2% battery.

Your head shoots up from your little bright screen. You jump to your feet, knock your chair over, leap over the couch, run across the state, over the lava, swim across the Atlantic Ocean, fight off members of a drug cartel, make it past a Pterodactyl without being eaten alive, run straight through WWII safe from the falling bombs, sneak past zombies in an apocalypse, climb over Mt. Everest and finally you reach it — the cherished charger that will give life to your beautiful, beloved cell phone.

A lot of us would probably be more upset about killing our phone’s battery in a public place without a charger than we would be if ran over a cat. In fact, when our phone dies, a piece of our soul dies as soon as that bright little screen suddenly goes black.

“But now I can’t tweet.”

“But I was texting my boyfriend.”

“What do I do without my phone?”

How did teenagers become so dependent on their cell phones? Only a few years ago, cell phones could only make phone calls and send text messages, but when smartphones came out and became affordable, it was like we entered a whole new world.

Why are we so caught up with our phones and other forms of technology anyway? Why are we so fascinated with social media networks to the point where we’re constantly rotating from Twitter to Instagram to Vine to Tumblr or any other site? Are games like Candy Crush, Flow, and Fun Run really the preferred way to pass time? Is it totally necessary to text your boyfriend, girlfriend, or best friend 24/7?

If we were forced to go an entire week without our cell phones, chaos would occur. Let’s add laptops, iPads, and any form of the internet as well. Everyone would freak out: What do we do now? Teenagers everywhere would go crazy, rocking themselves in the corner of their bedroom, ripping their hair out, staring blankly at walls, cutting their legs off and eating their own flesh. Active bloggers would be forced to actually go outside and experience that thing called sunlight. The cell phone that’s attached to one’s hand would be replaced by a, what’s it called? A book? Actually calling our friend’s house to ask them to hang out like we did when we were in elementary school? But talking on the phone is so awkward, how did we manage to do it before? Even worse, we can’t even keep up with everyone’s totally interesting lives on Twitter or even tweet about our own extraordinary lives.

Of course the advance in technology definitely has its benefits, but for teenagers, are we really better off now than teenagers were before we entered a world that relies on electronics? Think about movies with young people 20-30 years ago when they didn’t have the technology we have now. Didn’t it seem like they had a ton of fun driving around with their friends, going to the mall, or going to the movies and actually socializing without being on their cell phones the entire time?

I admit, I’m caught up in the whole technology fad as well; I spend an infinite amount of time on my laptop blogging away, I constantly have my phone attached to hand, and I panic a little bit when I have to go somewhere for an extended amount of time without WiFi.

While I am probably addicted to technology like most every other teenager in the United States, I still think it’s incredibly important to step away from these gadgets every now and then and actually live. Do we really want to look back on our teenage years thirty years from now and tell our kids that we spent most of our time talking to each other on social networks and having our eyes glued to a bright screen? Or would we rather tell our kids about the books we read, the movies we watched, the music we listened to, the adventures we went on alone late at night, and the funny jokes we shared with our friends?

So turn off your phones when you’re out with your friends, set your laptop down when you’re bored at your house and go outside, take a breath of fresh air, and appreciate what this world has to offer.