I live in a family of five, and out of five, I am the only one that doesn’t have a smart phone. In today’s society, you may think I’m crazy not to have one. You may think I don’t keep up with the times, and I’m stuck in the past. But the truth is I’m watching teenagers interact with technology everyday on the sidelines, and it baffles me how they believe they’re being sociable on social media.

We, as in teenagers, want to live life in the fast lane. We crave information like a drug. And most of the time, we end up knowing too much. We are so sucked into our plasma screen sized phone dawdling on social media that we abandon face-to-face contact. In situations where we feel uncomfortable or don’t want to chat with people around us, we turn to our phone, and we swipe down the scroll of posts, ignoring everything around us. Don’t be that person, please.

Whenever I see that person, on their phone, not talking to anyone, I just shake my head, or I laugh to myself. I shake my head in disappointment because they let toxic tweets and absurd snapchats fill up their brains with useless information. I laugh to myself because I look at the people around them who they could easily talk to in person.

When we are so engrossed in social media, to the point where the people around us become invisible, I know there’s a problem with our society. I know that we as the new generation can be better than that. If we, as the new generation, are glued to our phones, the train of life is going to drive away, and we’re going to miss it.

So while you’re on your phone texting, snapchatting, tweeting, or taking selfies away, get your head up and look around. You want to see an actual social network? Look at the world around you. Take opportunities, take chances, and live life. Fill your head with information that will benefit you and your future, not six seconds of a snapchat, not a photo of a stranger’s lunch, not even a tweet updating of when your friend went to the bathroom. If you do not do this, I assure you, your ability to communicate with people face-to-face will diminish drastically.

That is why I don’t have a smart phone; I don’t want to occupy myself with games, apps, or social media, because I don’t need to. I take whatever opportunity I have to talk to people at school, because that eye contact with that person is a connection that screens on a phone cannot make. A talk face-to-face allows me to use my senses to delineate how the person is feeling. A text cannot do that. Talking to someone in person is constant, it isn’t staged. A snapchat cannot do that.

So, next time you go out with your friends for dinner, pile your phones at the center of the table. Because nothing is worse than being with someone who would rather look at their instagram than talk to you. Don’t be that person.