I’m gonna be honest, I hate cell phones. Okay, that first sentence was a lie. I love them.

I love spending time that I can never get back looking at low-res pictures, emotional teenage tweets, and Snapchat stories of people at parties, all posted by peers that I tend to avoid eye contact with at school.

That sounds pretty stupid, but when you think about it, that’s exactly what we’re doing with our phones. Do I actually care about this person’s latest tweet or Instagram post? Probably not.

Then why do I continually open these apps when I could be doing much better things with my time? It doesn’t make much sense to me. (As I am writing this, I hear my phone vibrate on my bed and leap from my desk to see what it is.)

Whether we’d like to admit it or not, we are all addicted to our phones to some extent. Maybe it’s Twitter, Facebook, or Snapchat . . . the list goes on. I’m not saying the use of social media is a bad by all means, it actually has some benefits, but that’s not the point I’m trying to prove.

Teenagers are on their phones way too much. We say we are “checking” Twitter or Instagram, but it’s nothing we really need to check. We are simply looking at things that somehow entertain us.

Even when friends are hanging out, we are “checking their phones” for a lot of the time, and not even talking to each other. Since when have posts from people that you aren’t currently with in person taken priority over those you are with right now?

It’s just plain rude to ignore someone to be on your phone, unless you’re texting your mom, of course. She takes priority over everything.

That leads me to another point: using your phone when you are at an event/presentation. If people put a lot of time and effort into something and are performing or presenting it, it’s disrespectful to be on your phone during that time, no matter how uninterested you are in the subject.

And no matter what you think, they see that little white glow on your face.

A specific example would be people who go on their phones at concerts. As an avid concert-goer, nothing irks me more than to see this happening. Even if it’s an opening act, it’s very disrespectful. A band puts their life into the music they make, so the least you could do is watch and listen.

Teenagers are letting phones take priority over so many things in their life. They have become more than simply a distraction, it’s an addiction. Are we ever gonna look back at these years and think how glad we are that we spent so much time on our phones?

Put down your technology, go outside and have some fun with some good friends.