A Disguised Addiction

As summer came to an end, talks of my high school’s new phone policy became the topic of conversation, as rumours of its severity reached the mouths of many. The new phone policy stated that students had to place their phones in numbered pockets at the front of the classroom for the entirety of the period. However,  students were allowed to use them in between classes, before and after school, as well as during lunch.

The first day of school came as a wake-up call to many students, including myself. The pushback and complaints I heard were immense; students would take the cases off their phones, putting them in their phone pockets as a disguise instead of giving up their phones, or claiming that they had forgotten their phones or did not own one. Because addicts will always find a way.

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Can you blame us, though? Everything we knew about how to interact with our peers was taken from us. You just took alcohol from a bunch of alcoholics, and acted like it was nothing, with little grace during remission. We unconsciously choose our phones over our peers. We know everything about the latest social media scandal, and not the people we sit next to. The ones we see every day, the ones we have to work with, the ones who truly could have an impact on our lives. Instead, we live for the next news story, the next breakup, the next musician to overdose. Social media platforms specifically design algorithms to keep us scrolling. Because we live for money, no matter how much we say money can’t buy happiness.

Our society treats this addiction to cellphones like it does not exist, ignoring its consequences until it’s too late. Have you ever gotten headaches after looking at a screen for too long? Have you ever wondered where the last 20 minutes of your life went? Have you ever simply opened your phone to make yourself seem busy to avoid an interaction or conversation? Have you ever been the one who is forced to pull out their phone because everyone else is on theirs?

The presence of our phones has made us so uncomfortable with sitting in silence and simply living. We are no longer forced to stare out the window and simply think, giving our brains a second to wander. Our world moves at such a fast rate that we are trained to think that we do not have enough time to spare. We cannot possibly waste a couple of minutes. We walk while texting, we watch TikToks while trying to drift to sleep, and take notes in class while shopping online.

An educational psychologist, Bartolomé Úbeda, argues that boredom is necessary for creativity. When we are constantly distracting ourselves with screens, we aren’t giving our imagination an opportunity to run wild. We have replaced creative tasks, such as painting, knitting, or photography, with mindless scrolling on a screen. Nowadays, many people lack creativity, worrying too much about what other people will think of them or their creations. Instead, we have turned to the same mind-numbing browsing of YouTube shorts, TikTok and Instagram reels, so that we can keep up with what is trendy. 

However, it’s an all-or-nothing type of dilemma. One girl begging for distance from her phone will still check it continuously and bury her personality in the inches of her screen. I’ll still ask for more screen time and scroll for hours. 

An intervention is needed from the adults around us, because addicts rarely recover on their own. As much as I dread putting my phone in my pocket every single class, I become more grateful every time I do. I become more interested in my peers, more focused on my future accomplishments, and more present. Our schools and parents have to be the “bad guys” now.