Technology is making us less human. There are entire playgrounds not being used because all of the kids are plugged in. Teenagers are saying less and less,”Let’s go to the mall” and more “Hey, are you on yet?” or “you want to play squads?” Hop on any subway or bus in a city, the majority of the people will be on their phones. Look in any school before the day and you will find that most of the kids are on their phones. Their faces are being sucked into their devices. I recently spent the weekend at a friends house. We used to break out the nerf guns and have an awesome game in his entire house, with four people. We’d have entire ‘fortresses’ and weird rules.  This time he spent the entire weekend sleeping, eating, or playing Fortnite. Right before we left he was asked by his mom if he wanted to go to the Broncos game with another friend. He said he couldn't because he was in the middle of the match.

This concerns me, because he is one teen. There are roughly 200 million teens around the world, according to  who are doing this exact same thing. Pretty soon, it’s going to be an entire culture that's even more revolved around technology! It will become a world not unlike Ready Player One, where the world is slowly dying around people that are stuck inside a virtual world and don’t want to come out. The reality that this book portrays is frightening just because of how well it parallels our world. The environment is failing, deforestation is making hundreds of species extinct, our oceans have hundreds of thousands of pounds of trash, and the Greenhouse Effect is melting the ice caps; and people are stuck inside their own virtual world of games and millions of friends.

In Fort Carson, Colorado Springs there was about five playgrounds within about a half mile of us. Every single one was empty. I asked my mom where all the other kids were (I was 9 at the time) and she said they were playing video games or watching TV. Looking back, this disturbs me. I spent most of my time as a kid exploring the woods around my house. There was a gully and I would jump from side to side pretending I was Spiderman ™. I would run the hose down the dirt driveway and try to make dirt and stick dams to stop the water. I went on my first backpacking trip at age 2 and started skiing at age 4. I had an amazing childhood with my family outdoors. Kids don’t do those things anymore because they’re too invested in their TV or video games.

Kids in my class used to say that they “Mastered Minecraft” or “got an iPhone 4s”. I had no idea what these things were when I was in 4th grade, mainly because my family’s newest piece of technology was my mom’s Motorola Droid 2. She eventually upgraded to a Verizon Phablet and gave me her old phone. I was hooked in the virtual world and eventually lost interest in books, and the outdoors. I’ve since regained that love, but a part of me still rebels when I agree to go on a week long backpacking trip. I’m lucky to have had such a great childhood because I get to appreciate the things in life like a phone, or computer instead of overusing them.

The reality is that Generation Y is growing up with technology as their go-to distraction from the bad things that happen in this world. Kids are spending days locked up inside their house, and having no aspirations other than being a “Professional Gamer”. Twenty years ago there might’ve been kids reading books or playing in the forest. Now, kids are reading texts and playing in Wailing Woods.