(Hialeah, Fla.) A pic has been posted to social media showing a young Gen Z woman checking text messages just seconds before she realized she’s on her personal device “too damned much.”
Kaylee Winters, 28, admitted that she and most of her friends have allowed their cellphones to control their lives, so much so that they’ve not spoken any actual words to each other in more than a year.
“Well, I can’t say we don’t have conversations and heart-to-heart discussions because we do,” Winters said. “We just don’t have them in person. It just got to be too easy to text our thoughts, including when we broke up with boyfriends, got ahold of our parents, and, for some of my friends, kept in touch with their kids.
“I guess I just didn’t see how my device was consuming my life,” she continued. “Even now, I really wanna check for texts, see how many people responded to my last Facebook post, how many people liked my Snapchat selfie, and what everything thought about the really cool sweater I found at Walmart that I posted on Instagram.
“But I know that I can’t stay connected to this damned device all day long. I know it. I want to, though. It’s just so hard to do, like, real human-to-human, ya know? That’s really tough for my generation. We’re not used to that kind of interaction.”
