Somewhere along the way, we started measuring the quality of our days by the number of times our phones lit up. A call from a friend. A text from a colleague. A notification that someone, somewhere, has liked something we posted.
We tell ourselves it’s connection. Proof we matter. A little validation, packaged neatly in vibrations and ringtones. But if we’re honest, it’s not just connection we’re chasing, it’s a scorecard. The worst part? We’ve trained ourselves to check it constantly.
There was a time when the absence of calls meant peace. When no one interrupting you was not loneliness, but freedom. When you could sit in a café and watch the rain without feeling an itch to document it or an urge to see if anyone had “seen” your last message. But now, our phones have become both stage and judge. We scroll not because we’re curious, but because the quiet feels strange. We refresh our inboxes not because something urgent is pending, but because we’ve grown uneasy with stillness. We’re measuring our day in pings, and in the process, losing the ability to be fully here.
It’s not just time the phone takes from us. It robs you of something far more valuable: presence. The ability to really listen to someone without half your mind wondering what’s happening in your pocket. The capacity to experience a sunset without framing it for a story. The patience to let a moment breathe before turning it into content. Even in meaningful conversations, we hover on the brink of somewhere else. Our eyes flick down, our attention splits, and our presence gets eroded in tiny, almost invisible increments.
When our self-worth starts hitching itself to the rhythm of incoming notifications, we give away too much power. A good day becomes one where the phone was busy; a bad day becomes one where it stayed still. The absurdity is that life might have been enriched by a conversation with a neighbour, the taste of ripe fruit, the comfort of a book, but if it wasn’t punctuated by a buzz, it didn’t “count.” We risk missing the deep, textured reality of our lives because we’re chasing the shallower, louder version of it on a screen.
What if we stopped grading our days by how many people reached out? What if we started asking: Did I notice something beautiful today? Was I truly present with someone? Did I create something, even something small? Did I rest, breathe, or feel joy without documenting it? Presence is not flashy. It doesn’t buzz or beep. It doesn’t demand we look down or click a like / follow / subscribe button. But it’s the only thing that lets us actually inhabit our own lives instead of skimming them through the glow of a screen.
The next time our phone stays silent, take it as an invitation instead of an insult. An invitation to live untethered, for a few minutes, in the undistracted now.
FrogDiva Thoughts 