon a group of people (which they inevitably always do) everyone quickly whips out their phone and starts to text (or at least pretends to). This is done so that the awkward silence hanging in the air doesn’t manifest into a suffocating blanket of awkward that makes it difficult to breathe at ease.

Instead of retreating into texting, I was forced to sit there and either slowly gasp under the blanket or come up with something to say. Basically, I had to be completely present wherever I was, without having the ability to talk to someone who wasn’t in the room.

Which is another thing – being completely present and living in the moment is something that is easily forgotten with the phone keyboard at one’s fingertips. While people hunch over their devices, texting people elsewhere, they have become completely oblivious to events happening around them. Rather than enjoying where they were and meeting people around them, they were preoccupied with somewhere they probably shouldn’t have been.

There is nothing wrong with this, and I probably would’ve done something similar if I had a phone with me. However, seeing it from the outside-in made it seem a little different. It almost made me a little sad that people couldn’t be content wherever they were without worrying about what everyone else was up to.

While I am still looking forward to receiving my phone in the mail sometime this week, not having it has taught me a few valuable lessons. My goal for the future is to become less dependent on my phone and to make it less of a figurative life raft in the rough waters of life to help keep me afloat.