It is sad, really. It is sad that for us, the act of conversing with someone is a scary thought. Instead of actually speaking face to face, we would prefer cowering behind the safety of our screens. We would rather use emojis than show our actual emotions because using emojis is safer. Who can tell what you are actually thinking or feeling over a phone screen? How are ideas not to get confusing when you cannot understand the tone of someone’s voice? We create so much drama between ourselves and other people, just because of simple misunderstandings over text messages. For instance, you could text, “OMG shut up, ur so stupid,” and mean it as a joke, but the person you are “conversing” with may not take it as a joke because they cannot hear how you actually meant it to be received.

We use our technology as a way to avoid confrontation, and as a result we have made cowards of ourselves. We, as a generation, do not have the skill of talking through difficult situations. We talk all the time about simple things, but when it comes to harder situations, and more complex conversations, we clam up.

With the loss of real conversation, we lose other important components of life as well. We seem to think that incidents such as rejection will hurt less over the phone. After all, why take the chance of being shot down by the person you like face to face, when you can easily hide behind the safety of your phone screen for protection against the possibility of rejection? We all have chances to take, and taking chances is hard, but if we do not learn to take the risk of confronting someone in person, we will never survive in this world. If you manage to get through something like asking a crush out, then when you take them out, DON’T GET ON YOUR PHONE! I was out with my family one night, and we saw two teenagers out on a date. They were having dinner, yet instead of speaking to one another and carrying on a conversation, they were both on their phones the entire time. I’m sorry, but the goal of going out on a date is to get to know the other person better, and how can you do that if you are both glued to your phones the whole time?

Activities such as dating have changed so much because of how much we use technology. People do not ask others out face to face anymore, they do not actually speak with their dates when they are out with them and they do not communicate well with others anymore because nothing can be fully conversed over the phone.

Can you imagine how different our lives would be if we did not use our phones as a crutch? If we actually spoke to one another about things other than social media posts? When we lose the ability to speak, we push away opportunities.  When we lose the ability to communicate, we put ourselves in danger of suppressing our thoughts and emotions. A stolid person, who bottles all of their emotions up, is like a volcano on the verge of exploding.

Check out this website with the top psychological reasons for why people do not share their thoughts…