It's especially liberating to those young of us to have grown up with the phone always on all the time. Never get to hang out after school without everyone wanting to know where you are. Never get to roam the neighborhood without everyone wanting to know where you are. Never getting to encounter danger without extreme societal pressure to take the least risks and encounter the least amount of strange and difficult situations possible. Never getting to rely on your own ingenuity and tact because the phone can always answer better and faster. The phone does improve life in some ways, but it also strips us of others. If you had lived your adolescence without the god-mind constantly watching you, you might not understand what it's like to grow up these days. I'm sure you had your own difficulties but I wouldn't comment on those like I understand them.

I frightens me that we've set up our society to value perfect productivity over all else. It's unhealthy, at least for some. Maybe even life was worse on the whole before the connectivity singularity stole our privacy and our free time, but you cant say it was worse in every way. Why are we opposed to allowing others the ability to gain that perspective? Why should we tell someone that the way they discovered more of their humanity is pointless because it might "waste time". Do we meditate? Do we rest? I could just as easily say that spending all your time on your phone on a bus or transit is just as much wasting your time as is sitting and staring at the ceiling. The mind never shuts off. Could I ask anyone to repeat to me the important information they learned from that post on their bus transit 3 Tuesdays ago? Maybe they did learn something important and do remember. But maybe I came to a realization that I wouldn't have, without giving myself the space to think. Or maybe I met this beautiful girl who I just had my first date with. Or maybe I just sat and stopped stressing about everything that's bad in the world. Maybe I took some time to breathe so that I could be a more pleasant person for my child after a difficult day of work.

You could say that these things are all achievable through the phone and I think we can all agree there are marked differences between conversations over text and those in person, between an interesting point we read and an epiphany that we came to ourselves.

I don't want to be hypocritical tell you that your way is wrong or that your perspective is incorrect, just maybe a little push to think about what it would be like to be someone else. Who might have written that post? What might their life be like to make them think those things? What in my life has lead me to believe what I do? In my experience, these are the kinds of thoughts I don't have through the phone.

As an addendum, I'd say that there are many many uses for the phone, I would guess that you don't have a snapchat and an instagram to check and constantly worry about. But these days you can't be social or even participate in high school (college to a slightly lesser extent) without having one or both of those things (probably even newer ones I don't know about). It's not necessarily just freedom from google maps, but from the panopticon and extreme pressures to portray your life in a certain way.