When I see something crazy or remotely interesting during a normal day, I, along with almost everybody else, have one reaction that strikes first: I reach into my pocket, grab my iPhone and open up Snapchat, desperately hoping that it will finish loading before whatever was grabbing my attention fades away and the opportunity to document it is gone forever.
It’s a behavior that has become so habitual since I started using the app one year ago and I don’t even realize I’m doing it anymore. I could only assume that whatever caused me to perk up for even a brief second must be worth sharing with my entire social circle. But there’s just one problem.
We’ve really lost our grip on what’s important. This occurred to me during dinner with a friend last week, after I had been starving the entire day and couldn’t bear to wait any longer for some food. When the waiter finally came back with my order, I was dying to eat what was in front of me.
But I didn’t. I took my phone out, Snapchatted a picture of my food with some worthless contextual caption, put my phone back, and only then did I proceed to start eating; an occurrence we’re all too familiar with.
However, the only thing separating this time from the hundreds of other instances where I did the exact same thing was that I actually stopped and realized what I was doing. I was literally ignoring my fundamental needs for survival in favor of perpetuating the virtual “story” of my life. Instead of eating my food, I was showing it off to everyone I knew, as if it had more value as an instrumental bragging piece. I couldn’t help but think: What happened that pushed our priorities so seriously out of line?
Since then, I’ve made a conscious effort to stop myself whenever the urge hits to send Snapchats of mundane things. I do my best to ask things like “Is this really that cool?” or “Does anybody really care that this is happening right now?” Needless to say, I’ve found that the answer is ‘no’ in almost all situations. Your life isn’t that interesting and no, nobody really cares that you’re eating food right now. We all have to do it. It isn’t exactly an earth-shattering endeavor.
However, becoming self-aware when it comes to your own Snapchats is only half the battle. I might have been able to stop myself from posting some pretty useless crap, but all it did was make me spend more time on the app than before. Since I was no longer focused on posting, my time was now all devoted to watching every last second of everyone’s “My Story” whenever they updated. Turns out that I didn’t learn as much as I thought. I never “quit” the app; I just changed how I was using it. I was still glued to my phone all the time, just in a different way.
Our smartphones are incredible, make no mistake, but at some point we have to realize that enough is enough. Look at the people all around you. What are they doing? It doesn’t matter where you are, there’s always somebody panning for a video or snapping a selfie. We are on these things 24/7, whether it’s in the classroom, outside on the lawn or at home in the living room.
A smartphone is an integral part of life now, going a day without it leaves one feeling effects similar to withdrawal. We’re all addicts, even though few would admit it, and even fewer realize it.
That being said, the good news is that there are redeeming factors. This is by no means a guilt-trip for using your phone, because I can be blamed just as much for doing the same things that sometimes drive me up the wall. Snapchat is cool, and despite its freakishly addictive qualities, it’s still an amusing and lighthearted way to broadcast your daily adventures to a whole bunch of people.
The next time you snap a picture of your alarm clock, set it for eight seconds, and caption it “too early for this,” just remember that we’ve all done the same thing. Every day. Since the beginning of time. Try to spice it up a bit.