Opinion

Surviving a week at 16 with no cellphone

If teenagers were planets, our cell phones would be the sun. If we’re not Snapchatting our friends silly faces or texting our crushes heart emoticons, we’re scrolling through Instagram or checking the latest tweets from our favorite celebrities.

As soon as we come home from school, we’re texting our friends who we just saw an hour ago. Even when we’re not doing anything, we’re checking our phones.

My parents tease me about how much I use my phone. It’s always in my hand at home. Even at the dinner table, my phone is right next to me. My parents always say I can’t go without my phone and I always answer back with Yes I can.

One day I thought to myself, can I?

For a whole week, I, a 16-year-old girl living in New York City, gave up my iPhone. I use a laptop at home, so I could check the news and do my homework. I wasn’t giving up communication; I was giving up instant communication. I wanted to see if our phones really were our lifeline.

Here’s what happened.

The first day was the toughest. It didn’t hit me that I was truly doing this until 6:30 Monday morning when I woke up to what sounded like a fire alarm but was really the ancient alarm clock I never use. It took what seemed like an eternity to figure out how to stop the beeping. I usually wake up to the sound of Taylor Swift coming from my iPhone. I sighed. This was going to be a long week.

On my 25-minute daily subway ride to school, I usually listen to my music on my phone and doze off. Having no music turned out to be the hardest part of the whole experiment. I tried singing the songs in my head but it didn’t work. (I couldn’t capture Beyoncé’s voice perfectly.)

I ended up doing some reading for my book club. “The Martian” turned out to be a pretty interesting book, and now I won’t have to worry about reading it the day before my book club meets. Without music, I was forced to get actual work done, and I found I was more awake for school.

Once I arrived, I saw everyone sitting in the hallway, flipping through their phones or listening to music, even while they chatted with their friends. Those who weren’t using their phone kept it right next to them. Even during class, many students had their phones on top of their desks like a security blanket.

The rest of my first day without a phone wasn’t that hard. I felt myself at multiple times subconsciously reach for my phone like a phantom limb. It was weird but manageable.

The rest of my week was surprisingly easy. The need to have my phone on me at all times went away. I felt no desire to refresh my Instagram feed between classes. Even when I came home and had access to my laptop, I stopped immediately checking Facebook.

Going into this experiment, I thought I would prove how much a teen needs her phone. But now I was realizing the exact opposite. Being out of the loop with my friends didn’t alter my social life drastically. I was able to catch up with any group messaging I missed fairly quickly — in real-life conversation.

Once in a while, I did miss the thing. But besides minor inconveniences, I really didn’t need my phone at all.

Now that my experiment is over, here’s what I learned.

Our phones are like our coffee. Coffee gives us energy and the ability to function and we’re made to believe we can’t go without it. But if one day you forgot to go on your morning coffee run to Starbucks, what would really happen? Sure, you’d feel groggy and tired that first day, but a couple days later and suddenly, the need for coffee goes away.

The one who suffers is Starbucks.

It’s the same with a phone. To keep us holding on to them 24/7, the technology world gives us more games, more apps, more reasons to swipe and click and look. We’re not addicted to our phones; they’re addicted to us. The technology world holds so much power over what teenagers see and do.

But when we put our phones down, the power comes back to us.

I still Snapchat and text my friends like crazy; some things just don’t change. But now I read and study more on the train; I find myself doing Sudoku or crossword puzzles instead of playing games on my phone.

I’ve taken the power back from my phone and I have more control over it than it does over me, exactly the way it should be.

© 2016, The Washington Post