On a bright Wednesday morning, I sat down at my desk in English, excited for another lesson about “The Odyssey,” the epic poem detailing Odysseus’ long-winded return home from Troy. As we discussed Odysseus’ journeys, the topic of the lotus eaters drifted into conversation. Not long after departing from Troy, Odysseus’ crew encountered a strange group of people, the “lotus eaters,” who lived off of eating lotus fruit. However, those who had eaten lotuses fell into a trance, tragically forgetting about their dreams of returning home and being content with remaining on the island.
As my English teacher asked, “What do you think would be the real-life equivalent of the lotus in ‘The Odyssey?’” Everyone immediately had one thought: phones.
The iPhone was developed not so long ago. My mother only got her first iPhone when I was two years old. Before that, they simply…ceased to exist, despite how hard it is to imagine life without them. After all, they’ve made everything so convenient. Do you wish to contact somebody at a moment’s notice? Easy, you can just text them, or call them. Are you unsure of where you’re going? Simple, pull up Google Maps. Are you afraid you’ll miss a few meetings? That’s okay, just set an alarm. Are you conversing with your friends and suddenly someone brings up an actor’s name you don’t know? That’s perfectly fine, just give it a quick search, and then you’ll know who they are, what movies they’ve done, their birthday, relationships, and their mother’s maiden name. With the cell phone, we have boundless amounts of knowledge and power right at our fingertips, and it has undoubtedly made our lives much easier. Some may argue that it has even become a necessity to function in modern-day society.
Before coming to boarding school, my parents regulated my device usage. They used built-in Apple features like Screen Time to limit how long I could spend on entertainment platforms and social media. I wasn’t allowed to charge devices in my room. And finally, I wasn’t allowed a cell phone. I’d always been frustrated about that. After all, cell phones made everything so much more convenient, and all my friends had one! ‘I was old enough to be trusted with a phone!’ I thought, ‘I wasn’t going to get addicted to it or anything. It can’t be that bad.’
As it turns out, it can be that bad.
Though cell phones have made life easier, they’ve also come with a new set of problems to face. Due to the widespread reach of the internet, advertisements quickly became popular in the digital world, as companies tried to snatch your attention and influence you to buy their products. A phrase emerged: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” From the eyes of companies like Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and many more, this is what their customers became: products in the form of clicks and views ready to sell to advertising firms.
Picture it: platforms, all fighting to keep people hooked on their sites for the longest—all fighting to keep teenagers hooked on their sites for the longest. It’s not simply just an issue of “annoying ads”. Platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube are all engineered to make us addicted.
I often absentmindedly check my phones for notifications, even though I know there won’t be any. Notifications create and trigger releases in dopamine, reinforcing a habitual cycle that draws us like a magnet to our home screens, constantly on alert for a buzz or a banner. Moreover, entertainment platforms like YouTube use algorithms to track what content we like and dislike, constantly pushing us to a selection of videos it knows we will want to watch.
Countless times, I’ve gone onto YouTube to find a chemistry video or math tutorial, and become distracted by some flashy animation or a new Game Theory video… With the introduction of short-form video content, suddenly, we don’t even have to go through the effort of choosing what we watch. All we need to do is scroll, passively absorbing information, creating more unwanted habits. After all, maybe the next reel will be funny, so I might as well just watch another. Before we know it, an hour has already ticked by.
As an Andover student still struggling to adapt to the increased academic and extracurricular pressure, this can be deadly. I’ve often opened Instagram to check some club meeting information and found myself, 20 minutes later, watching just one more reel. I can’t even focus when I study without putting my phone in a drawer a room away from mine, after all, it’d be much easier to scroll through my texts than it would be to write another sentence of my History essay.
As I reflected on this, I began to notice some things around me. At the start of every lesson, instead of chatting, everyone was on their phones, including myself whether it was checking their texts, scrolling through shorts on some platform, or even playing Block Blast. On the paths, students buried their heads in their phones as they walked. Many times, I’ve also been preoccupied with texting people or fiddling with my phone, blind to the quiet beauty of the snow, the sunset, and the stars around me.
Who can blame us? Phones, and the platforms on them, were designed to do this. They are truly the modern lotuses, drawing us into a world on a screen until everything around us fades away.
The easiest solution to stopping the magnetic lure of cell phones is simple. Just remove them. Deerfield Academy requires students to leave their phones in their dorms from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Choate takes this one step further, restricting cell phones during study hours and after lights out. Although it would be frustrating and inconvenient at first, a ban on cell phones during school hours would benefit our individual well-being, and collective community culture.
