Rhetoric & Composition I Rotating Header Image

Paulina: no-phone journal

I did not think I was going to be leaving that day without my phone. I was dying little by little when I was putting the phone down in the box and leaving it behind. I thought that it was going to be easy and that the days would fly by. I was completely wrong. When I left the classroom I felt lighter, like I was missing something very important. When I was walking I kept touching my pockets looking for my phone, but then I remembered that I did not have my phone. I felt like I was disconnected from my friends, family, coworkers, etc. basically the whole world. I was basically invisible and nobody knew I existed.

The main question that kept running through my head was, how am I going to be communicating with anyone. The only thing that came to my head was emailing them to talk to them. During this time I felt lonely, distant, and invisible because I wasn’t talking to anyone or looking at my social media constantly. I am not going to lie; it was a weird feeling not having my phone. The first day without a phone was the hardest, but I noticed some details about myself. One of the bigger things that I noticed about myself was that I was able to accomplish my homework much faster compared to other times.

I did not have anything to distract me, so I think that was the reason for me to finish everything much faster and put more thought into what I was doing. I always knew that my phone consumed a great deal of my time, but I never realized that it was this much time. I was surprised by this news, but now I know that when I am doing my homework I should consider putting my phone away. A problem I ran into knew the time. In a lot of the public areas there are not clocks just hanging around. I am not used to wearing a watch and I was used to checking my phone for the time. When I asked people for the time, they gave me an unusual look and told me the time. I know I would do the same if someone would be asking me the time because I would assume that they could just check their phones for the time and not ask me.

Another thing that I realized was that majority of the people on the train are either on their phones or have some sort of electronic device. No one is trying to have a conversation with anyone because they are to busy on their phones/electronic devices. When I got home it was the best feeling. I was able to have conversation with real people and see how everyone was doing. I noticed that my family members were on their phones for most of the time. They did talk to me, but I never noticed how attached we were to our phones. I was talking to them, but they were doing something on their phones.