Look at our society today, we have every gadget available to be able to communicate and stay in touch with each other. Don’t get me wrong having all this power at your finger tips is amazing but when it doesn’t work to your advantage it can control your life, bring you down and can cause anxiety and depression. What exactly am I talking about?

Let me start by telling you when this technology all started for me. You can sort of figure out roughly how old I am by this story. So in the early 90’s when pagers where the way to get a hold of each other & cell phones were just becoming the norm, I was in my later years in High School. Call display on home phones just came out and were your best friend. I’d come home from my part time job or just hanging out with some friends and immediately upon entering the house would scream at the top of my lungs “Mom who called?” of course she would name everyone’s name except the one name you were dying to hear. You still don’t believe her so you run over to the phone and check the call display for the list of callers, just in case you thought she might have missed any calls but No phone number wasn’t there, which then puts you in a bad mood for some reason. This was just the start. As time progressed, it was my pager next, soon it was email, then everyone had cell phones and then text messaging, MSN messenger, Myspace, Facebook to cheap data plans on Blackberry’s which gave us Blackberry messenger and access to emails at all the times and the list goes on. We can be reached everyway possible and how great it. But how many times has this technology not worked to your advantage, like when you see your friends just posted pictures of a party on Facebook that you didn’t get invited too, or when your holding on to that cell phone of yours waiting for it to vibrate for that text message and it never goes off or when you do get the text message or email but it’s not the words you wanted to hear. How many people can say that they broke up via text message or email with someone. If you’re my age and back in the day when we didn’t have this technology and breaking up with someone over the phone was actually the worst thing to do. You would have been perceived as a heartless monster. Hey but that’s our society today, we live in times where technology can also be our Achilles heal or downfall. Do you even want me to get started on camera phones and the damage that they can do ….

Point in all of this is we need to grasp all this power in our hands, handle it with care, take it into stride and try not to be so dependent on it. For all the young people who are accustom to this lifestyle and this is all you know, it doesn’t hurt to every now and then to disconnect yourself from this modern technology. You might see an improvement in some other aspects of your life when you actually take the time to go out and socialize with friends in person. Those of us who have seen this progression know where I’m coming from and will hopefully agree it’s good idea for everyone to go back to those old school days once in a while, you’ll realize it won’t kill you to turn off your cell phone or not check your emails for one day. Give you time to clear your mind from it all, stop you from going crazy and enjoy life without the technology interruptions. There will be times you’ll be glad you did it and it will save your sanity in your later years …

Brandon