Reason #1 why my social life is sorry: “Your generation invented the delayed reaction.”

My friend’s professor told her class that our generation invented the delayed reaction. Until texting, a conversation only functioned with the immediate responses of everyone involved. Now, I find myself texting people to receive responses half a day, if not days, later. But usually I don’t receive responses at all.

Black and white no longer divide life as they did in childhood, so whether a new person I meet is undependable as far as their phone goes says nothing about their character; the large majority of my closest friends are the same way. When I hang out with people my age, their fingers are often inseparable from their phones. So what happens when I’m not around? When I call or text them and they don’t pick up or respond, make no effort to reach out to me as I have to them?

It’s easy to sound like an angry, angsty, cynical eighth-grader when writing about how people never text me back, but this issue is not about phones—it’s about communication. It almost never takes me more than thirty seconds to text someone to tell them where I am, what my plans are or if I can meet them. And, considering I treat people with respect, I follow through with my plans and arrive on time. If I’m late, I apologize. I prioritize no one over anyone else—not this friend over that friend, not a boyfriend over a friend; the latter, in my opinion, is silly and juvenile. And I understand that people are busy, people forget—it’s fine. We’re human. But when it becomes a regular occurrence, it becomes problematic.

Upsetting how we can use phones to get directions, to blog, to listen to music, but the function so many of us have trouble with is that which phones were made for in the first place.