On my way back to my car after work the other night, my phone fell out of my pocket as I was crossing the street. I picked it up quickly without looking at it because I was afraid of what I might see – a shattered screen or something.

When I got to the sidewalk, I stopped to look at my phone to check it over for any damage. Nothing. Not a single scratch, dent or crack on the screen.

I was so happy. I drove back home and before I got out of the car, I looked over my phone one more time to make sure I hadn’t missed anything but I had. I found a small dent next to the power button. I was so sad.

My phone still works perfectly fine but now has a mark of damage for life. I’m not sharing this story with you to talk about the small dent, necessarily, but to explain how I felt when my phone fell out of the pocket and crash landed on the asphalt.

The minute I heard it land, my heart stopped. I stared at it lying there and it just felt like time had stopped, like the world around me was on pause for that handful of seconds. Why? Why did it feel like this?

Because in this day and age, we have become too dependent upon our technology. Without it, we feel lost and out of control.

The world feels wrong when we damage or lose our phones, music players, computers and whatnot.

Thanks to technology, we have lost so much appreciation for the rest of the world around us. And to me, that is just sad.

After going through that moment that night with dropping my phone, I am very thankful that a small dent was all that came out of the incident physically. I have found more damage on myself for feeling the way I did when my phone fell and that is more saddening to me than a small dent.

So, from here, I vow to depend less on technology.

Obviously, for school and work, I can’t just give up technology altogether. However, I can certainly limit my time with how much I use it. I want to start enjoying the world around me a lot more without the help of technology. The time I spend on my phone checking social media, I could spend reading and making progress on my 2015 reading list.

I want to see the world through my own eyes not my phone’s or computer’s or my tablet’s eyes.