The Benefits of Reverting Back to Flip Phones
Society has grown increasingly dependent on the use of smart phones, so much that it has eaten away at our ability to live in the moment.
March 9, 2021
Over the years, society has increasingly become more unhealthily dependent on smartphones. Instead of actual quality time to enjoy with family and friends to promote deeper connections, we rely on social media and screens to provide us with the entertainment which could have been found in the moment.
The switch back to flip phones would combat the addiction found with the use of a smartphone because of the absence of many apps that make smartphones so addictive.
Many of these addictive apps are only made up by the simple digital footprint of a person, their social media.
Social media has proven to be a very toxic platform for society, influencing one to focus on an unhealthy “perfect” image of themselves compared to the real, genuine life they lead. Social media sets the beauty standards one should hold themselves to and creates a system where these toxic beauty standards are perpetuated.
Because people feed into the system by becoming accustomed to receiving the validation gained from likes and comments, the satisfaction starts to become addictive. More people start to continuously strive to receive an even greater amount of these unnecessary forms of validation.
If society simply learned that their self-confidence should not rely on praise from someone else– an idea perpetuated by the dependency on social media– anxiety and depression would not be so common among today’s youth.
With the use of flip phones, the availability of these addictive apps do not apply. The idea of a phone loses its only “redeeming quality.” Flip phones still offer a way to facilitate a simple form of communication with someone else without promoting the necessity of validation from other parties.
Smartphones force us to depend on the presence of people who can only be found on a screen, rather than someone who is actually there in the moment. Our lives continue to slip away faster and faster as we lose focus of the bigger picture. The more time we spend relying on screens to boost our egos means the more time we lose to enjoy the world around us.
Instead of creating an entirely new digital world, we should stop and smell the roses.
We are no longer able to live in the moment because we are forced into an addictive system based on validation that is hard to escape, and we are forced into this unhealthily system from youth.
The sooner we bring back the use of flip phones, the healthier our youth will become because their happiness will no longer lie on their ability to connect with others digitally, but to connect and learn things themselves on a more emotionally intimate level.
