While people used to actually socialize in public, today when you go to a restaurant it’s not unusual to see people sitting at tables, surrounded by friends or family, only to be on their phones. All the typical desk items like calendars, notebooks, calculators and clocks have been condensed into one machine. It’s as if our entire lives have been squished into a rectangle. Most of our vision has gone from a wide panorama to a sadly cropped Instagram picture, but in place of a nice filter, there's a bright screen with bothersome ads or some form of distraction with text, pictures or videos. Though phones can make our lives easier to some degree, they also make days seem shorter with all of their distractions. Phones also affect our health, from our eyesight to our sleep schedules to our neck pain. However, phones also unknowingly impact our behavior and the way we live.

I remember my dad telling me about meeting places when he was my age -- how if he was late to a meeting or even a hangout with friends, he could expect to be forgotten, or depending on the circumstances, the event could be cancelled. Because people today can text others, “I’m going to be late,” or the dreadful last minute text of, “Something came up last minute and I can’t go,” people are getting accustomed to doing this and are taking advantage of it more than they should. One of my professors even allows my class to text her if one of us is going to be late. While it’s nice she acknowledges that sometimes life happens and gets in the way of things, it’s sad that teachers expect students to be late. Our generation is growing up with the understanding that they can just text someone about their lateness and even worse, people are growing to expect tardiness.

Then there’s the touched-up portrayal of our life in square form, random posts or blurbs under 140 characters. I’m talking of course about Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. I feel as though some people have at least one or more of these accounts because they feel the need to in order to keep up with everyone else. I feel the main reason I have an Instagram is because a friend made me one and some of my other friends were always talking about it. It is sad that in order to connect with everyone our age, we usually have to get sucked into the world of social media.

Some people think they can get to know someone by looking at their Instagram pictures or their Twitter and Facebook posts, which can actually be a completely different life than it seems they have. People seem to get lazier about getting to know someone or make assumptions about them based on their social media. Worst of all, my generation seems to get all their information about politics and local news from Facebook instead of watching or reading the news.

This doesn’t even include autocorrect -- the epitome of embarrassing text messages. Texting can be stressful since it is often challenging to convey emotion through a text and you don’t know when the other person is going to reply. Because it’s easier and everyone does it, some people (like me) feel compelled to text as often as everyone else even if they don’t prefer it.

At one point, people thought technology and phones would only make our lives better, which is quite funny considering most of the technology used today is usually the opposite. As a matter of fact, phones and technology are comparable to Doc Ock’s bionic arms in "Spider Man 2." They looked incredible and simply life-changing but turned out to control life way more than anyone would’ve originally wanted.

Phones are a great way to communicate with people. It’s amazing that we can type something on a keyboard and it shows up on someone else’s screen in seconds, but with that great opportunity also comes great confusion, and by great confusion I mean not understanding someone’s text, completely misconstruing it, or even overthinking it into another dimension. Phones have completely changed our way of interpreting written words, and thus have changed how we communicate.

As if there isn’t already enough hassle that comes with phones, studies have shown that guys and girls text and interpret text differently. Girls find texting more meaningful while guys see it as no big deal. Girls tend to also overanalyze texts much more than guys. Thanks to phones, there are now more confusing issues between guys and girls as if we already don’t find the opposite sex confusing enough.

Not to mention our eyesight will worsen at a faster rate. We hear elders complain about having bad vision, and I'm used to my parents holding phones three feet from their face because they have become far-sighted. Our generation’s eyesight will most likely be twice as bad, seeing that our eyes will adjust to us looking a foot in front of us the majority of our lives. There have also been cases where young people have had to go to the hospital because their necks became bent from looking down at their phones for too long. In fact this condition has been named specifically for phone use and is called “text neck.” This isn’t just some silly term people on the Internet made; it’s on WebMD, along with other technology-related health issues.

I highly doubt our generation and future generations will be able to easily detach from technology, but hopefully we will be able to detach enough so that we adapt to the classic lifestyle our parents were able to luckily maintain with ease.