Texting is labourious and I don’t want to do it anymore
I work in a job that requires constant communication via email and I have friends who are on co-op cycles that have them living kilometres away from me. I’m attached to my phone. Most of the time, my eyes are constantly strained from the endless amount of digital consumption that my glasses just cannot keep up with. So, I’m tired of texting.
Call me lazy, but I don’t like keeping a constant line of communication open with drawn out conversations that never seem to go anywhere. It’s not that my friends are boring people to talk to — they’re not. I just don’t want pieces of conversation at a time.
Call me old fashioned but I like phone calls. They used to be something most people my age dreaded when we were younger because it meant an hour long conversation with a distant relative. Now that I’m older and most of the people I know are roaming around the planet, phone calls seem so much more personal. When I was 13, I thought that I was so righteous to think that being in constant contact with my friends on our LG Rumours was the highest form of social intimacy.
Phone calls are a great and often over-looked form of communication. Nothing is lost in translation because you can say what you want with whatever inflection you want. You can get answers immediately and you can make plans with ease.
In high school, when most of us had finally acquired texting plans that didn’t limit us to a suffocating 150 messages per month, the constant contact became over-stimulating.
I would have to text goodnight and goodbye to my friends who I would always see the next day, otherwise they would think I was upset with them. If you didn’t send someone a “BRB” text you were clearly ignoring them.
It was the social conventions of MSN messenger carried over to the mobile devices. It was the beginning of the teen years of the 2000s. It was hell.
I carry over a resentment of texting from my late high school years when doing anything without having to answer a simple text message was almost impossible. Please never take me back to when that was the proper texting etiquette.
Now my problems with texting aren’t so imprisoning. Texting people back right away isn’t the standard and it can be as casual as telling someone to listen to this great song you discovered on Spotify today.
My problem now is that I wear reading glasses. Reading glasses are a major problem for people like me who constantly have to look up from their electronic device that they’re reading and back down again. If I want to read my phone and not give myself a headache I have to wear my glasses.
But the problem stands that looking up from my phone or looking away from the set distance that my far-sighted eyes are meant to see sends me into a blurry mess.
The constant swirl of clear and unclear vision makes me absolutely nauseous. So does reading without my glasses.
Therefore, I don’t want to text anymore. I don’t want to look down at my phone only to give myself eye-strain and I don’t want to put my glasses on and off again every time I want to read something on my phone. If you want to take a break from texting don’t feel bad for not texting someone back right away. It’s your life, live it how you want to.
I know people care about me if they’re not texting me 24/7, and you should too.
Alexandra Hanrath
3B English Literature
