While waiting to be seated at a local restaurant, my husband and I saw some old friends. We were invited to sit with them instead of waiting and we did so. During the morning rush, it took a while to be served and the conversation was good, catching up on old times. When the meal was over and we parted ways I realized we had a friendly conversation and not one of us reached for our phones to check email, text, surf for information or takea call. No one looked at Facebook or read a tweet. It was an hour long visit at a restaurant without interference of today’s technology.
After this realization, it occurred to me later just how odd this trend is becoming. At a recent women’s retreat we still had internet services hadwe needed them, and our phones were always close by. It was a rare occasion one of us would make a call during the retreat, and some mentioned it was nice no television sets were located within the rooms we were staying.
There’s a lot of talk on how social technology has harmed our teens’ ability to communicate. My point is this: when we limit ourselves by allowing social media to interfere with our daily lives to the point we can’t imagine ourselves without it, we are cheating ourselves out of warm, inviting friendships and spending time knowing and listening to our loved ones. If we prefer to post our thoughts to the hundreds, or thousands of friends and acquaintances of those friends who may or may not really know who we are–instead of speaking directly to our friends or family–those relationships will, most likely, suffer. Are we spending time at the dinner table together without a phone or tablet nearby? Remember when moms and dads wouldn’t allow anyone to answer the telephone connected to the wall during meal time or allow anyone to accept a call after 8 p.m.? Keeping these perspectives should be paramount within our families to ensure our relationships stay healthy. Listening to our loved ones and sharing our own experiences for an evening instead of sharing our thoughts and memes on social media is one way to stop the madness.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Let me check my phone