We have all been there. When you feel out of place, everyone else seems to belong and you feel as though you stick out like a sore thumb. Sometimes it happens when you arrive too early to leave too late. As a seventeen year old without a license in Minnesota, I find myself entirely dependent on my friends and family for rides. This dependency causes some truly awkward situations... Sometimes I feel judged, afraid to make eye contact with others and occasionally I'm just genuinely bored. In all of these scenarios, my phone comes to my rescue. I text or call people in an awkward situation, and instead of being the awkward girl who is sitting alone I become the girl with better things to do and better people to talk to. I screen my CNN app for the latest news or look on Buzzfeed for a good laugh, no matter the situation, my iphone has my back. I think about my parents, and how up until our generation, what did people do in awkward situations? Or when people got excessively board?

I think about all the times that my iphone has saved me: when I am the last person awake at a sleepover and cannot fall asleep, when I need to check a fact quickly, or misplaced my graphing calculator and the app will have to do. There is no doubt in my mind that my iphone has made my life easier, but I look at smartphone statistics and I think, but at what cost?

Renown news sources all over the world, like the BBC continuously relay information about how the world's population is spiraling out of control, and increasing exponentially. Countries like China, which for years has had one-child policy to attempt at controlling the worlds population. All of this knowledge about the need for population control, puts our reliance on technology into question. According to the New York Daily News, more smartphones are activated each day than babies are born. This meaning there are more new smartphones coming into the world and being used than there are humans. And the average person checks their smartphone every 6.5 minutes. Now this may seem extreme but when you think about it, the results make sense. This is an average including all of the teenagers who spend hours straight on their phones, or who constantly check their phone to see when someone has responded to their snapchat or text and keeping up with how many people have liked their most recent instagram or favorited their latest tweet. These days it is nearly impossible to live a regular social life without a smartphone.

This notion may seem extreme, but from my experience it is true. There are days where I fall asleep right when I come home or my phone dies and I am unreachable for hours, and by the time I look at my phone it seems to have blown up with messages. I think it is less about needing to reach someone and more about since the technology is there and accessible, why not use it? Roughly 90% of my text message, viber, whatsapp or facebook instant message exchanges are not necessary, someone is just bored, or like I previously stated, in an awkward situation.

There is no doubt that I love my phone and all of its uses but I frequently wish that this technology was not needed to be social in society. Every year, I attend a camp for two months. During this duration the camp asks you to not bring cell phones and if you are caught with one, they are confiscated. I find that this atmosphere is the perfect one for social interaction, this is because it is not just me who chooses to not use a phone, but everyone is forbidden. Because of this these friendships spans more than who tags me in the most photos on facebook or who watches my vines the most. When I see these friends again, we frequently induct a "no phone zone" where everyone must put their phones in a pile and unless someone gets a call (because these days people usually just call if something is important), no one is allowed to touch their phones, the only social interaction is human face to face interaction, which even with all of this technology, I still think is the best kind.