Nowadays, if you ask a person who’s between 13 and 35 years old to spend one entire day without a cell phone, it would most likely be the same as telling them that the end of the world is approaching. After all, what would we be without a cell phone, right? Well, I’m here to answer that we would be completely the same and nothing in the world would change (not even an apocalypse would happen).
Where did I get the idea of being without a cell phone?
Since 2016, I’ve been a member of a volunteer NGO called CISV (Children International Summer Village), which together with Unesco, provides summer camps for teenagers between 11 and 17 years old all around the world that can last from two to five weeks.
The key point of the proposal is having various delegations from different countries at the same camp, with an approximate age group, and no contact with cell phones and family members. Thus, young people live together, make global friendships and disconnect from their natal routine, being able to open up to other schedules.
In spite of everything, as a young woman from the generation that always had a small screen around, I didn’t like the suggestion at first. The idea of going somewhere full of people I didn’t know, without being able to talk with my parents for four weeks or open Instagram at least once a day was bizarre. And I remember very well that in my first camp in 2022 in Jacksonville (FL) I felt homesickness and fomo (fear of missing out) in the first few days. But after that? I felt fine and warmed up to the people.
What can happen to us as a consequence?
Undoubtedly there are impacts, mostly emotional for me. At my last camp in Vendas Novas, Portugal, the staff Júlia Borges comforted me when I was missing home and said something I never forgot and still make a lot of sense today: “When we turn off the phone for a long time, we are forced to feel real things, so feelings become much more intense, whether they are good or bad”. Brilliant, isn’t it? “But that’s it, we can’t ignore them, because pretending we’re not feeling it is worse. We have to try to understand these emotions”.
Even though that was my third experience at CISV, I had never stopped to think about it.
Thinking in another context, suppose you’re with someone else and, suddenly, that awkward atmosphere arises when no one has anything to talk about. What would you do without immediately thinking of checking your phone? In this case, when your phone simply doesn’t exist, you are “forced” to create another conversation and interact more with the person right next to you, which allows you to get to know better and explore (even in a simple way) the world around you.
People have to question that we are always running to our screens, even if we don’t have anything really important to watch on them.
Was experiencing such madness able to change the way I think?
It may seem silly, but the answer is: obviously! When I stop to think about it, older generations are right when they say: “All you do is use your phone, there’s so much more to do outside”, because they lived in a time that technology didn’t exist, or it wasn’t that advanced and addicting like nowadays. We are the generation that grew up in front of screens (television, cell phones, computers), unlike our grandparents, that live perfectly fine without digitals bricks.
In addition, I realized that we need to know how to use a phone! It can be a powerful weapon of knowledge and not just another compilation of ads, posts and insignificant information. Our cell phones are dangerously designed for us to spend as much time as possible with them in our hands, with flashy colours and algorithms that know exactly what we are consuming.
Regardless, even if we have all that we want in the phones, the “material ways” (paper calendars, notes, handwritten texts, notebook with telephone numbers) still exist and can be as good as the online tricks.
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The article above was edited by Maria Esther Cortez.
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