Having trouble putting down your cell phone?

I know you’re probably raising your eyebrows at me right now. I’m sure I would be too if I hadn’t given this subject some thought. But this isn’t a lecture to all you texters about how phone use is bad for you or how you have lost all ability to directly communicate with real people.

I can remember getting a gold watch for my sweet 16. It had its fair share of praise from all of the adults around me and I tried sporting it for maybe all of two days. Now that gold watch sits in its box, ticking furiously because it is being ignored.

Watches and watch wearers are a dying breed. A recent study showed that the average phone user checks their phone 34 times per day. That’s once every 18 minutes. So, if all you phone users are checking your phones every 18 minutes, you don’t need to wear a watch because you always have the time.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just means that our society has advanced, once again, to another way of telling time. After all, we are always improving our technologies. We have a consistent need to make everything better, greater and bigger. But as more and more parts of our lives get shrunk and loaded onto our phones, we become ever more reliant on them.

Picking up your smartphone is an addiction because of the rush you get. Think back to the last time you checked your phone and there wasn’t a message on it. If you’re anything like me, you felt a small twinge of disappointment that a fellow phone user didn’t take the time to send you a quick “howdy-do.”

Now, what about that time that you checked your phone and saw that magical number on top of your message box stating that someone had texted you? Did you maybe do a small happy-dance inside your head? Well, I can almost guarantee you at least rushed to read that message.

Or how about that time when you absentmindedly set your phone down on the table, went to reach for it in your pocket and realized it wasn’t there? Your heart started beating faster, you started furiously patting your body and basically did a tiny freak-out because you just lost your entire world.

My phone, for example contains everything: all my contacts (whose numbers I don’t have memorized because they are only a click away), my way to secretly stalk people without them knowing (Facebook and Twitter make it easy), my calendar of my life’s events and all those other little doodads that make my already easy university life even easier.

When my phone recently went in for servicing, I felt like I lost a part of myself. Yes, I had a loner phone — a CrackBerry, of all things. Oh the horror! It wasn’t the same. I genuinely missed my phone. Yes, I told people that. And yes, I did get “WTF?” looks.

Looking at myself and the people around me, it’s clear that “addiction” is the only appropriate word for how we use our phones.

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Photo: LexnGer/flickr