By Michael Armijo

It felt like a chill. Like a tingling inside my skull. As though I had missed something extremely important. Or something devastating. It was the shrill in her voice that really impacted me.

“Where are you? I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for over an hour!”

I was a bit confused, a bit nervous about what I was about to hear, but I had to ask the question:

“Why? What happened? What’s so important?”

I was pretty shocked to hear the outcome of the question why I was being sought out so drastically.

“I couldn’t get a hold of you!”

That was it. I felt the shrill, the panic, the worry for; ‘I couldn’t get a hold of you.’

I was left trying to figure out: when did it happen? When did we get to a point in our lives that our whereabouts are necessary at all times? Or the flip side, when did our family become so insecure that they need to know where we are upon demand?

There was a time, not too far in the past, when we had privacy. We had time alone. Time for ourselves. Technology, in this day and age, seems to have given that ‘right’ away. Those moments of reflection, moments of inner thought. Those moments of peace, of serenity. We seem to continue to a need to be clouded, distracted, or entertained constantly.

There are times we must shut the computer, the iPad, the phone, the internet, and the TV off. To take a walk, to sit outside. To talk, read, share, and to listen. To learn how to communicate without a keyboard or a text message.

But our demise for ‘instance’ isn’t just technology’s fault, we too are to blame. We are constantly allowing others to rely on us to a point of severe dependency. Our thirst for technology and our constant obsession only shows our loved ones that it’s important to obsessively see all, and to know all, every minute and every second of the day. Our behavior has taught them to react in a shrilling tone, in a panicked voice. Until we are pinpointed, marked, labeled, or GPS’d until the question is answered:  “Where are you?”