I know this is something people say all the time to the point where it is cliché and ineffective, but technological advancements in modern society are mind-blowing. As I was trying to come up with a good column idea, I was texting my girlfriend on my brand new HTC Windows Phone 8x when it hit me, immediately. How crazy is that?

I’d never owned a smartphone before, but the abilities it grants seem to be limitless. If I wanted, I could text someone while listening to music and using it as a GPS to find my way to a restaurant that I just looked up on the Internet. In the olden days, to do all that would have required me to send a letter/call someone while loading up a CD or cassette into my player while pouring over my atlas for the location of the restaurant that I found while looking through my newspaper. And that was only 15ish years ago, in our lifetimes.

And yet, the power to access the Internet from anywhere in the palms of our hands while simultaneously being constantly connected to other people seems to be totally taken for granted. Before I got this phone, people used to tell me that they had “no idea how I survived,” as if they associated the lack of a smartphone to being stranded on some deserted island with Internet as their only sustenance.

I even fall into this trap. I was without a phone for two weeks a few years ago and I thought the world was ending as I knew it. Have you ever tried to set up a study group via email? There’s a lot more guesswork and “gee, I hope he looks at his email soon” than you might guess. And that’s even with the ability to email. I can’t imagine how far ahead our parents and grandparents had to plan in situations such as these, which is probably the principal shortcoming of such amenities.

People our age seem to lack the ability to really plan ahead. If this leads to a larger issue, we also often seem to be unable to put forth any real problem solving skills to fix the situation. Let’s use my previous example of setting up a study group. If we lived in 1975, what would you do, short of texting or emailing, if someone didn’t show up to your study group and it was vitally important that they be there? Call their home phone and pray that they hadn’t left? Walk around campus and find them? I really have no idea. Yet somehow people dealt with these issues for many years before phones and the Internet came along and the world never exploded due to the consequences. Because of this, I think it’s safe to say that the issues were resolved in other ways.

Technology has clearly helped expand the world and has made the day-to-day living of the human race vastly more convenient. However, it many other ways it has limited us. So, the next time you drop your phone in the toilet, your GPS dies, your air conditioner conks out, or you lose your WiFi signal, remember that your ancestors found a way to deal with these circumstances on a daily basis. Until then, these things are awesome. I’m not sure how I survived without one.

— Hunter Tipton is a senior in microbiology. He can be reached at [email protected].