Put The Damn Phone Down

Living in a digitally dominant world surrounded by rapidly diminishing attention spans coupled with expectations of filtered, edited and altered faces and bodies, we’ve reached a frightening point of what the fuck is going on?

We’ve expanded our rationale to the growing levels of casual that have become the standard for what relationships are today.

I can’t help but think, will relationships become a thing of the past? Drastic, sure, but look how much has changed with dating after social media and dating applications began.

I’m talking at the very least, the ones we’ve known as quote on quote, normal. Are we drifting more towards the extinction of monogamy?

We have cat-fishing, cheating, filtered photos, exaggerated biographies, and misleading information, all simplified and easier to pull off with the assistance of technology.

Have we always been so dishonest, we just never had the tools to express this part of ourselves? Is technology testing humans of today to differentiate between honest vs. dishonest?

More importantly, what do we do now? 

Well, the only thing we have control over is ourselves, and how we choose to handle our own relationships and forms of expression.

So I did that. I decided to start a conversation, more so the wake-up call 2018 needed. 

I wrote a book called Put The Damn Phone Down available on Amazon here, published with Thought Catalog.

So, when I say, “Put The Damn Phone Down,” do I mean get rid of our phones?

Absolutely not. I use my phone to communicate. I use social media to promote and push my writing and video projects to the world wide web.

But the biggest takeaway I want people to take from this book is to be aware of the dramatic impact technology has had in such a short period of time.

It’s easy to ignore reality and choose to dial into a digital world. It’s even easier to get locked into that digital universe.

But I still can’t help but want more for the generations that come after me, specifically the generations that don’t know a time without technology as a vital component to everyday life.

I want young girls to know that imperfections are beautiful. We are not meant to look plastic, filtered, and unblemished.

I want young people entering the dating world to rethink the effort put into dating applications and how that coincides with the results they are getting from them.

I want consumers to rethink putting all of their trust into “influencers” that have a high number of “followers.”

Now more than ever, people are focused on others, taking away from our own passions.

I not only want to start a conversation, but I want the conversation to continue.

I want to empower people to follow themselves while exploring the number of ways they can express themselves.

So put the damn phone down, at least for just a moment.