I remember the days before I had a smartphone. My friends didn’t have one either. We didn’t need to be in constant communication with the world. We didn’t have to have every article on the worldwide web at our fingertips. Now the thought of us going without our smartphones could result in anxiety and probably nausea. How did we get here?

Obviously the times are changing, and most of our communication and a lot of our employment is connected to our smartphone. It’s used for talking, texting, posting, tweeting, filming, mailing, capturing, connecting, searching, learning, updating, laughing, and thinking. Our phones are our whole lives. We can’t do one thing without tweeting about it, Instagramming it, and sharing it on Facebook.

I love my iPhone. Dearly. But sometimes I think back to the days before smartphones ran our lives and I’m hit by a wave of nostalgia. Smartphones are awesome. But as a society, we’re slowly turning into people who don’t know how to communicate face to face. We don’t know how to live without live-tweeting our every move or instagramming every place we go. And I’m just as guilty as anyone.

I don’t think smartphones or technology in general is a bad thing. I absolutely love it and it makes our lives a million times more efficient. I just hope and pray that as a society, we don’t forget about how nice it is to just sit down with a friend and have a cup of coffee with them and enjoy each other’s company without our noses buried in our phones. Or to experience raw artistic expression without an infographic or a caption. Or the way a real-life sunset looks with #nofilter. Or the organic sound of your best friend’s voice rather than a choppy 140 characters.

I love smartphones. I love social media. I love technology as a whole. But I don’t want them to turn us into robots. I hope that as we continue to make all these advancements, we remember all the things that make people special and unique and less like identical machine operators.