Social Media, The Opiate Annie Bolin

“It was rough, but we had loads of fun, those lads and I.” As I sat on my grandpa’s beat-up couch while he rambled on about his schemes as a young Coast Guardsman in the Korean Conflict, I mindlessly scrolled through my phone, letting out a “mhm” or “wow” every now and then, just to make him think I was listening. At the time, I thought nothing of my discourtesy, commonly practiced by the majority of the teenage population, as I was completely engrossed in a Tumblr post about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s early years as a musician, stunned by his life story and with complete disregard for that of my grandpa, or Pop, as we call him.

The following week, I was assigned to analyze William Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” in my AP English Literature class. Wordsworth’s message was clear: with drowsy, nostalgic language that emphasized his past and Romantic features that solidified his present, he presented the idea that humans are unable to fathom the significance of the beauty in front of them, leading to desirous thoughts of the past when alone. I decided that if this was true in Wordsworth’s time, it’s beyond true today in our technological society. With this, I remembered my visit with Pop. It was only when I got home that day and failed to...