Going off the grid

That summer when my parents took my phone from me, I was so mad. Not just “frustrated with my screen time limit” mad, they took it from me for the entire summer. At the time, it seemed like an unjustifiable punishment, mostly because I believed I was going to fade into oblivion in the eyes of my peers.

For the first few days of the summer, I would reach for my phone without thinking. When I saw something funny, the first thing I would think about was who I wanted to share it with. I would wonder what all of my friends were doing without me. They were having conversations and planning events via group chat that I couldn’t access; they were sharing photos and stories that I wouldn’t see. And I was extremely aware that everyone else’s social lives were continuing as usual without me. After the first week or so of the summer, however, I found myself becoming accustomed to not having my phone. I no longer thought about whether someone had sent me a message or what I might be missing since there was no way for me to find out.

Eventually, my social life became slightly separate from everyone else’s. I wasn’t involved in every conversation and I definitely missed plans I would otherwise have been invited to. Initially, that had been exactly what I was afraid of. But once it actually happened, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had imagined. I became much more focused on the people I was actually spending time with rather than the people I could have been talking to. I also stopped comparing what I was doing with what everyone else seemed to be doing.

By the end of the summer, I had become much happier without constantly knowing what was going on. Of course, when September came around and I got my phone back, I didn’t suddenly decide that I was better off without it. I quickly went back to group chats, sending my friends things I found funny and catching up on everything I had missed. I still wanted to be part of my friends’ lives, and having my phone obviously made that much easier.

But I think that summer changed how I understood being connected to people. Before, I had assumed that the more I knew about what everyone was doing, the more included I would feel. Being separated from all of it made me realise that sometimes the opposite was true. I didn’t need to know where everyone was, who they were with or what I was missing all the time. As much as I hated admitting that my parents’ punishment had done me some good, knowing less about everyone else’s lives had made me much more content with my own.

Author: Anonymous