Endless hours of scrolling, retweeting and liking pictures of your friends’ breakfast on Instagram are considered daily activities of today’s teenage population. Wake up: check social media. In between classes: check social media. Before you go to bed: check social media. Our lives revolve around constant curiosity regarding what each person is doing at each waking moment.

I myself am just as guilty as the next person. However, this addiction to continual social media usage has gotten out of control. Too much of our generation’s time is spent staring at the screens of our iPhones when there is so much more to experience and so many important tasks to be completed.

Instead of paying attention in class and working diligently, many students are intrigued with their the latest news on twitter and too distracted to care about school. Not even teacher’s threats to take away students’ phones can keep them from secretly refreshing their timelines under their desks.

It’s even worse when trying to complete homework. When taking a break every two minutes to see who’s posting “throwback Thursday” photos, homework takes forever to get done. Setting the phone aside to complete homework is unspeakable. Even reading this article you may catch yourself feeling the need to check your phone.

There was a time when Facebook was the only social media people had. Recently this outlet has grown immensely along with a fast paced culture. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, Tumblr, Facebook, Pintrest and countless others all beg for daily or even hourly attention. So many accounts and so many unnecessary (yet addicting) forms of entertainment slow students down constantly.

With so many possible distractions, how are we supposed to get anything done? How are we supposed to have real life conversations with human beings outside of our twitter feeds? If dependency on social media continues to advance any further, the future generations will be so consumed that they will not know what life is truly suppose to be.

It is impossible to enjoy a moment without having the temptation to record it and put it on your Snapchat story or take a picture for the world to see what a “fun” and “awesome” life you live. Why is it that we do this? Do we simply want to document a moment so we don’t forget it?

Is it to get the most likes and impress everyone else? People have forgotten what its like to live in the moment because their attention is directed on what other people will see.

This distraction from not only school work but life, stems from the obsession to new content many have developed. It’s time to realize that this has become a problem and separate ourselves from our phones.

Life has so much more to offer than laying in bed and scrolling for hours on end. The amount of likes you get on your selfie will not make you a better human being.