Electric Silence

Is it the damn phone?

LUARDE MONTANO CANCEL

You enter your apartment right out of class and sit on the couch. One of your roommates is on the couch watching TV and the other is on the kitchen stool scrolling away on Instagram at a speed of five reels per second. Like most, you pull out your own phone and get sucked into the routine of dragging your thumb across your screen and laughing at some outrageous reel or getting bummed because this is the seventh time today that you caught yourself doomscrolling on TikTok. You can’t help but overhear your roommate, now on the phone talking about a game or movie you like. You love that movie, it never would have occurred to you that your roommate would like it too. Then again, how would you know what they like or don’t like? You don’t speak much, other than the occasional “Hello.” You live together, why waste away in electric silence? You don’t know something as simple as their favorite color.

Now, phones and social media can be pretty great. I can keep in touch with my friends and family who live 2,000 miles away. I can keep up with what’s happening around me; I can see what’s going on back home. Not to mention the wealth of knowledge that’s available on the internet—how else would I feed my obsession with locomotives and ridiculously overpriced action figures? I’m not saying phones are this evil godforsaken device that has everyone constantly gripped, scrolling our days away, rotting our brains. But for a lot of us, phones do have us gripped because they’re always so accessible. They’re so easy to just grab, and the next thing you know it’s two hours past when you should have been sleeping. That time is gone forever, and the phone is still there clinging to us like a disease.

There is so much time to spend with our friends, our family. We could learn new skills, play a new instrument, or join some cool club. Instead we lie on our beds, snoozing our alarms and scrolling for five more minutes, until half an hour has vanished. We could go out, meet new people and try new things. We could be reading a good book or watching a movie, but instead we sit on the toilet watching the seventh edit of whatever show the algorithm picked for us. Instead of appreciating real media, I watched a video of a dog that took me five seconds too long to realize was made by Claude AI.

Hell, writing this, I picked up my phone just to see some guy pretending to be a Snapple bottle inside a Costco fridge screaming at some poor soul who thought he was finally losing his mind.

It’s not easy of course, to quit. To put down the phone and force ourselves out of that bubble it creates for us. I know I’ve tried: screen limits and locking up my phone. I got a watch to check the time instead of the phone, deleted some apps, and started carrying my 3DS with me to play games. Despite these efforts I still at times go back to the phone and let the time pass me by. I don’t want life to pass me by and realize that I spent most of it on the screen.

You don’t want that either, who does? So when you come home fresh from your class, when you see your roommates watching television and scrolling, when you sit down on that couch; you ask about their day, you ask about what they’re watching. Maybe it’s awkward, maybe they give you a half-assed answer, or they pretend they don’t hear you—and that’s okay. Not everyone will want to talk, maybe you yourself struggle to keep the conversation going, but you tried. You put yourself out there, and if not with your roommates then with someone in your class, someone in a club. You can be the person to pull someone away from the screen, to break the electric silence, and maybe you learn their favorite color.