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Hey guys, I'm Jeremy. There’s a big chance you are watching this video on a smartphone. And it’s also quite possible that you’ve spent half of your day scrolling through memes, watching vids, texting, and stuff like that. I mean… I’m not judging, I just know the way it works.
Usually you don’t realize it’s an addiction until something horrible happens. That was my case exactly. Scrolling was the first thing I would do when I woke up in the morning, right after I opened my eyes, and the last thing I would do before falling asleep. At school I was not paying any attention of course, since I was neither looking, nor listening. And even when I was hanging out with friends, all of us would still spend most of our time on our phones, even when we were physically in the same room.
Of course my parents were not happy about this at all. There were plenty of times that they'd get mad when I would be reluctant to talk to them at dinner while I was texting, for example. Now I see that I was wrong, but I can’t say that they were 100% right either! Most of the time they were super negative and even aggressive, saying smartphones are, like, totally useless and harmful and that back in their day… and on and on, I mean it didn’t really make sense. I did spend way too much time texting, but that let me keep in touch with my cousins, for example, or with my best friend Eric, whose family moved to New York City 6 months ago. And that supported and helped me a lot every day.
And then this happened.
Technically a smartphone had nothing to do with it, and at the same time.. it did. I was walking to my friend’s house, texting my cousin, I wasn't paying enough attention while I was crossing the road, and… I got hit by a car.
I opened my eyes in the hospital. I was very lucky to not have anything broken, but the bruises over my left arm and left leg were huge. My parents were there, my mom was crying. They knew in detail how the accident happened, and it seemed they were more angry than relieved. So as soon as I reached for my phone to check the notifications I had missed, I learned that the moment I got out of hospital I was going to a "smartphone rehab."
I had never heard about anything like that in my life. And of course I didn't want to go.
And here’s the important thing: my parents are pretty strict but they would never send me somewhere against my will. So they offered me a deal. If I went through the rehab and came back still sure that there was nothing wrong, they would never say another word about me being on the phone. And… that sounded fair.
So in late May I got out of the hospital and on the first day of my summer break I went to the rehab center.
It turned out to be a pretty comfortable resort. But of course from the very beginning… I hated it. Right after my arrival they took my phone and I would only get it back once the program ended. And there were no digital devices there. At all. Not even a single TV.
When I woke up on my first morning, I felt miserable. Some of you are probably thinking that I'm being whiny, but OK, just try to imagine it for a second. You cannot text anyone. You have no idea what’s going on with your friends and the FOMO is just killing you. You don't even know what’s going on in the world, since the only news sources are the newspapers delivered daily by the mailman.
A couple of days passed and I still hated the rehab, but I got to know some of the guys there. It was a program for teenagers, so everyone was from around 13 to 18, and each had their own story. For example Greg, who was the first guy I got to know, was sent there when his parents saw that he was so distracted every day that he couldn’t even study anymore. He arrived one day before me and he was also not happy about it.
In fact, we felt so bad… we thought of a plan. At night two people were at the center with us: our supervisor and the security guard. The lockers with our phones were right next to the guard, who would fall asleep almost every night. The supervisor was a very disciplined woman who didn’t seem to get sleepy ever. So the plan was: ask one of the guys to distract her, while Greg and I would get the locker keys from her desk and run get our phones as fast as we could. We didn’t even need to get ‘em back there because as long as the lockers would be closed, no-one would guess that they were empty.
So we decided to take action the same night.
Music by Epidemic Sound:
#actuallyhappened
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