On the first day of college, during the awkward periods of uncomfortable silence, I simply pulled out my phone. Although I may have been receiving text messages throughout the day, most of the time when I pulled out my phone, it was mostly to check Twitter, Facebook, and other sorts of social networking mediums.

As my first semester went on and I was better acquainted with various people, I still noticed that I had the habit of taking out my phone when I was put into an awkward situation. A random person enters the elevator; I take out my phone and check Twitter. I run out of things to say to my friend as we eat dinner; I take out my phone and I check Facebook. I see that one person who I cannot stand talking to, eagerly awaiting to engage me in conversation, and I pull out my phone and pretend that I had just received a phone call.

I can be classified as a cell-phone addict; however, I am just one in millions of other addicts who consistently reach into their pockets, or purses, or whatever to grab that small rectangle that occupies our lives.

Cell phones are without doubt incredibly amazing and entertaining devices. In just a split second, we can connect to all of our friends, either by text message, social networking website, or, more rarely, a phone call. On top of all this, we have various games that we can play on our phones, the internet to browse, and various apps that we can use to occupy our free time. However, they occupy much more than our free time.

We now live in a society that is constantly on the verge of checking our phone, mostly because it is extremely easy to deal with people. Instead of taking the five minutes to call a friend and make plans for that night, we send each other a text message that outlines everything that we are doing later. How can this be good for us young adults learning to communicate in a society?

Our generation was born watching the television, which has already hindered our abilities to actually interact with others. Now, we have these portable social media providers that elude us from actually making real conversations with others. Our generation already has trouble dealing with speaking up and talking to others, and now we have ways of completely avoiding direct contact with others.

How will our generation be able to interact with others in the working world? During a job interview you can’t simply pull out a phone. You have to sit one on one and engage in a discussion with a living being completely in the flesh. How are you going to meet your significant other when you are too busy browsing Tinder? One thing is for sure: Young adults in today’s world need to put down the cellphones.